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1NC Subversive Ideology K

Ideological transgression is a continuation of the existing orderthe power of the protest structurally depends upon the continued authority of the system. The critique functions as a carnivalesque reversal of authoritywe make a gesture of non-compliance that posits us as the real masters of fate. Zizek 95 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, LAW AND THE
POSTMODERN MIND: SUPEREGO BY DEFAULT, Cardozo Law Review, 1995, 16 Cardozo L. Rev. 925)

In the traditional patriarchal society, the inherent transgression of the law assumes the form of a carnivalesque reversal of authority: the king becomes a beggar, madness poses as wisdom, etc. A custom practiced in the villages of northern

Greece until the middle of our century exemplifies this reversal. n5 One day a year was set aside for women to take over. Men had to stay at home and look after children while women gathered in the local inn, drank to excess, and organized mock trials of men. What breaks out in this carnevalesque suspension of the ruling patriarchal law is the fantasy of feminine power. Lacan draws attention to the fact that, in everyday French, one of the designations for the wife is la bourgeoise n6 - the one who, beneath the semblance of male domination, actually pulls the strings. This, however, can in no way be reduced to a version of the standard male chauvinist wisecrack that patriarchal domination is not so bad for women after all since, at least in the close circle of the family, they run the show. The problem runs deeper; one

of the consequences of the fact that the master is always an impostor is the duplication of the master the agency of the master is always perceived as a semblance concealing another, "true" master. Suffice it to recall the well-known anecdote quoted by Theodore Adorno in Minima Moralia, about a wife who apparently subordinates to her husband and, when they are about to leave the party, obediently holds his coat, all the while exchanging behind his back ironic patronizing glances with the fellow guests to communicate the message, "poor weakling, let him think he is the master!" In this opposition of semblance and actual power men are impostors, condemned to performing empty symbolic gestures while the actual responsibility falls to women. However, the point not to be missed here is that this specter of woman's power structurally depends on the male domination: it remains its shadowy double, its retroactive effect, and as such its inherent moment. For that reason, bringing the woman's
shadowy power to light and acknowledging it publicly enables law to cast off its direct patriarchal dress and present itself as neutral egalitarian. The character of its obscene double also undergoes a radical shift:

what now erupts in the carnivalesque suspension of the "egalitarian" public law is precisely the authoritarian-patriarchal logic that continues to determine our attitudes, although its direct public expression is no longer permitted. "Carnival" thus becomes the outlet for the repressed dark side of social jouissance: Jew-baiting riots, gang rapes, lynchings, etc. Insofar as the superego designates

the intrusion of enjoyment into the field of ideology, we can also say that the opposition of symbolic law and superego points towards the tension between ideological meaning and enjoyment: symbolic law guarantees meaning, whereas superego provides enjoyment which serves as the unacknowledged support of meaning. Today, in the so-called postideological era, it is crucial to avoid confounding fantasy that supports an ideological edifice with ideological meaning - how can we otherwise account for the paradoxical alliance of post-Communism and Fascist nationalism such as that between Russia and Serbia? At the level of meaning, their relationship is that of mutual exclusion; yet they share a common phantasmatic support (when Communism was the discourse of power, it played deftly with nationalist fantasies - from Stalin to Ceausescu). Consequently,

there is also no incompatibility between the postmodern cynical attitude of nonidentification - of distance towards every ideology - and the nationalist obsession with the ethnic thing. The thing is the substance of enjoyment: the cynic is a person who believes only in enjoyment - and is not the cynic the clearest example of one obsessed precisely with the national thing?

Critiques uphold the existing system because they are a safe outlet for transgression, which is a necessary supplement to any system of power. Zizek 95 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, LAW AND THE
POSTMODERN MIND: SUPEREGO BY DEFAULT, Cardozo Law Review, 1995, 16 Cardozo L. Rev. 925)

superego emerges where the law - the public law, the law articulated in the public discourse - fails. At this point of failure, the public law is compelled to search for support in an illegal enjoyment. Superego is the obscene "nightly" law that necessarily accompanies, as its shadow, the "public" law. This inherent and constitutive splitting in the law is the subject of Rob Reiner's film, A Few Good Men, the court-martial drama about two marines accused of murdering one of their fellow soldiers. In the film, the military prosecutor accuses two marines of premeditated murder. The defense, however, wins an acquittal, demonstrating that the defendants were just following "Code Red" orders, which authorize a clandestine nighttime beating of any fellow soldier who, in the opinion of his peers or of the superior officer, breaks the United States Marines' ethical code. The dual function of Code Red is extremely interesting; it condones an act of transgression - illegal punishment of a fellow soldier - yet, at the same time, it reaffirms the cohesion of the group, calling for an act of supreme group identification. Such a code must remain under cover of night, unacknowledged, unutterable; in public, everybody feigns
The proper way to approach "psychoanalysis and law" is to ask the question: what kind of law is the object of psychoanalysis? The answer is, of course: ignorance, or even actively denies its existence. Code Red represents the community spirit in its purest form, exerting the strongest pressure on the individual to comply with its mandate of group identification; yet simultaneously, it violates the explicit rules of community life. The plight of the two accused soldiers is that they are unable to grasp this exclusion of Code Red from the "big Other" - the public law; they desperately ask themselves what they did wrong, since they simply followed a superior officer's order.

From whence does this splitting of the law into the written public law and its underside, the "unwritten," obscene secret code, come? From the incomplete character of the public law. Explicit, public rules do not suffice; they must be supplemented by a clandestine "unwritten" code aimed at those who, although they 1

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Updated Lacan K 2 violate no public rules, maintain a kind of inner distance and do not truly identify with the "spirit of community." n2 Sadism thus relies on the splitting of the field of the law into law qua "ego-ideal": a symbolic order which regulates social life and maintains social peace, and into its obscene, superegotistical inverse. As has been shown by numerous analyses from Mikhail Bakhtin onwards, periodic transgressions of the public law are inherent to the social order inasmuch as they function as a condition of the latter's stability. n3 What most deeply holds together a community is not so much identification with the law that regulates the community's "normal" everyday circuit, but rather identification with a specific form of transgression of the law - of the law's suspension (in psychoanalytic terms, with a specific form of enjoyment).

Lacanian politics are a genuine political alternative. If it is impossible to fully represent the real, then we have no choice but to institutionalize the Lack or design politics around doubt and uncertainity. This will result in more radically democratic politics. Stavrakakis, 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages p 96-98).
According to my reading, Bellamy, Butler and Lane are questioning the value of recognising the effects and the structural causality of the real in society; instead of the political they prioritise politics, in fact traditional fantasmatic politics. This seems to be the kernel of their argument: Even is possibleencircling

if this move the unavoidable political modality of the realis it really desirable, is it ethically and politically satisfactory? The fear behind all these statements is common; it is that the stress on the political qua encounter with the real precludes the possibility of presenting a more or less stable (present or future) ground for ethics and democracy, that it undermines their universal character and the possibility of any final reconciliation at either the subjective or the social level. Frosh is summarising this fear a propos of the issue of human rights: if humanism is a fraud [as Lacan insists] and there is no fundamental human
entity that is to be valued in each person [an essence of the psyche maybe?], one is left with no way of defending the basic rights of the individual (Frosh, 1987:137). In the two final chapters of this book I shall argue that the reason behind all these fears is the continuing hegemony of an ethics of harmony. Against such a position the

ethics of the real entails a recognition of the irreducibility of the real and an attempt to institutionalise social lack. Thus it might be possible to achieve an ethically and politically satisfactory institution of the social field beyond the fantasy of closure which has proved so problematic, if not catastrophic. In other words, the best way to organise the social might be one which recognises the ultimate impossibility around which it is always structured. What could be some of the parameters of
this new organisation of the social in our late modern terrain? Ulrich Becks theory seems to be relevant in this respect. According to our reading of Becks schema, contemporary

societies are faced with the return of uncertainty, a return of the repressed without doubt, and the inability of mastering the totality of the real. We are forced thus to recognise the ambiguity of our experience and to articulate an auto-critical position towards our ability to master the real. It is now revealed that although repressing doubt and uncertainty can provide a temporary safety of meaning, it is nevertheless a dangerous strategy, a strategy that depends on a fantasmatic illusion. This realisation, contrary to any nihilistic reaction, is nothing but the starting point for a new form of society which is emerging around us, together of course with the reactionary attempts to reinstate an ageing modernity: 96 ENCIRCLING THE POLITICAL Perhaps
the decline of the lodestars of primary Enlightenment, the individual, identity, truth, reality, science, technology, and so on, is the prerequisite for the start of an alternative Enlightenment, one which does not fear doubt, but instead makes it the element of its life and survival. (Beck, 1997:161) Is it not striking that Lacanian

theory stands at the forefront of the struggle to make us change our minds about all these grandiose fantasies? Beck argues that such an openness towards doubt can be learned from Socrates, Montaigne, and others; it might
be possible to add Lacan to this list. In other words, doubt, which threatens our false certainties, can become the nodal point for another modernity that will respect the right to err. Scepticism contrary to a widespread error, makes everything possible again: questions and dialogue of course, as well as faith, science, knowledge, criticism, morality, society, only differently...things unsuspected and incongruous, with the tolerance based and rooted in the ultimate certainty of error. (Beck, 1997:163) In that sense, what

is at stake in our current theoretico-political terrain is not the central categories or projects of modernity per se (the idea of critique, science, democracy, etc.), but their ontological status, their foundation. The crisis of their current foundations, weakens their absolutist character and creates the opportunity to ground them in much more appropriate foundations (Laclau, 1988a). Doubts liberate; they make things possible. First of all the possibility of a new vision for society. An anti- utopian vision founded on the principle Dubio ergo sum (Beck, 1997:162) closer to the subversive
doubtfulness of Montaigne than to the deceptive scepticism of Descartes. Although Lacan thought that in Montaigne scepticism had not acquired the form of an ethic, he nevertheless pointed out that Montaigne is truly the one who has centred himself, not around scepticism but around the living moment of the aphanisis of the subject. And it is in this that he is fruitful, that he is an eternal guide, who goes beyond whatever may be represented of the moment to be defined as a historical turning-point. (XI:2234) This

is a standpoint which is both critical and self2

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critical: there is no foundation of such a scope and elasticity for a critical theory of society 97 ENCIRCLING THE POLITICAL (which would then
automatically be a self-critical theory) as doubt (Beck, 1997:173). Doubt, the invigorating champagne of thinking, points to a new modernity more modern than the old, industrial modernity that we know. The latter after all, is based on certainty, on repelling and suppressing doubt (ibid.: 173). Beck asks us to fight for a modernity which is beginning to doubt itself, which, if things go well, will make doubt the measure and architect of its selflimitation and self-modification (ibid.: 163). He

Updated Lacan K 3

asks us, to use Paul Celans phrase, to build on inconsistencies. This will be a modernity instituting a new politics, a politics recognising the uncertainty of the moment of the political. It will be a modernity recognising the constitutivity of the real in the social. A truly political modernity (ibid.: 5). In the next two chapters I will try to show the way in which Lacanian political theory can act as a catalyst for this change. The current crisis of utopian politics, instead of generating pessimism, can become the starting point for a renewal of democratic politics within a radically transformed ethical framework.

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1NC Lacan K
We create enemies as a means of dealing with internal conflicts. The enemy becomes the embodiment of the disavowed parts of our own psyches. We talk about threats as a way of avoiding reflection about the psychoanalytic roots of war. This turns the case. Stein 3 (Howard, Professor, University of Oklahoma, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8.2 (2003) 187-199 Days of Awe: September 11, 2001 and its
Cultural Psychodynamics).

We not only need enemies (Volkan, "Need," "Blood Lines"), but we also create enemies by provoking them. We (each "we") project aggression, provoke aggression, and then justify our own aggression as defense. In a world of true believers and infidels, David Levine writes of the fatal psychological symbiosis of faithful and infidel: When the unfaithful self is projected onto external objects, the aggression we attribute to it becomes their aggression directed at us, their desire to destroy our faith. We must now mobilize aggression to protect ourselves against the infidel, notwithstanding the fact that the threat he poses is the threat of connection with our own split off and disavowed faithless selves. Since the infidel's rejection of the good object is also our own, the aggression we attribute to him is also our own aggression outside and
experienced as a threat to us. ("Tolerating" 52) Coninues... If there is some historical truth to the accusation of American abandonment and exploitation of the Near East,

does the U.S. not also play an unconscious and symbolic role (a Durkheimian "collective representation"), one which now generates and provokes its own reality? Put differently, what is the interplay between what we do to others and what we represent to others, between what we actually do (achieved status) and what we projectively are (ascribed status)? Do not cultures often "get what they unconsciously desire"which often differs from conscious agendas and interests? Do not groups "dance" in some kind of reciprocal unconscious adversary symbiosis (Stein, "Adversary")? Further, can this dance with our enemieswho do bad things to usbe separated from the bad things we do within our own national group? Such a split is common. In the Soviet Union, Stalin was a master of this displacement of his own terror onto the Nazi menace

and the Great Patriotic War (World War II) against Fascism. Furthermore, do not the leaders and followers of currently warring groups have childhoods and families of origin, as well as political-economic realities, that affect decision-making? What do these warring groups represent to each other, and what are the overdetermined roots of these symbolisms? Finally, what good are borders (psychological, geographic) if they cannot keep their promises? I leave this interpretive paper and its subject with an overwhelming sense of incompleteness. I accept this void in knowing as necessary. Conventional and stylized accounts are at worst defenses against understanding the meaning of the attack, and at best they are partial truths. What we can know now is limited by the complicated process of mourning (Volkan, Need, Blood Lines; Stein, "Mourning"). Yet, it is often unbearable to mourn, so we flee into violent action. As

America focuses exclusively on "what they [the enemy] did and do to us," we have failed to pay attention to "what we Americans did and do to ourselves." Long before

September 11, the decade-and-a-half long legacy of "managed social change" from downsizing and restructuring, to outsourcing and reengineering, have symbolically disposed of millions of Americans in the service of instant bottom-line inflation and a surge in shareholder value. The "Enron Scandal," in which company officials took millions of dollars from a collapsing corporation, while prohibiting workers from selling shares, thereby losing their entire retirement savings, emerged in early 2002 as internal American self-destructiveness on an unprecedented economic scale. What and who the United States becomes now as a culture, and what we do in the world, after September 11, 2001 rests upon what and who we value, and not only what and who we oppose. There is so much more to be known, and felt, beyond culturally stylized sentiment and sentimentality, ideologically right thinking, nationalistic jingoism, and obligatory action. People died on that terrible day because people could not be recognized as people. They could only be recognized as symbols, embodiments, part objects. People

were killed and people killed others because who and what they represented consumed their existence as distinct, differentiated, and integrated persons. Many more will die, will be killed, in the name of heaven and nation. The psychoanalytic work of comprehending September 11, 2001 is scarcely begun.

The affirmatives utopian vision of a peaceful global community will be impossible to realizenecessitating the scapegoating and elimination of the other. Lacanian political intervention is the only way out. Stavrakakis, 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government,
University of Essex, pages 99-100).

Our age is clearly an age of social fragmentation, political disenchantment and open cynicism characterised by the decline of the political mutations of modern universalisma universalism that, by replacing God with Reason, reoccupied the ground of a pre-modern aspiration to fully represent and master the essence and the totality of the real. On the political level this universalist fantasy took the form of a series of utopian constructions of a reconciled future society. The fragmentation of our present social terrain and cultural milieu entails the collapse of such grandiose fantasies.1 Today, talk about utopia is usually characterised by a certain ambiguity. For some, of course, utopian constructions are still seen as positive results of human creativity in
the socio- political sphere: utopia is the expression of a desire for a better way of being (Levitas, 1990:8). Other, more suspicious views, such as the one expressed in Marie Berneris book Journey through Utopia, warntaking

into account experiences like the Second World Warof the dangers entailed in trusting the idea of a perfect, ordered and regimented world. For some,
instead of being how can we realise our utopias?, the crucial question has become how can we prevent their final realisation?.... [How can] we return to

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a non-utopian society, less perfect and more free (Berdiaev in Berneri, 1971:309).2 It is particularly the political experience of these last decades that led to the dislocation of utopian sensibilities and brought to the fore a novel appreciation of human finitude, together with a growing suspicion of all grandiose political projects and the meta-narratives traditionally associated with them (Whitebook, 1995:75). All these developments, that is to say the crisis of the utopian imaginary, seem however to leave politics without its prime motivating force: the politics of today is a politics of aporia. In our current political terrain, hope seems to be replaced by pessimism or even resignation. This is a result of the crisis in the dominant modality of our political imagination (meaning utopianism in its various forms) and of our inability to resolve this crisis in a productive way.3 In this chapter, I will try to show that Lacanian

theory provides new angles through which we can reflect on our historical experience of utopia and reorient our political imagination beyond its suffocating strait-jacket. Lets start our exploration
with the most elementary of questions: what is the meaning of the current crisis of utopia? And is this crisis a development to be regretted or cherished? In order to answer these questions it

is crucial to enumerate the conditions of possibility and the basic characteristics of utopian thinking. First of all it seems that the need for utopian meaning arises in periods of increased uncertainty, social instability and conflict, when the element of the political subverts the fantasmatic stability of our political reality. Utopias are generated by the surfacing of grave antagonisms and dislocations in the social field. As Tillich has put it all utopias strive to negate the negative...in human existence; it is the negative in that existence which makes the idea of utopia necessary (Tillich in Levitas, 1990:103). Utopia then is one of the possible responses to the ever-present negativity, to the real antagonism which is constitutive of human experience. Furthermore, from the time of Mores Utopia (1516) it is conceived as an answer to the negativity inherent in concrete political antagonism. What is, however, the exact nature of this response? Utopias are images of future human communities in which these antagonisms and the dislocations fuelling them (the element of the political) will be forever resolved, leading to a reconciled and
harmonious worldit is not a coincidence that, among others, Fourier names his utopian community Harmony and that the name of the Owenite

utopian community in the New World was New Harmony. As Marin has put it, utopia sets in view an imaginary resolution to social contradiction; it

is a simulacrum of synthesis which dissimulates social antagonism by projecting it onto a screen representing a harmonious and immobile equilibrium (Marin, 1984:61). This final resolution is the essence of the utopian

promise. What I will try to do in this chapter is, first of all, to demonstrate the deeply problematic nature of utopian politics. Simply put, my argument will be that

every utopian fantasy construction needs a scapegoat in order to constitute itselfthe Nazi utopian fantasy and the production of the Jew is a good example, especially as pointed out in ieks analysis.4 Every utopian fantasy produces its reverse and calls for its elimination. Put another way, the beatific side of fantasy is coupled in utopian constructions with a horrific side, a paranoid need for a stigmatised scapegoat. The naivetyand also the dangerof utopian structures is revealed when the realisation of this fantasy is attempted. It is then that we are brought close to the frightening kernel of the real: stigmatisation is followed by extermination. This is not an accident. It is inscribed in the structure of utopian constructions; it seems to be the way all fantasy constructions work. If in almost all utopian visions, violence and antagonism are eliminated, if utopia is based on the expulsion and repression of violence (this is its beatific side) this is only because it owes its own creation to violence; it is sustained and fed by violence (this is its horrific side). This repressed moment of violence resurfaces, as Marin points out, in the difference inscribed in the name utopia itself (Marin, 1984:110). What we shall argue is that it also resurfaces in the production of the figure of an enemy. To use a phrase enunciated by the utopianist Fourier, what is driven out through the door comes back through the window (is not this a precursor of Lacans dictum that what is foreclosed in the symbolic reappears in the real?VII:131).5 The work of Norman Cohn and other historians permits the articulation of a genealogy of this manichean, equivalential way of understanding the world, from the great witch-hunt up to modern anti-Semitism, and Lacanian theory can provide valuable insights into any attempt to understand the logic behind this utopian operationhere the approach to fantasy developed in Chapter 2 will further demonstrate its potential in analysing our political
experience. In fact, from the time of his unpublished seminar on The Formations of the Unconscious, Lacan identified the utopian dream of a perfectly functioning society as a highly problematic area (seminar of 18 June 1958).

Lacanian politics are a genuine political alternative. If it is impossible to fully represent the real, then we have no choice but to institutionalize the Lack or design politics around doubt and uncertainity. This will result in more radically democratic politics. Stavrakakis, 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages p 96-98).
5

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According to my reading, Bellamy, Butler and Lane are questioning the value of recognising the effects and the structural causality of the real in society; instead of the political they prioritise politics, in fact traditional fantasmatic politics. This seems to be the kernel of their argument: Even is possibleencircling

if this move the unavoidable political modality of the realis it really desirable, is it ethically and politically satisfactory? The fear behind all these statements is common; it is that the stress on the political qua encounter with the real precludes the possibility of presenting a more or less stable (present or future) ground for ethics and democracy, that it undermines their universal character and the possibility of any final reconciliation at either the subjective or the social level. Frosh is summarising this fear a propos of the issue of human rights: if humanism is a fraud [as Lacan insists] and there is no fundamental human
entity that is to be valued in each person [an essence of the psyche maybe?], one is left with no way of defending the basic rights of the individual (Frosh, 1987:137). In the two final chapters of this book I shall argue that the reason behind all these fears is the continuing hegemony of an ethics of harmony. Against such a position the

ethics of the real entails a recognition of the irreducibility of the real and an attempt to institutionalise social lack. Thus it might be possible to achieve an ethically and politically satisfactory institution of the social field beyond the fantasy of closure which has proved so problematic, if not catastrophic. In other words, the best way to organise the social might be one which recognises the ultimate impossibility around which it is always structured. What could be some of the parameters of
this new organisation of the social in our late modern terrain? Ulrich Becks theory seems to be relevant in this respect. According to our reading of Becks schema, contemporary

societies are faced with the return of uncertainty, a return of the repressed without doubt, and the inability of mastering the totality of the real. We are forced thus to recognise the ambiguity of our experience and to articulate an auto-critical position towards our ability to master the real. It is now revealed that although repressing doubt and uncertainty can provide a temporary safety of meaning, it is nevertheless a dangerous strategy, a strategy that depends on a fantasmatic illusion. This realisation, contrary to any nihilistic reaction, is nothing but the starting point for a new form of society which is emerging around us, together of course with the reactionary attempts to reinstate an ageing modernity: 96 ENCIRCLING THE POLITICAL Perhaps
the decline of the lodestars of primary Enlightenment, the individual, identity, truth, reality, science, technology, and so on, is the prerequisite for the start of an alternative Enlightenment, one which does not fear doubt, but instead makes it the element of its life and survival. (Beck, 1997:161) Is it not striking that Lacanian

theory stands at the forefront of the struggle to make us change our minds about all these grandiose fantasies? Beck argues that such an openness towards doubt can be learned from Socrates, Montaigne, and others; it might
be possible to add Lacan to this list. In other words, doubt, which threatens our false certainties, can become the nodal point for another modernity that will respect the right to err. Scepticism contrary to a widespread error, makes everything possible again: questions and dialogue of course, as well as faith, science, knowledge, criticism, morality, society, only differently...things unsuspected and incongruous, with the tolerance based and rooted in the ultimate certainty of error. (Beck, 1997:163) In that sense, what

is at stake in our current theoretico-political terrain is not the central categories or projects of modernity per se (the idea of critique, science, democracy, etc.), but their ontological status, their foundation. The crisis of their current foundations, weakens their absolutist character and creates the opportunity to ground them in much more appropriate foundations (Laclau, 1988a). Doubts liberate; they make things possible. First of all the possibility of a new vision for society. An anti- utopian vision founded on the principle Dubio ergo sum (Beck, 1997:162) closer to the subversive
doubtfulness of Montaigne than to the deceptive scepticism of Descartes. Although Lacan thought that in Montaigne scepticism had not acquired the form of an ethic, he nevertheless pointed out that Montaigne is truly the one who has centred himself, not around scepticism but around the living moment of the aphanisis of the subject. And it is in this that he is fruitful, that he is an eternal guide, who goes beyond whatever may be represented of the moment to be defined as a historical turning-point. (XI:2234) This

is a standpoint which is both critical and selfcritical: there is no foundation of such a scope and elasticity for a critical theory of society 97 ENCIRCLING THE POLITICAL (which would then
automatically be a self-critical theory) as doubt (Beck, 1997:173). Doubt, the invigorating champagne of thinking, points to a new modernity more modern than the old, industrial modernity that we know. The latter after all, is based on certainty, on repelling and suppressing doubt (ibid.: 173). Beck asks us to fight for a modernity which is beginning to doubt itself, which, if things go well, will make doubt the measure and architect of its selflimitation and self-modification (ibid.: 163). He

asks us, to use Paul Celans phrase, to build on inconsistencies. This will be a modernity instituting a new politics, a politics recognising the uncertainty of the moment of the political. It will be a modernity recognising the constitutivity of the real in the social. A truly political modernity (ibid.: 5). In the next two chapters I will try to show the way in which Lacanian political theory can act as a catalyst for this change. The current crisis of utopian politics, instead of generating pessimism, can become the starting point for a renewal of democratic politics within a radically transformed ethical framework.

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Updated Lacan K 7

link: demands
Impossible demands maintain the status quowe can passionately play the role of radicals without risking actual change. Zizek 2 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Welcome to the Desert of
the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, Passions of the Real, Passions of Semblance, p. 59-61) MH In a strict Lacanian sense of the term, we should thus posit that 'happiness' relies on the subject's inability or unreadiness fully to confront the consequences

of its desire: the price of happiness is that the subject remains stuck in the inconsistency of its desire. In our daily lives, we (pretend to) desire things which we do not really desire, so that, ultimately, the worst thing that can happen is for us to get what we 'officially' desire. Happiness is thus inherently hypocritical: it is the happiness of dreaming about things we do not really want. When today's Left bombards the capitalist system

with demands that it obviously cannot fulfil (Full employment! Retain the welfare state! Full rights for immigrants!), it is basically playing a game of hysterical provocation, of addressing the Master with a demand which will be impossible for him to meet, and will thus expose his impotence. The problem with this strategy, however, is not only that the system cannot meet these demands, but that, in addition, those who voice them do not really want them to be realized. For example when, 'radical' academics demand full rights for immigrants and opening of the borders, are they aware that the direct implementation of this demand would, for obvious reasons, inundate developed Western countries with millions of newcomers, thus provoking a violent working-class racist backlash which would then endanger the privileged position ofthese very academics? Of course they are, but they count on the fact that their demand will not be met - in this way, they can hypocritically retain their clear radical conscience while continuing to enjoy their privileged position. In 1994, when a new wave of emigration from Cuba to
it - which the Cuban authorities in effect did a couple of days later, embarrassing the USA with thousands of unwanted newcomers.... Is this not like the proverbial woman who snapped back at a man who was making macho advances to her: 'Shut up, or you'll have to do what you're boasting about!' In both cases, the gesture is that of calling the other's bluff, counting on the fact that what the other really fears is that one will fully comply with his or her demand. And would not the same gesture also throw our radical academics into a panic? Here the old '68 motto 'Soy0ns realistes, demandons l'impossible!' acquires a new cynical and sinister meaning which, perhaps, reveals its truth: 'Let's be realists: we, the academic Left,

the USA was on the cards, Fidel Castro warned the USA that if they did not stop inciting Cubans to emigrate, Cuba would no longer prevent them from doing

want to appear critical, while fully enjoying the privileges the system offers us. So let's bombard the system with impossible demands: we all know that these demands won't be met, so we can be sure that nothing will actually change, and we'll maintain our privileged status!' If someone accuses a big corporation of particular financial crimes, he or she is

exposed to risks which can go right up to murder attempts; if he or she asks the same corporation to finance a research project into the link between global capitalism and the emergence of hybrid postcolonial identities, he or she stands a good chance of getting hundreds ofthousands of dollars.

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link: narratives
Narratives are politicall disempowering because they prevent understanding the
broader underpinnings of the injustice McGowan 4 PhD from Ohio State English Department (Todd, 2004, Introduction: Psychoanalysis after Marx, End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the
Emerging Society of Enjoyment, p. 98-9) MH However, as we can see in the passage from Laclau and Mouffe, there is some slippage between the impossibility of universality and the call for a prohibition against the discourse of the universal. In other words, they begin by claiming that universality is no longer possible, that the universal position has been eradicated, and then they insist that we must renounce universality. By making universality seem to be a possibility that we must avoid, Laclau and Mouffe cover over their insight into the evanescent nature of universality today. There is no need to avoid or renounce universality, precisely because we are no longer capable of it. And we are no longer capable of it insofar as we experience our subjectivity as one of, in Laclau and Mouffes terms, a polyphony of voices, each of which constructs its own irreducible discursive identity. For Laclau and Mouffe, as for much of the contemporary Left, this

turn from universality to particularity is a turn away from domination and from the violence of trying to speak for others. What they miss, however, is what is lost along with the loss of universality. When we can no longer take up a universalizing perspective, we can no longer escape our isolated position in order to understand the social order as a totality. Without the universal, we lose the ability to interpret the events occurring in our everyday liveswe lose the ability to find meaningbecause it is only the universal that makes interpretation possible. Interpretation operates by relating the particular to the universal, by taking a seemingly isolated event and seeing its larger importance. The universal provides the framework of meaning through which the particular acquires whatever sense it will acquire. Without the possibility of a reference to the universal, particular events lose their connection to the whole and thus take on the appearance of contingency. We can see this phenomenon at its most egregious in the contemporary attitude toward crime. People fear crime today in large part because it always threatens to take them by surprise. Rather than being the product of definite sociohistorical conditions, the criminal seems to emerge out of nowhere, strike, and then return to anonymity. As the victim (or potential victim) of the crime, I experience it as a wholly random act, disconnected with the functioning of the social order as a whole. What I experience most forcefully is the fact that the crime could have happened to anyone that it could have happened to someone else just as easily as it happened to me. Certainly it is never anything that I did that triggered the crimeor at least such is my experience. Crimes appear, in other words, in almost every instance as particular acts without any link to the universal, without any connection to the social order in which they exist. One might have a theory about crimeblaming it on liberal judges, for instancebut when crime actually strikes, it seems random and irreducibly singular. Hence, it becomes impossible to interpret crime, to grasp particular crimes within their universal significance.9 But nonetheless crime does have a universal significance, and it does emerge from localizable conditions, despite its appearance of isolation and particularity. In fact, one could convincingly argue that crime should be easier to understand within the current context of global capitalism than ever before in human history, simply because never before have those who live in squalor been bombarded on a daily basis with nonstop images of opulence. Making connections like this is increasingly difficult today, however, because subjects increasingly view their experience as an isolated, essentially private experience.10 Individual experiences are not relevant to the politicalwe need to find universal issues in social justice, not personal stories. McGowan 4 PhD from Ohio State English Department (Todd, 2004, Introduction: Psychoanalysis after Marx, End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the
Emerging Society of Enjoyment, p. 99) MH In addition to fostering paranoia about crime, this

contemporary failure to recognize the universaland the inability to interpret that it produces renders subjects unable to see any way out of the isolated particularity that engulfs them. A sense of claustrophobia sets in: without the possibility of universality, I have no means through which I might escape my insular, private world. From this perspective, one can understand yet another reason for the appeal of fundamentalism today. In addition to promising a return of transcendence (as we saw in the previous chapter), fundamentalism (grounded in religion, ethnicity, nation, etc.) provides the subject with a way out of his or her private world, a way of rediscovering the possibility of the universal. It assures us that there is a universal frame of reference that holds for everyone and that isnt subject to the variegations of our relativistic world. Whereas traditional religions today make allowances for other religions (other particularities) and thus tend to eschew universalizing, fundamentalism has no such qualms. The subject in the society of enjoyment feels incapable of universality, and fundamentalism comes along to provide an avenue through which it can be attained and experienced. As long as subjects continue to feel themselves isolated within their particularity, fundamentalism will continue to have an appeal. It provides the missing universal framework that allows us to make sense of our particular situation, to discover its meaning. Fundamentalism, however, is not the only path to universality. In fact, the turn toward it is based upon a misperception involved in the experience of late capitalist subjectivity. Though 8

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Updated Lacan K 9 subjects dont recognize the existence of the universal today, they nonetheless continue to exist under its sway. As speaking beings, we are all the time employing the universal, discussing a particular situation through the vehicle of the universal. From the moment that we use words at all, we have moved from the level of the particular to that of the universal. This is the point that Hegel insists upon in the first chapter of the Phenomenology: Of course, we do not envisage the universal This or Being in
general, but we utter the universal; in other words, we do not strictly say in this sense-certainty what we mean to say. But language, as we see, is the more truthful; in it, we ourselves directly refute what we mean to say, and since the universal is the true [content] of sense-certainty and language expresses this true [content] alone, it is just not possible for us ever to say, or express in words, a sensuous being that we mean.11 Hegels claim here is that though

we may intend to communicate a particular content when we speak, the very act of speaking itselfusing words necessarily implies that we are dealing with universals, not particulars. Whatever words we use to describe the particular that we are trying to describe will be universalswords that describe other
particularities as well. Hence, we cannot speak that particular that we are trying to speak. As Hegel puts it, the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e., to that which is inherently universal.12 Rather than speaking about particulars, we

are always involved with the universal while we inhabit the world of language, the symbolic order. The point, thenand this is what the fundamentalist missesis that we havent lost the universal, that the universal continues to persist despite the current difficulties we have in discerning it. Though our experience seems bereft of the universal, it is nonetheless there, providing the frame through which we encounter the particulars of our everyday lives. The key to interpretation today is the ability to grasp this silent functioning of the universal.We can continue to interpretwe can continue to move from the particular to the universal because the universal persists. Interpretation becomes, however, more difficult and, at the same time, more exigent. In the face of the seeming absence of the universal, we must interpret all the more, because without interpretation our experience is simply a series of randomly arranged events, wholly without significance. Narratives of suffering play into the hands of the existing order. They cannot challenge the fundamental components of the political fantasy because they are focused on victimization, not real political challenges. iek 1 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Interview with Christopher
Hanlon, Ph.D. from UMass-Amherst, Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj iek, New Literary History, 32.1, 1-21, Project Muse).

SZ: Well, I don't think that . . . OK, Cornel West did say that. But I nonetheless don't think that he perceives us as the main opponent. Because this very reproach that you
usually relies on the most abstract and pure theory, and as an old philosopher I would say, as you said before, that we

mention is not a reproach that can be addressed specifically to Lacan. My idea is the old marxist idea that this immediate reference to experience, practice, struggle, etcetera,

simply cannot escape theory. I fanatically oppose this turn which has taken place in social theory, this idea that there is no longer time for great theoretical projects, that all we can do is narrativize the experience of our suffering, that all various ethnic or sexual groups can ultimately do is to narrate their painful, traumatic experience. I think this is a catastrophe. I think that this fits perfectly the existing capitalist order, that there is nothing subversive in it. I think that this fits perfectly today's ideology of victimization, where in order to legitimize, to gain power politically, you must present yourself, somehow, as the victim. Narratives create social apartheidif only individuals can relate their own experiences, it means that only they truly understand the situation and it relives the rest of us of any responsibility for their suffering. iek 2 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, inteview with Bad Subjects,
I am a Fighting Atheist: Interview with Slavoj iek, Bad Subjects, Issue #59, February, http://eserver.org/bs/59/iek.html).

My opponent here is the widely accepted position that we should leave behind the quest for universal truth that what we have instead are just different narratives about who we are, the stories we tell about ourselves. So, in that view, the highest ethical injunction is to respect the other story. All the stories should be told, each ethnic, political, or sexual group should be given the right to tell its story, as if this kind of tolerance towards the plurality of stories with no universal truth value is the ultimate ethical horizon. I oppose this radically. This ethics of storytelling is usually accompanied by a right to narrate, as if the highest act you can do today is to narrate your own story, as if only a black lesbian mother can know what it's like to be a black lesbian mother, and so on. Now this may sound very emancipatory. But the moment we accept this logic, we enter a kind of apartheid. In a situation of social domination, all narratives are not the same. For example, in Germany in the 1930s, the narrative of the Jews wasn't just one among many. This was the narrative that explained the truth about the entire situation. Or today, take the gay struggle. It's not enough for gays to say, "we want our story to be heard." No, the gay narrative must contain a universal dimension, in the sense that their implicit claim must be that what happens to us is not something that concerns only us. What is happening to us is a symptom
or signal that tells us something about what's wrong with the entirety of society today. We have to insist on this universal dimension.

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link: visual
Prioritizing the visual plays makes us vulnerable to totalitarianism because we are far less critical of images and its non verbal nature means that it is an individual, not shared experience. McGowan 4 PhD from Ohio State English Department (Todd, 2004, Introduction: Psychoanalysis after Marx, End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the
Emerging Society of Enjoyment, p. 65) MH

This belief in the truth of the image leaves us especially vulnerable to ideological coercion (which is not to say, of course, that the image cannot be subversive as well). The image, much more than the word, inspires trust, and this trust is precisely what ideology hopes to engender. This is why fascists rely so heavily on imagery. In fact, cultural theorist Paul Gilroy links the rise of the image to the rise of fascism in the mid-twentieth century. According to Gilroy: The application of image-building and image-maintaining techniques has created a condition in which icons severely qualify and often dominate the vivid authority of the spoken word in ways that recall the operations of fascist propaganda. The power of speech, already substantially reduced by the imperative to supply empty but memorable sound bites, has declined even further since Hitlers innovations.17 In valuing the image over the word, we fall victim to the images appearance of full revelation.Whereas the word prompts suspicion and questioning, the image produces belief and devotion. It is in this sense that Gilroy sees a latent fascism in the contemporary elevation of the image. The image today signifies the possibility of a completely successful process of manipulation. According to Postman, however, the great danger of this epistemological transitiontoward faith in the imageis not the possibility for manipulation but the inescapability of distraction. The flow of images in contemporary society serves to keep subjects constantly entertained and distracted. We are amused, but we are also isolated and docile. In the final pages of his treatise, Postman articulates this danger in dramatic terms: When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.18 What Postman labels culture-death is the breakdown of symbolic mediation, the inability of language to link subjects to each other. There is no symbolic authority demanding that subjects leave the imaginary realm and enter into the social world.Without this authority, subjects remain within the private world of the image, confined to what Jean Baudrillard calls the hell of the same.

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link: utopianism
Harmony as the affirmative constructed it is impossibleand will require the extermination of those who are blamed for the inevitable failure of utopia. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, Lacan and the Political, The Lacanian Object p.63-5)MH Mac Arthur, Odum and Clements, like Isaac Newton, had tried to make nature into a single, coherent picture where all the pieces fitted firmly together. All of them tried to reduce the disorderliness or the unknown qualities of nature to a single all-encompassing metaphysical idea (Worster, 1994:400). Even conceptions of nature stressing the element of conflict, such as the Darwinian one, sometimes feel the need to subject
this non-perfect image to some discernible goal of nature (for example the constantly increasing diversity of organic types in one areaWorster, 1994:161) which introduces a certain harmony through the back door. What

constantly emerges from this exposition is that when harmony is not present it has to be somehow introduced in order for our reality to be coherent. It has to be introduced through a fantasmatic social construction. 19 One should not get the impression though that this is a mere philosophical discussion. In so far as our constructions of reality influence our behaviourand this is what they basically doour fixation on harmony has direct social and political consequences. Reality construction does not take place on a superstructural level. Reality is forced to conform to our constructions of it not only at the spiritual or the intellectual, but also at the material level. But why does it have to be forced to conform? This is due, for instance, to the gap between our harmonious fantasmatic constructions of nature and nature itself, between reality and the real. Our constructions of reality are so strong that nature has to conform to them and not they to nature; reality is conceived as mastering the real. But there is always a certain leftover, a disturbing element destabilising our constructions of nature. This has to be stigmatised, made into a scapegoat and exterminated. The more beatific and harmonious is a social fantasy the more this repressed destabilising element will be excluded from its symbolisationwithout, however, ever disappearing. In this regard, a vignette from the history of nature conservation can be revealing. As is
well known nature conservation was developed first in the United States; what is not so well known is that a major feature of the crusade for resource conservation

was a deliberate campaign to destroy wild animalsone of the most efficient, well-organized, and well-financed such efforts in all of mans history (Worster, 1994:261). All this, although not solely attributable to it, was part of a progressive moralistic ideology which conceived of nature together with society as harbouring ruthless exploiters and criminals who should be banished from the land (Worster, 1994:265). The driving force behind this enterprise was clearly a particular ethically distinctive construction of nature articulated within the framework of a conservation ideology. According to this construction what was had to conform to what should be and what should be, that is to say nature without vermin (coyotes and other wild predators), was accepted as more naturalmore harmoniousthan what was: These conservationists were dedicated to reorganizing the natural economy in a way that would fulfil their own ideal vision of what nature should be like (Worster, 1994:266). This construction was accepted by the Roosevelt administration in the USA (1901-9) and led to the formation of an official programme to exterminate vermin. The job was given to a government agency, the Bureau of the Biological Survey (BBS) in the Department of Agriculture, and a ruthless war started (in 1907 alone, 1,700 wolves and 23,000 coyotes were killed in the National Parks and this policy continued and expanded for years) (Worster, 1994:263). What is this dialectic between the beatific fantasy of nature and the demonised vermin doing if not illustrating the Lacanian dialectic between the two sides of fantasy or between fantasy and symptom? Since we will explore the first of these two Lacanian approaches to fantasy in Chapter 4, we will concentrate here on the fantasy/symptom axis. 20 As far as the promise of filling the lack in the Other is concerned, fantasy can be better understood in its relation to the Lacanian conception of the symptom; according to one possible reading, fantasy and symptom are two inter-implicated terms. It is the symptom that interrupts the consistency of the field of our constructions of reality, of the object of identification, by embodying the repressed jouissance, the destabilising part of nature excluded from its harmonious symbolisation. The symptom here is a real kernel of enjoyment; it is the repressed jouissance that returns and does not ever stop in imposing itself [on us] (Soler, 1991:214). If fantasy is the support that gives consistency to what we call reality (iek, 1989:49) on the other hand reality is always a symptom (iek, 1992). Here we are insisting on the late Lacanian conception of the symptom as sinthome. In this conception, a signifier is married to jouissance, a signifier is instituted in the real, outside the signifying chain but at the same time internal to it. This paradoxical role of the symptom can help us understand the paradoxical role of fantasy. Fantasy gives discourse its consistency because it opposes the symptom (Ragland-Sullivan, 1991:16). Hence, if the symptom is an encounter with the real, with a traumatic point that resists symbolisation, and if the discursive has to arrest the real and repress jouissance in order to produce reality, then the negation of the real within fantasy can only be thought in terms of opposing, of stigmatising the symptom. This is then the relation between symptom and fantasy. The self-consistency of a symbolic construction of reality depends on the harmony instituted by fantasy. This fantasmatic harmony can only be sustained by the

neutralisation of the symptom and of the real, by a negation of the generalised lack that crosses the field of the social. But how is this done? If social fantasy produces the self-consistency of a certain construction it can do so only by presenting the symptom as an alien, disturbing intrusion, and not as the point of eruption of the otherwise hidden truth of the existing social order (iek, 1991a:40). The social fantasy of a harmonious social or natural order can only be sustained if all the persisting
disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder. To return to our example, the illusory character of our harmonious construction of nature is shown in the fact that there is a part of the real which escapes its schema and assumes a symptomatic form (vermin, etc.); in order for this fantasy to

remain coherent, this real symptom has to be stigmatised and eliminated. It cannot be accepted as the excluded truth of nature; such a recognition would lead to a dislocation of the fantasy in question. When, however, the dependence of fantasy on the symptom is revealed, then the playthe relationbetween the symptom and fantasy reveals itself as another mode of the play between the real and the symbolic/imaginary nexus producing reality.

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The drive to master the globe is the ultimate in the politics of utopia. Rather than admitting that the world is beyond our control we contruct a fanatsy of total mastery of the planet. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages p 81-82 ).
The fantasmatic support If

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political reality is a symbolic construction produced through metaphoric and metonymic processes and articulated around points de capiton and empty signifiers, it nevertheless depends on fantasy in order to constitute itself. This dimension must have become evident from our argumentation so far. It is useful however to
present one more example in which this dimension is illustrated with clarity.

Fantasies of mastery, especially mastery of knowledge, have direct political significance. Thomas Richards, in
his book The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of the Empire, explores the importance of fantasy in the construction of the British empire. There is no doubt that no nation can close its hand around the whole of the world. In that sense an empire

is always, at least partly, a fiction. Absolute political control is impossible due to a variety of reasons, such as the lack of information and control in distant parts of the imperial territory. This gap in knowledge (in the symbolic constitution of the empire) and control, was covered over by the fantasy construction of the imperial archive, a fantasy of knowledge collected and united in the service of state and empire. In that sense the myth of imperial archive brought together in fantasy what was breaking apart in fact and was thus shared widely; it even had an impact in policymaking (Richards, 1993:6). This imperial archive was not a real museum or a real library, it was not a building or a collection of texts, but a fantasy of projected total knowledge: it constituted a collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable, a fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern, a virtual focal point for the heterogeneous local knowledge of metropolis and empire (Richards, 1993:11). In this utopian space, disorder was transformed to order, heterogeneity to homogeneity and lack of political control and information to an imaginary empire of knowledge and power. Such a fantasmatic support is, however, discernible in all the examples we have already presented. This is because all ideological formations, all constructions of political reality, although not in the same degree or in the same way, aspire to eliminate anxiety and loss, to defeat dislocation, in order to achieve a state of fullness. Thus what Thatcherism as an ideology does, is to address
the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities, of a people.... It is addressed to our collective fantasies, to Britain as an imagined community, to the social imaginary (Hall, 1988:167). The same applies to nationalism, to millenarian redemption, as well as to Disraelis One Nation and to Blairism. This

fantasmatic element is crucial for the desirability of all these discourses, in other words for their hegemonic appeal. All political projects to reconstitute society as a well-ordered and harmonious ensemble aim at this impossible object which reduces utopia to a fantasmatic screen. If, according to Laclaus Lacanian dictum, society does not exist (as a harmonious ensemble), this impossible existence is all the time constructed and reconstructed through the symbolic production of discourse and its fantasmatic investment, through the reduction of the political to politics. When we try create global harmony, we come up against its impossibility. To maintain faith in the fantasy, we will try to violently eliminate components that do not fit, turning the case. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 100-101).
In order to answer these questions it is crucial to enumerate the conditions of possibility and the basic characteristics of utopian thinking. First of all it seems that the

need for utopian meaning arises in periods of increased uncertainty, social instability and conflict, when the element of the political subverts the fantasmatic stability of our political reality. Utopias are generated by the surfacing of grave antagonisms and dislocations in the social field. As Tillich has put it all utopias strive to negate the negative...in human existence; it is the negative in that existence which makes the idea of utopia necessary (Tillich in Levitas, 1990:103). Utopia then is one of the possible responses to the ever-present negativity, to the real antagonism which is constitutive of human experience. Furthermore, from the time of Mores Utopia (1516) it is conceived as an answer to the negativity inherent in concrete political antagonism. What is, however, the exact nature of this response? Utopias are images of future human communities in which these antagonisms and the dislocations fuelling them (the element of the political) will be forever resolved, leading to a reconciled and harmonious worldit is not a coincidence that, among
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As Marin has put it, utopia

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others, Fourier names his utopian community Harmony and that the name of the Owenite utopian community in the New World was New Harmony.

sets in view an imaginary resolution to social contradiction; it is a simulacrum of synthesis

which dissimulates social antagonism by projecting it onto a screen representing a harmonious and immobile equilibrium (Marin, 1984:61). This final resolution is the essence of the utopian promise. What I will try to do in this chapter is, first of all, to demonstrate the deeply problematic nature of utopian politics. Simply put, my argument will be that

every utopian fantasy construction needs a scapegoat in order to constitute itselfthe Nazi utopian fantasy and the production of the Jew is a good example, especially as pointed out in Zizeks analysis.4 Every utopian fantasy produces its reverse and calls for its elimination. Put another way, the beatific side of fantasy is coupled in utopian constructions with a horrific side, a paranoid need for a stigmatised scapegoat. The naivetyand also the dangerof utopian structures is revealed when the realisation of this fantasy is attempted. It is then that we are brought close to the frightening kernel of the real: stigmatisation is followed by extermination. This is not an accident. It is inscribed in the structure of utopian constructions; it seems to be the way all fantasy constructions work. If in almost all utopian visions, violence and antagonism are eliminated, if utopia is based on the expulsion and repression of violence (this is its beatific side) this is only because it owes its own creation to violence; it is sustained and fed by violence (this is its horrific side). This repressed moment of violence resurfaces, as Marin points out, in the difference inscribed in the name utopia itself (Marin, 1984:110). What we shall argue is that it also resurfaces in the production of the figure of an enemy. To use a phrase enunciated by the utopianist Fourier, what is driven
out through the door comes back through the window (is not this a precursor of Lacans dictum that what is foreclosed in the symbolic reappears in the real?VII:131).5 The work of Norman Cohn and other historians permits the articulation of a genealogy of this manichean, equivalential way of understanding the world, from

the great witch-hunt up to modern anti-Semitism, and Lacanian theory can provide valuable insights into any attempt to understand the logic behind this utopian operation here the approach to fantasy developed in Chapter 2 will further demonstrate its potential in analysing our political experience. In fact, from the time of his unpublished seminar on The Formations of the Unconscious, Lacan identified the utopian
dream of a perfectly functioning society as a highly problematic area (seminar of 18 June 1958).

Lacanian theory is a source of liberation from the strait-jacket of the politics of harmonyLacanian theory can help us to develop a more radically democratic society. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 4...9-10).
If the first three chapters aim at extracting the importance of the Lacanian conceptual

and theoretical apparatus for political analysis and the theory of politics, the two chapters that follow are designed to demonstrate some of the ways in which this conceptual apparatus can lead to new challenging approaches to areas which are crucial for contemporary political theory and political praxis, namely the crisis of utopian politics and the ethical foundation of a radical democratic project. Here again, we shall argue that both a historical and theoretical analysis reveals that the politics of utopia which has for long dominated our political horizonlead to a set of dangers that no rigorous political analysis and political praxis should neglect. Its current crisis, instead of being the source of disappointment and political pessimism, creates the opportunity of liberating our political imagination from the strait-jacket imposed by a fantasmatic ethics of harmony, and of developing further the democratic potential of this imagination in an age in which all sorts of xenophobic, neofascist andnationalist particularisms and fundamentalisms show again their ugly face. Lacanian theory can be one of the catalysts for these political liberations, simultaneously offering a non- foundational ethical grounding for their articulation. The crisis identified by the affirmative is an opportunity to turn away from the politics of utopia and create a new order designed around accepting antagonism. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government,
University of Essex, pages 135-136).
Slavoj Zizek starts Tarrying with the Negative by presenting the

most striking and sublime expression of a political attempt to encircle the lack of the real, to show the political within a space of political representation: the flag of the rebels in the violent overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania. In this flag, the red star, the communist symbol constituting the nodal point of the flag and of a whole political order, the symbol standing for the organising principle of
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the national life is

cut out; what remains in its place is only a hole. It is in this brief moment, after the collapse of an order and before the articulation of another one, that it becomes possible to attest to the visibility of the hole in the big Other, to sense the presence of the political. If there is a duty for critical intellectuals today it is to occupy all the time the space of this hole, especially when a new order (a new reoccupation of traditional politics) is stabilised and attempts to make invisible this lack in the Other (iek, 1993:1 2). As far as political praxis is concerned our ethical duty can only be to attempt the institutionalisation of this lack within political reality. This duty is a truly and radically democratic one. It is also an ethical duty that marks the philosophical dimension of democracy. As Bernasconi and Critchley point out, if democracy is an
ethically grounded form of political life which does not cease to call itself into question by asking of its legitimacy, if legitimate communities are those that call themselves into question, then these communities are philosophical (Critchley, 1992:239). In this light, what becomes fundamental in democracy is that it makes visible the political institution, the limit of all political forces. By instituting

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antagonism it points to the distance between every utopian symbolisation and the real it attempts to master. But how exactly is this distance marked and made visible? This visibility is only obtained in so far as opposite forms of institution (of the social) are possible, and this possibility is revealed when those forms are actually postulated and fought for in the historical arena. For it is only in their antagonistic relation to other projects that the contingency of particular acts of institution is shown, and it is this contingency that gives them their political character.
(Laclau, 1994:4) In other words, the

conditions for maintaining the visibility of the constitutive lack and the contingent nature of a structure are, according to Laclaus schema, the following: first, to make visible the (external) conflict between the different political projects, the different contents that purport to fill this lack (none of which is predetermined to perform this task); and second, to make visible the (internal) split marking each of these projects, a split between their function as representatives of (universal) fullness and their concrete (particular) content (Laclau, 1993:285). Democracy attempts to maintain this visibility, to institutionalise this lack by including as a part of its normal, regular reproduction the moment of the suspension/ dissolution of political reality. This particular moment of the eruption of the real is, as iek points out, the moment of elections: At the moment of elections, the whole hierarchic network of social relations is in a way suspended, put in parentheses; society as an organic unity ceases to exist, it changes into a contingent collection of atomized individuals, of abstract units, and the result depends on a purely quantitative mechanism of counting, ultimately on a stochastic process: some
wholly unforeseeable (or manipulated) eventa scandal which erupts a few days before an election, for examplecan add that half per cent one way or the other that determines the general orientation of the countrys politics over the next few years.... In vain do we conceal this thoroughly irrational character of what we call formal democracy.... Only the acceptance of such a risk, only such a readiness to hand over ones fate to irrational hazard, renders democracy possible. (iek, 1989:147)

This suspension of sedimented political reality, this opening to the moment of the political, presupposes the institutionalisation both of the external antagonism between competing political forces and, most importantly, of the internal split marking the identity of all these forces (ieks pure antagonism), since the repetition of the moment of elections inscribes deep in our political culture the recognition that none of these forces can sublate its internal split; if we need elections every once in a while it is because we accept that the hegemonic link between a concrete content and its incarnation of fullness has to be continuously re-established and renegotiated. This is one of the ways in which democracy identifies with the symptom (the constitutive antagonism of the social which is usually presented as a mere epiphenomenon) and traverses the fantasy of a harmonious social order: by instituting lack at the place of the principle of societal organisation.9 The politics of utopia are responsible for the worst acts of violencethe failure of the fantasy to be fully relaized causes us to project that failure on an alien intruder justifying persecution and massacres. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 101-102).

In order to realise the problematic character of the utopian operation it is necessary to articulate a genealogy of this way of representing and making sense of the world. The work of Norman Cohn seems especially designed to serve this purpose. What is most important is that in Cohns schema we can encounter the

three basic characteristics of utopian fantasies that we have already singled out: first, their
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link to instances of disorder, to the element of negativity. Since human experience is a continuous battle with the unexpected there is always a need to represent and master this unexpected, to transform disorder to order. Second, this representation is usually articulated as a total and universal representation, a promise of absolute mastery of the totality of the real, a vision of the end of history. A future utopian state is envisaged in which disorder will be totally eliminated. Third, this symbolisation produces its own remainder; there is always a certain particularity remaining outside the universal schema. It is to the existence of this evil agent, which can be easily localised, that all persisting disorder is attributed. The elimination of disorder depends then on the elimination of this group. The result is always horrible: persecution, massacres, holocausts. Needless to say, no utopian fantasy is ever realised as a result of all these crimesas mentioned in Chapter 2, the purpose of fantasy is not to satisfy an (impossible) desire but to constitute it as such. What is of great interest for our approach is the
way in which Cohn himself articulates a genealogy of the pair utopia/demonisation in his books The Pursuit of the Millennium and Europes Inner Demons (Cohn, 1993b, 1993c). The same applies to his book Warrant for Genocide (Cohn, 1996) which will also be implicated at a certain stage in our analysis. These books are concerned with the same social phenomenon, the

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idea of purifying humanity through the extermination of some category of human beings which are conceived as agents of corruption, disorder and evil. The
contexts are, of course, different, but the urge remains the same (Cohn, 1993b:xi). All these works then, at least according to my reading, are concerned with the production of an archenemy which goes together with the utopian mentality. It could be argued that the roots of both demonisation and utopian thinking can be traced back to the shift from a cyclical to a unilinear representation of history (Cohn, 1993a:227).6 However, we will start our reading of Cohns work by going back to Roman civilisation. As Cohn claims, a profound demonising tendency is discernible in Ancient Rome: within the imperium, the Romans accused the Christians of cannibalism and the Jews were accused by Greeks of ritual murder and cannibalism. Yet in the ancient Roman world, although Judaism was regarded as a bizarre religion, it was nevertheless a religio licita, a religion that was officially recognised. Things were different with the newly formed Christian sect. In fact the Christian Eucharist could easily be interpreted as cannibalistic (Cohn, 1993b:8). In almost all their ways Christians ignored or even negated the fundamental convictions by which the pagan Graeco-Roman world lived. It is not at all surprising then that to the Romans they looked like a bunch of conspirators plotting to destroy society. Towards the end of the second century, according to Tertullian, it was taken as a given that the Christians are the cause of every public catastrophe, every disaster that hits the populace. If the Tiber floods or the Nile fails to, if there is a drought or an earthquake, a famine or a plague, the cry goes up at once: Throw the Christians to the Lions!. (Tertullian in Cohn, 1993b:14) This defamation of Christians that led to their exclusion from the boundaries of humanity and to their relentless persecution is a pattern that was repeated many times in later centuries, when both the persecutors and the persecuted were Christians (Cohn, 1993b:15). Bogomiles, Waldensians, the Fraticelli movement and the Catharsall the groups appearing in Umberto Ecos fascinating books, especially in The Name of the Rosewere later on persecuted within a similar discursive context. The same happened with the demonisation of Christians, the fantasy that led to the great witch-hunt. Again, the conditions of possibility for this demonisation can be accurately defined. First, some kind of misfortune or catastrophe had to occur, and second, there had to be someone who could be singled out as the cause of this misfortune (Cohn, 1993b:226).

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link: critiques
Small acts of subversion (such as armchair ideological distance) make us more comfortable and therefor more invested in the political status quo. McGowan 4 PhD from Ohio State English Department (Todd, 2004, Introduction: Psychoanalysis after Marx, End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the
Emerging Society of Enjoyment, p. 124-6) MH In response to the command to enjoy, contemporary

cynicism is an effort to gain distance from the functioning of power, to

resist the hold that power has over us. Hence, the cynic turns inward and displays an indifference to external authorities, with the aim of self-sufficient independence. Symbolic authoritywhich would force the subject into a particular symbolic identity, an identity not freely chosen by the subject herself is the explicit enemy of cynicism. To acknowledge the power of symbolic authority over ones own subjectivity would be, in the eyes of the cynic, to acknowledge ones failure to enjoy fully, making such an acknowledgment unacceptable. In

the effort to refuse the power of this authority, one must eschew all the trappings of conformity. This is why the great Cynical philosopher Diogenes made a show of masturbating in public, a gesture that made clear to everyone that he had moved beyond the constraints of the symbolic law and
that he would brook no barrier to his jouissance. By freely doing in public what others feared to do, Diogenes acted out his refusal to submit to the prohibition that others accepted. He attempted to demonstrate that the symbolic law had no absolute hold over him and that he had no investment in it. However, seeming

to be beyond the symbolic law and actually being beyond it are two differentand, in fact, opposed things, and this difference becomes especially important to recognize in the contemporary society of enjoyment. In the act of making a show of ones indifference to the public law (in the manner of Diogenes and todays cynical subject), one does not gain distance from that law, but unwittingly reveals ones investment in it. Such a show is done for the look of the symbolic authority. The cynic stages her/his act publicly in order that symbolic authority will see it. Because it is staged in this way, we know that the cynics actsuch as the public masturbation of Diogenesrepresents a case of acting-out, rather than an authentic act, an act that suspends the functioning of symbolic authority. Acting-out always occurs on a stage, while the authentic act and authentic enjoymentthe radical break from the constraints of symbolic authorityoccur unstaged, without reference to the Others look.9 In the
once walked on the beautiful carpets with muddy feet, saying, I tread on the pride of Plato. Yes, but with another pride, replied Plato, as pointedly.

History of Philosophy, Hegel makes clear the cynics investment in symbolic authority through his discussion of Platos interactions with Diogenes: In Platos house [Diogenes]

When Diogenes stood wet through with rain, and the bystanders pitied him, Plato said, If you wish to compassionate him, just go away. His vanity is in showing himself off and exciting surprise; it is what made him act in this way, and the reason would not exist if he were left alone.10 Though Diogenes attempts to act in a way that demonstrates his selfsufficiency, his distance from every external authority, what he attains, however, is far from self-sufficiency. As Platos ripostes demonstrate, everything that the cynic does to distance himself from symbolic authority plays directly into the hands of that authority.11 Here we see how cynicism functions symptomatically in the society of enjoyment,
providing the illusion of enjoyment beyond social constraints while leaving these constraints completely intact. We dont have to look twenty-five hundred years in the past for an example of cynicisms hidden investment in symbolic authority: this

investment is even more fully present in contemporary cynicism. It is especially clear in the cynicism of the antiauthority, discontented hacker working at a new internet company. The hacker is able to eschew all
of the trappings of the traditional office labor: she/he can make her/his own hours, wear what she/he wants, listen to a walkman, and, in general, be her/his own boss. But nonetheless, this rejection of authority is wholly amenable to the functioning of the internet company. In fact, such a company thrives on it. It is not uncommon for internet companies to fire hackers when they lose their rebelliousness and become part of the corporate structure. Such companies want edgy product development that only a rebellious hacker can provide. The cynical worker works all the more effectively for the companyfor the authorityin the guise of an opposition to structures of authority. Imagining her/himself as a rebel against tradition allows the hacker to become more creative, to spur the company on toward greater and greater profits. Contemporary cynicism at large works much like it does in the case of the hacker. The cynic rejects authority at the same time she/he devotes all of her/his energies to helping it

along. The contemporary cynics rebellion is, in this way, not a brake upon the functioning of late capitalism, but its engine. The cynicism among subjects today thus indicates the extent to which the society of enjoyment leaves subjects bereft of the actual enjoyment that would break from the prevailing symbolic authority. So-called radical acts of subversion allow us to ignore our roles in the system. We need to embrace our responsibility by identitfying with oppressive power, not making empty gestures against it. McGowan 4 PhD from Ohio State English Department (Todd, 2004, Introduction: Psychoanalysis after Marx, End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the
Emerging Society of Enjoyment, p. 192-4) MH

The problem with the school uniform movement, as well as all of the other calls for a return to prohibition, is that, as the previous chapters have sought to demonstrate, widespread disobedience is not the problem. The problem with the society of commanded enjoymentwhat constitutes its danger for us is not the enjoyment that it unleashes, but the barrier that it proves to enjoyment. Rather than being beset by disobedience and transgressive enjoyment, our society has become replete with obedience, with subjects who are wholly committed to sustaining their symbolic identity, their
status within the prevailing social order. This

obedience predominates precisely because it successfully disguises itself as its oppositeas rebellion, radicality, and difference. The most difficult obstacle to overcome today is the sense that one is radical or subversive, precisely because this sensibility is so pervasive, even amongor especially amongthe most 17

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Updated Lacan K 18 conservative subjects. In fact, convincing subjects that they are radical has become the primary function of ideology today. If I believe that I am already radical while I am following the dictates of the social order, I am not likely to challenge those dictates. Already in the nineteenth century Marx and Engels saw that life under
capitalism tended to offer subjects a sense of their own freedom (i.e., their own radicality and distance from the big Other) combined with an increase in actual unfreedom. They say, in imagination, individuals seem freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seem accidental; in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are to a greater extent governed by material forces.2 The situation that Marx and Engels describe here has grown exponentially today. Existing in the isolation of her/his imaginary enclave, the contemporary

subject tends to feel certain of her/his freedom and distance from the social order. Phenomenologically, todays subject is a radical and independent subject, but this experience of radicality is the fundamental manifestation of contemporary ideology.3 It is in this way that global capitalismthe hegemonic power of our timesecures its domination throughout the world. Ironically, despite all of the claims of radicality being made today, very few call into question the functioning of global capitalism. We
can see an illuminating example of the tacit acceptance of global capitalism in the docu- mentary Trekkies (1999), which chronicles the fanatical devotion that Star Trek has inspired. The film shows the extreme lengths to which people go out of love for Star Trek and all that it represents. One woman wears her Star Fleet uniform to work every day; a dentist transforms his office into a simulation of the Enterprise; and a man considers having his ears surgically altered in order to resemble those of Mr. Spock. According to these fans and the many others interviewed, there is something special about the Star Trek universe that inspires this kind of devotion.When pressed for details, they mention its fairness, its equality, its diversity, its tolerance, and its ethic of nonviolence. However, not a single fan depicted in the film, out of hundreds that are interviewed, mentions the fact that the Star Trek economy is a wholly socialist one, that this universe is so far from our prevailing capitalist one that its subjects dont even have money. Trekkies find themselves drawn to Star Treks radicality or so they claimand yet, they completely miss the aspect of the show that most challenges our contemporary existence its blatant rejection of capitalism as the sine qua non of modern life. Though Star Trek doesnt hide its rejection of capitalism, Trekkies dont see it because global capitalism has become a fundamental horizon of our thought. Though we are skeptical about the functioning of almost everything else, we trust fully in the staying power of global capitalism. The alternatives, which once seemed to be just around the corner, have become unimaginable today. The universe
of global capitalism is, or so we think, here to stay, and we best not do anything to risk our status within it. Hence, we pledge our allegiance to it, and we put our trust in it.

This is the fundamental mode of contemporary obedience to authority. Only by coming to understand this obedience to the dictates of global capitalism as obedience can we hope to break out of it. Global capitalism seems an unsurpassable horizon simply because we have not properly recognized our own investment in sustaining it. We see it as unsurpassable because we dont want to lose itand the imaginary satisfaction that it provides. The society of enjoyment works to convince
subjects that they exist outside this society, in independent isolation. It thus becomes increasingly difficult to grasp oneself within the universal. One feels and lives like an outsider. But this in no way hampers the functioning of the universal. It works through us all the more effectively insofar as we fail to recognize it.

In the society of enjoyment, the most difficult task becomes recognizing our own role as an integral part of this societywhat keeps it going. The great temptation today lies in proclamations of ones radicality, expressions of a refusal to conform to the social order. But any subversive display today plays in the prevailing demand for enjoyment. The key to transcending the society of enjoyment and the global capitalism with which it works hand-in-hand lies in reconciling ourselves to this society, in grasping our fundamental investment in it. When we recognize ourselves as the subjects of the society of enjoyment and the subjects of global capitalism rather than as subjects existing in marginality or in isolation, we take a leap beyond this society. The limits of the society of enjoyment are daunting limits precisely because we cannot recognize them as such. In recognizing these limitsin recognizing the extent of our obedience we find a way out of this obedience. As Hegel puts it in the Encyclopedic Logic, No one knows, or even feels, that anything is a limit or defect, until he is at the same time above and beyond it.4 The act of recognition is, at the same time, the act of transcendence. To
recognize ones failure to enjoy is already to begin to enjoy.

The 1ac presents a subversive performance that is a wishful fantasy. We briefly snatch away a small part of the power structure, leaving most forms of oppression intact. We produce enjoyment in the act of snatching, so that we come to love oppression. Zizek 97 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, The Plague of Fantasies,
p. 45-48) In short,

the right-wing intellectual is a knave, a conformist who refers to the mere existence of the given order as an argument for it, and mocks the Left on account of its `utopian' plans, which necessarily lead to catastrophe; while the leftwing intellectual is a fool, a court jester who publicly displays the lie of the existing order, but in a way which suspends the performative efficiency of his speech. Today, after the fall of Socialism, the knave is a neoconservative advocate of the free market who cruelly rejects all forms of social solidarity as counterproductive sentimentalism, while the fool is a deconstructionist cultural critic who, by means of his ludic procedures destined to `subvert' the existing order, actually serves as its supplement.`' What psychoanalysis can do to help us to break this vicious cycle of fool-knave is to lay bare its underlying libidinal economy - the libidinal profit, the 'surplus-enjoyment', which sustains each of the two positions{original upon
request} So: if the conservative knave is not unlike the gypsy, since he also, in his answer to a concrete complaint (Why are things so horrible for us ... /gays, blacks, women/?'), sings his tragic song of eternal fate ('Why are things so bad for us people, 0 why?') - that is, he also, as it were, changes the tonality of the question from concrete complaint to abstract acceptance of the enigma of Fate - the the poor Russian peasant, the

satisfaction of the progressive fool, a `social critic', is of the same kind as that of typical hysterical satisfaction of snatching a little piece of jouissance away from the 18

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Master. If the victim in the first joke were a fool, he would allow the monkey to wash his balls in the whisky yet another time, but would add some dirt or sticky stuff to his

glass beforehand, so that after the monkey's departure he would be able to claim triumphantly: 'I duped him! His balls are now even dirtier than before!' It is easy to imagine a much more sublime version of the reversal performed by the gypsy musician - is not this same reversal at work in the subjective position of castrati singers, for example? They are made to `cry :o Heaven': after suffering a horrible mutilation, they are not supposed .o bemoan their worldly misfortune and pain, and to look for the culprits responsible for it, but instead to address their complaint to Heaven itself. In a way, they must accomplish a kind of magic reversal and exchange all their worldly complaints for a complaint addressed to Divine Fate itself - this reversal allows them to enjoy their terrestrial life to the fullest. This is (the singing) voice at its most elementary: the embodiment of 'surplus enjoyment' in the precise sense of the paradoxical `pleasure in pain'. That is to say: when Lacan uses the term plus-de jouir, one has to ask a naive but crucial question: in what does this surplus consist? Is it merely a qualitative increase of ordinary pleasure? The ambiguity of the French term is decisive here: it can mean `surplus of enjoyment' as well as `no more enjoyment' - the surplus of enjoyment over mere pleasure is generated by the presence of the very opposite of pleasure, that is, pain. Pain generates surplus-enjoyment via the magic reversal-into-itself by means of which the very material texture of our expression of pain (the crying voice) gives rise to enjoyment - and is not this what takes place towards the end of the joke about the monkey washing his balls in my whisky, when the gypsy transforms my furious complaint into a selfsatisfying melody? What we find here is a neat exemplification of the Lacanian formula of the fetishistic object (minus phi under small a): like the castrato's voice, the objet petit a - the surplus-enjoyment - arises at the very place of castration. And does not the same go for love poetry and its ultimate topic: the lamentation of. the poet who has lost his beloved (because she doesn't return his love, because she has died, because her parents do not approve of their union, and block his access to her ...)? Poetry, the specific poetic jouissance, emerges when the very symbolic articulation of this Loss gives rise to a pleasure of its own.' Do we not find the same elementary ideological gesture inscribed into Jewish identity? Jews `evacuate the Law of jouissance', they are `the people of the Book' who stick to the rules and allow for no ecstatic experience of the Sacred; yet, at the same time, they do find an excessive enjoyment precisely in their dealings with the Text of the Book: the `Talmudic' enjoyment of how to read it properly, how to interpret it so that we can none the less have it our own way. Is not the tradition of lively debates and disputes which strike foreigners (Gentiles) as meaningless hairsplitting a neat example of how the very renunciation of the Thing jouissance produces its own jouissance (in interpreting the text)? Maybe Kafka himself, as the Western `Protestant' Jew, was shocked to discover this obscene aspect of the Jewish Law' - is not this jouis-sense in the Letter clearly discernible in the discussion between the priest and K at the end of The Trial, after the parable on the door of the Law? What strikes one here is the `senseless' detailed hairsplitting which, in precise contrast to the Western tradition of metaphorical-gnostic reading, undermines the obvious meaning not by endeavouring to discern beneath it layers of `deeper' analogical meanings, but by insisting on a too-close, too-literal reading ('the man from the country was never ordered to come there in the first place', etc.). Each

of the two positions, that of fool and that of knave, is thus sustained by its own kind of jouissance: the enjoyment of snatching back from the Master part of the jouissance he stole from us (in the case of the fool); the enjoyment which directly pertains to the subject's pain (in the case of the knave). What psychoanalysis can do to help the critique of ideology is precisely to clarify the status of this paradoxical jouissance as the payment that the exploited, the servant, receives for serving the Master. This jouissance, of course, always emerges within a certain phantasmic field; the crucial precondition for breaking the chains of servitude is thus to `traverse the fantasy' which structures our jouissance in a way which keeps us attached to the Master - makes us accept the framework of the social relationship of domination.

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link: suffering
Narratives of suffering play into the hands of the existing order. They cannot challenge the political fantasy because they are focused on victimization, not real politics. Zizek, (University of Ljubljana), 1 (Slavoj, Interview with Christopher Hanlon, Ph.D. from UMass-Amherst, Psychoanalysis and
the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj iek, New Literary History, 32.1, 1-21, Project Muse). SZ+: Well, I dont think that . . . OK, Cornel West did say that. But I nonetheless dont think that he perceives us as the main opponent. Because this very reproach that you mention is not a reproach that can be addressed specifically to Lacan. My idea is the old marxist idea that this

immediate reference to experience, practice, struggle, etcetera, usually relies on the most abstract and pure theory, and as an old philosopher I would say, as you said before, that we simply cannot escape theory. I fanatically oppose this turn which has taken place in social theory, this idea that there is no longer time for great theoretical projects, that all we can do is narrativize the experience of our suffering, that all various ethnic or sexual groups can ultimately do is to narrate their painful, traumatic experience. I think this is a catastrophe. I think that this fits perfectly the existing capitalist order, that there is nothing subversive in it. I think that this fits perfectly todays ideology of victimization, where in order to legitimize, to gain power politically, you must present yourself, somehow, as the victim.

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link: reforming capitalism

Claims to reform capitalism are a re-nevtment in the politics of utopiaexcesses are blamed on alien intruders which must be eliminated so that we can return to a harmonious balance; hiding the fact that the excesses are inherent to capitalism. Zizek 93 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Tarrying with the
Negative, p. 210-211)

the fascist dream is simply to have capitalism without its "excess," without the antagonism that causes its structural imbalance. Which is why we have, in fascism, on one hand, the return to the figure of the Master-Leader-who guarantees the stability and balance of the social fabric, i.e., who again saves us from society's structural imbalance; while, on the other hand, the reason for this imbalance is attributed to the figure of the Jew whose "excessive" accumulation and greed are the cause of social antagonism. Thus the dream is that, since the excess was introduced from outside, i.e., is the work of an alien intruder, its elimination would enable us to obtain again a stable social organism whose parts form a harmonious corporate body, where, in contrast to capitalism's constant social displacement, everybody would again occupy his own place. The
Let us take the ideological edifice of fascist corporatism:

function of the Master is to dominate the excess by locating its cause in a clearly delimited social agency: "It is they who steal our enjoyment, who, by means of their excessive attitude, introduce imbalance and antagonism." With the figure of the Master, the antagonism inherent in the social structure is transformed into a relationship of power, a struggle for domination between us and them, those who cause antagonistic imbalance. Perhaps this matrix also helps us to grasp the reemergence of nationalist chauvinism in Eastern Europe as a kind of "shock-absorber" against the sudden exposure to the capitalist openness and imbalance. It is as if, in the very moment when the bond, the chain preventing free development of capitalism, i.e., a deregulated production of the excess, was broken, it was countered by a demand for a new Master who will rein it in.

What one demands is the establishment of a stable and clearly defined social body which will restrain capitalism's destructive potential by cutting off the excessive" element; and since this social body is experienced as that of a nation, the cause of any imbalance "spontaneously" assumes the form of a national enemy."

Millions of lives are sacrificed by capitalism but we do not dwell on the very real possibility of planetary extinction because we are soothed by hopes for new politics that can fix the problem. Zizek 2k (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Contingency, Hegemony,
Universality, p. 321-326) First, let me emphasize what these lines mean: they mean, in effect, that today,

one cannot even imagine a viable alternative to global capitalism - the only option for the Left is `the introduction of state regulation and democratic control of the economy so that the worst effects of globalization are avoided' (EL, p. 206), that is, palliative measures which, while resigning themselves to the course of events, restrict themselves to limiting the damaging effects of the inevitable. .... A series of `irrationalities' immediately comes
of decolonization is that multinationals treat even their own country of origin as just another colony; the

to mind: the result of the breathtaking growth of productivity in the last few decades is rising unemployment, with the long-term perspective that developed societies will need only 20 percent of their workforce to reproduce themselves, with the remaining 80 per cent reduced to the status of a surplus from a purely economic point of view; the result

result of globalization and the rise of the `global village' is the ghettoization of whole strata of the population; the result of the much-praised `disappearance of the working class' is the emergence of millions of manual workers labouring in the Third World sweatshops, out of our delicate Western sight ... The capitalist system is thus approaching its inherent limit and self-cancellation: for the majority of the population, the dream of the virtual 'frictionless capitalism' (Bill Gates) is turning into a nightmare in which the fate of millions is decided in hyper-reflexive speculation on futures..... The second answer should be a clear line of distinction between utopia and ideology: ideology is not only a utopian project of social transformation with no realistic chance of actualization; no less ideological is the anti-utopian stance of those who `realistically' devalue every global project of social transformation as `utopian', that is, as unrealistic dreaming and/or harbouring `totalitarian' potential -- today's predominant form of ideological `closure' takes the precise form of mental block which prevents us from imagining a fundamental social change, in the interests of an allegedly `realistic' and `mature' attitude. In his Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis Lacan developed an opposition between `knave' and `fool' as the two intellectual attitudes: the right-wing intellectual is a knave, a conformist who considers the mere existence of the given order as an argument for it, and mocks the Left for its `utopian' plans, which necessarily lead to catastrophe; while the leftwing intellectual is a fool, a court jester who publicly displays the lie of the existing order, but in a way which suspends the performative efficiency of his speech. In the years immediately after the fall of Socialism, the knave was a neoconservative advocate
,

of the free market who cruelly rejected all forms of social solidarity as counterproductive sentimentalism; while the fool was a deconstructionist cultural critic who, by means of his ludic procedures destined to `subvert' the existing order, actually served as its supplement. Today, however, the relationship between the couple knave-fool and the political opposition Right/Left is more and more the inversion of the standard figures of Rightist knave and Leftist fool: are not the Third Way theoreticians ultimately today's knaves, figures who preach cynical resignation, that is, the necessary failure of every attempt actually to change something in the basic functioning of global capitalism? And are not the conservative fools - those conservatives whose original modern model is Pascal and who as it were show the hidden cards of the ruling ideology, bringing to light its underlying mechanisms which, in order to remain operative, have to be repressed - far more attractive? Today;

in the face of this Leftist knavery, it is 21

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Updated Lacan K 22 more important than ever to hold this utopian place of the global alternative open, even if it remains empty, living on borrowed time, awaiting the content to fill it in. I fully agree with Laclau that after the exhaustion of both the social democratic

welfare state imaginary and the 'really-existing-Socialist' imaginary, the Left does need a new imaginary (a new mobilizing global vision). Today, however, the outdatedness of the welfare state and socialist imaginaries is a cliche - the real dilemma is what to do with - how the Left is to relate to -- the predominant liberal democratic imaginary. It is my contention that Laclau's and Mouffe's `radical democracy' comes all too close to merely `radicalizing' this liberal democratic imaginary, while remaining within its horizon. Laclau, of course, would probably claim that the point is to treat the democratic imaginary as an `empty signifier', and to engage in the hegemonic battle with the proponents of the global capitalist New World Order over what its content will be. Here, however, I think that Butler is right when she emphasizes that another way is also open: it is not `necessary to occupy the dominant norm in order to produce an internal subversion of its terms. Sometimes it is important to refuse its terms, to let the term itself wither; to starve it of its strength'. This

means that the Left has a choice today: either it accepts the predominant liberal democratic horizon (democracy, human rights and freedoms ...), and engages in a hegemonic battle within it, or it risks the opposite gesture of refusing its very terms, of flatly rejecting today's liberal blackmail that courting any prospect of radical change panes the way for totalitarianism. It is my firm conviction, my politico-existential premiss, that the old '68 motto Soyons realistes, demandons l'impossible! still holds: it is the advocates of changes and resignifications within the liberaldemocratic horizon who are the true utopians in their belief that their efforts will amount to anything more than the cosmetic surgery that will give us capitalism with a human face.

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All fantasies operate within constraints of prohibition and desire. The problem is that the pleasure derived from those prohibitions help to sustain the fantasy itself. Zizek 97 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, The Plague of Fantasies, p.
26-27). We are now in a position to specify the distinction between the Foucauldian interconnection between Power and resistance, and our notion of `inherent transgression'. Let us begin via the matrix of the possible relations between Law and its transgression. The most elementary is the simple relation of externality, of external opposition, in which transgression is directly opposed to legal Power, and poses a threat to it. The next step is to claim that transgression hinges on the obstacle it violates: without Law there is no transgression; transgression needs an obstacle in order to assert itself. Foucault, of course, in Volume I of The History of Sexuality, rejects both these versions, and asserts the absolute immanence of resistance to Power. However, the point of `inherent transgression' is not only that resistance is immanent to Power, that power and counter-power generate each other; it is not only that Power itself generates the excess of resistance which it can no longer dominate; it is also not only that - in the case of sexuality

link: prohibitions

- the

disciplinary `repression' of a libidinal investment eroticizes this gesture of repression itself, as in the case of the
Hegelian terms of speculative identity,

obsessional neurotic who derives libidinal satisfaction from the very compulsive rituals destined to keep the traumatic jouissance at bay. This last point must be further radicalized: the power edifice itself is split from within: in order to reproduce itself and contain its Other, it has to rely on an inherent excess which grounds it - to put it in the

Power is always-already its own transgression, if it is to function, it has to rely on a kind of obscene supplement. It is therefore not enough to assert, in a Foucauldian way, that power is inextricably linked to counter-power, generating it and being itself conditioned by it: in a self-reflective way, the split is always already mirrored back into the power edifice itself, splitting it from within, so that the gesture of selfcensorship is consubstantial with the exercise of power. Furthermore, it is not enough to say that the `repression' of some libidinal content retroactively eroticizes the very gesture of `repression' - this 'eroticization' of power is not a secondary effect of its exertion on its object but its very disavowed foundation, its `constitutive crime', its founding gesture which has to remain invisible if power is to function normally. What we get in the kind of military drill
depicted in the first part of Full MetalJacket, for example, is not a secondary eroticization of the disciplinary procedure which creates military subjects, but the constitutive obscene supplement of this procedure which renders it operative. Judith

Butler' provides a perfect example of, again, Jesse Helms who, in his very formulation of the text of the anti-pornography law, displays the contours of a particular fantasy - an older man who engages in sadomasochistic sexual activity with another, younger man, preferably a child - which bears witness to his own perverted sexual desire. Helms thus unwittingly brings to light the obscene libidinal foundation of his own crusade against pornography.

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link: decreasing discrimination

The problem with the left is that we take a stance against discrimination and congratulate ourselves on poltically correct progress, without ever disturbing the fundamental fantasy that makes oppression function. Small acts of transgression are part of what makes the fantasy possible. Zizek 93 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Tarrying with the
Negative, p. 211-214) And yet in

spite of this self-reflective incorporation of the liberal, "socially conscious" ingredients, the fantasy remains thoroughly the same, its efficiency in structuring our space of desire intact. The truly radical critique of ideology should therefore go beyond the self-congratulatory "social analyses" which continue to participate in the fantasy that sustains the object of their critique and to search for ways to sap the force of this underlying fantasy-frame itself-in short, to perform something akin to the Lacanian "going-through the fantasy." The general lesson to be drawn from it with reference to how ideology works concerns the gap that separates
elements whose value wholly depends on their respective differential position within the symbolic structure. The

ideology qua discursive formation from its fantasy-support: an ideological edifice is of course submitted to incessant retroactive restructurations, the symbolicdifferential value of its elements shifting all the time, but fantasy designates the hard kernel which resists symbolic "perlaboration," i.e., which as it were anchors an ideology in some "substantial" point and thus provides a constant frame for the symbolic interplay. In other words, it is on account of fantasy that an ideology cannot be reduced to a network of

positive expression of this ambivalence toward the other's fantasmatic enjoyment is the obsessive attitude that one can easily detect in what is usually referred to as "PC," political correctness: the compulsive effort to uncover ever new, ever more refined forms of racial and / or sexual violence and domination (it is not PC to say that the president "smokes a peace-pipe" since this involves a patronizing irony
say, at

toward Native Americans, etc., etc.). The problem, here, is simply "how can one be a white, heterosexual male and still retain a clear conscience"? All other positions can affirm their specificity, their specific mode of enjoyment, only the white-male-heterosexual position must remain empty, must sacrifice its enjoyment. The weak point of the PC attitude is thus the weak point of the neurotic compulsion: the problem is not that it is too severe, too fanatic, but quite on the contrary that it is not severe enough. That is to

first glance, the PC attitude involves the extreme self-sacrifice, the renunciation of everything that sounds sexist and racist, the unending effort to unearth traces of sexism and racism in oneself, an effort not unworthy of the early Christian saint who dedicated his life to discovering in himself ever new layers of sin." Yet all this effort should not dupe us; it is ultimately a stratagem whose function is to conceal the fact that the PC type is not ready to renounce what really matters: "I'm prepared to sacrifice everything but that" -but what? The very gesture of self-sacrifice. In other words, the Pc attitude implies the same antagonism between the
enunciated content and the position of enunciation that Hegel denounced apropos of the ascetic self-humiliation: it conceals a patronizing elevation over those whose injuries from discrimination are allegedly compensated. In the very act of emptying the whitemale-heterosexual position of all positive content, the Pc attitude retains it as a universal form of subjectivity. As such, the

PC attitude is an exemplary case of the Sartrean mauvaise foi of the intellectuals: it provides new and newer answers in order to keep the problem alive. What this attitude really fears is that the problem will disappear, i.e., that the white-maleheterosexual form of subjectivity will actually cease to exert its hegemony. The guilt displayed by the PC attitude, the apparent desire to get rid of "incorrect" elements, is therefore the form of appearance of its exact opposite: it bears witness to the inflexible will to stick to the white-male heterosexual form of subjectivity. Or, to put it in clear, old-fashioned political terms: far from being a disguised expression of the extreme Left, the PC attitude is the main ideological protective shield of the bourgeois liberalism against a genuine leftist alternative."

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link: critiques of the state

Intellectual discussions about the ills of the state are the flip side of totalitarianism. Public authority and private protest are mutually supportive of one another. iek 95 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis LAW AND THE
POSTMODERN MIND: SUPEREGO BY DEFAULT, Cardozo Law Review, 1995, 16 Cardozo L. Rev. 925). One must therefore take a step further and consider that

there is no way to simply step aside from ideology. The private indulgence in cynicism and the obsession with private pleasures are all precisely how totalitarian ideology operates in nonideological everyday life. It is how this life is determined by ideology, how ideology is "present in it in the mode of absence," if we may resort to this syntagma from the heroic epoch of structuralism. The

depoliticization of the private sphere in late Socialist societies is "compulsive," marked by the fundamental prohibition of free political discussion; for that reason, such depoliticization always functions as the evasion of what is truly at stake. This accounts for the most immediately striking feature of Kundera's novels: the depoliticized private sphere in no way functions as the free domain of innocent pleasures; there is always something damp, claustrophobic, inauthentic, even desperate, in the characters' striving for sexual and other pleasures. In this respect, the lesson of Kundera's novels is the exact opposite of a naive reliance on the innocent private sphere; the totalitarian socialist ideology vitiates from within the very sphere of privacy to which we take refuge. This insight, however, is far from conclusive. Another step is needed to deal with Kundera's even more ambiguous lesson. Notwithstanding the dampness of the private sphere, the fact remains that the totalitarian situation gave rise to a series of phenomena attested by numerous chronicles of everyday life in the socialist East. In

reaction to totalitarian ideological domination, not only a cynical escape into the "good life" of private pleasures took place, but also an extraordinary flourishing of authentic friendship, of paying visits at home, of shared dinners, and of passionate intellectual conversations in closed societies - features which usually fascinated visitors from the West. The problem, of course, is that there is no way to draw a clear line of separation between the two sides; they are the front and the back of the same coin, which is why, with the advent of democracy, they both get lost. It is to Kundera's credit
that he does not conceal this ambiguity: the spirit of "Middle Europe" - of authentic friendship and intellectual sociability - survived only in Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland as a form of resistance to totalitarian ideological domination. Perhaps yet another step is to be ventured here; the

very subordination to the socialist order brought about a specific enjoyment: not only the enjoyment provided by an awareness that people were living in a universe absolved of uncertainty (since the system possessed, or pretended to possess, an answer to everything), but above all the enjoyment of the very stupidity of the System - a relish in the emptiness of the official ritual, in the worn-out stylistic figures of the predominating ideological discourse.

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link: infinite obligation

Infinite demands on behalf of the excluded are so overhelming that they are designed to fail. Completely unreasonable demands are therefore in the service of the existing order. Zizek, 99 (Slavoj, The Ticklish Subject, p.229-230, plus footnote 54) The pathetic assertion `We are all [Jews, Blacks, gays, residents of Sarajevo ...]' can thus work in an extremely ambiguous way: it can also induce a hasty claim that our own predicament is in fact the same as that of the true victims, that is, a false metaphoric universalization of the fate of the excluded. Soon after the publication of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag trilogy in the West, it became fashionable in some `radical' leftist circles to emphasize how `our entire
consumerist Western society is also one gigantic Gulag, in which we are imprisoned by the chains of the ruling ideology - and our position is even worse, since we are unaware of our true predicament'. In a recent discussion about clitoridectomy, a `radical' feminist pathetically claimed that Western women are in a way also thoroughly circumcised, having to undergo stressful diets, rigorous body training and painful breast- or facelifting operations in order to remain attractive to men.... Although, of course, there is in both cases, an element of truth in the claims made, there is none the less something fundamentally faked in the pathetic statement of a radical upper-middle-class student that `the Berkeley campus is also a gigantic Gulag. Is it not deeply significant that the bestknown example of such a pathetic identification with the outcast/victim is J.F. Kennedy's 'Ich bin ein Berliner' from 1963 - a statement which is definitely not what Ranciere had in mind (and, incidentally, a statement which, because of a grammatical error, means, when retranslated into English, `I am a doughnut')? The way out of this predicament seems easy enough: the measure of the authenticity of the pathetic identification lies in its sociopolitical efficiency. To what effective measures does it amount? In short, how does this political stance of singulier universel affect what Ranciere calls the police structure? Is there a legitimate distinction between two `polices (orders of being)': the one which is (or tends to be) self-contained, and the one which is more open to the incorporation of properly political demands: Is there something like a `police of politics'? Of course, the Kantian answer (shared even by Badiou) would be that any direct identification of police (the Order of Being) with politics (the Truth-Event), any procedure by means of which the Truth posits itself directly as the constitutive structuring principle of the sociopolitical Order of Being, leads to its opposite, to the `politics of the police', to revolutionary Terror, whose exemplary case is the Stalinist desastre. The

problem is that the moment we try to provide the pathetic identification with the symptom, the assertion of the universel singulier, with a determinate content (What do protesters who pathetically claim `We are all immigrant workers!' actually want? What is their demand to the Police Power?), the old contrast between the radical universalism of egaliberte and the `postmodern' assertion of particular identities reappears with a vengeance, as is clear from the deadlock of gay politics, which fears losing its specificity when gays are acknowledged by the public discourse: do you want equal rights or specific rights to safeguard your particular way of life? The answer, of course, is that the pathetic gesture of singulier universel effectively functions as a hysterical gesture made to avoid the decision by postponing its satisfaction indefinitely. That is to say: the gesture of singulier universel flourishes on bombarding the Police/Power edifice with impossible demands, with demands which are `made to be rejected'; its logic is that of `In demanding that you do this, I am actually demanding that you do not do it, because that's not it.' The situation here is properly undecidable: not only is a radical political project often `betrayed' by a compromise with the Police Order (the eternal complaint of revolutionary radicals: once the reformists take over, they change only the form and accommodate themselves to the old masters), there can also be the opposite case of pseudoradicalization, which fits the existing power relations much better than a modest reformist proposal.54 Footnote 54: 54. Therein lies the grain of truth of Richard Rorty's recent polemics against `radical' cultural studies elitists (see Richard Rorty, Achieving Our America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1998): under the pretence of radically questioning the mythical spectre of Power, they perfectly fit the reproduction of the existing power relations, posing no threat to them whatsoever - or, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin's thesis, their declared attitude of radical opposition to the existing social relations coexists with
their perfect functioning within these relations, rather like the proverbial hysteric who perfectly fits the network of exploitation against which he complains, and effectively endorses its reproduction.

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link: ethics
Universal ethical principles ignore the crucial Lacanian insight that desire cannot simply be ignored. Trying to renounce all desire in favor of ethics turns us into perpetual Hamlets frozen in indecision with catastrophic results all around. Donahue 1 (Brian, Department of English, Gonzaga University, Marxism, Postmodernism, iek, Postmodern Culture,12.2, Project Muse) iek specifies this crucial opposition between symbolic law and superego explicitly in terms of the movement from permission to obligation, from possibility based on clearly defined universal prohibition to necessity based on radical contingency. Paradoxically, in the absence of prohibition, where one might expect the free flow of libidinal energy, superego intervenes to
require what is already permitted: Law is the agency of prohibition which regulates the distribution of enjoyment on the basis of a common, shared renunciation (the "symbolic castration"), whereas superego marks a point at which permitted enjoyment, freedom-to-enjoy, is reversed into obligation to enjoy--which, one must add, is the most effective way to block access to enjoyment. (For They 237). It

is because of this obscene, harsh, punitive quality of the superego that the subject can never settle accounts with it. There is always more that can be sacrificed, iek explains, which is why Lacanian psychoanalytic ethics is based explicitly on opposing the coercion of the superego, in contrast to the ordinary association of superego with "conscience" or the moral sense guiding ethical behavior:

Lacan's maxim of the ethics of psychoanalysis ("not to compromise one's desire") is not to be confounded with the pressure of the superego.... Lacan takes seriously and literally the Freudian "economical paradox" of the superego--that is, the vicious cycle that characterizes the superego: the more we submit ourselves to the superego imperative, the greater its pressure, the more we feel guilty. According to Lacan, this "feeling of guilt" is not a self-deception to be dispelled in the course of the psychoanalytic cure--we really are guilty: superego draws the energy of the pressure it exerts upon the subject from the fact that the subject was not faithful to his desire, that he gave it up. Our sacrificing to the superego, our paying tribute to it, only corroborates our guilt. For that reason our debt to the superego is unredeemable: the more we pay it off, the more we owe. (Metastases 67-68) Indeed, Lacan's

ethical imperative must be taken as explicitly opposed to the concept of conventional morality with its focus on maximizing the Good, which functions as the arbiter of all action, since this model ultimately leads to a psychological paralysis arising from infinite consideration of ramifications, a process that turns the subject into a perpetual Hamlet, standing behind Claudius but unable to decide whether killing him or not killing him would be the better option. The interminable process of trying to decide which course of action leads to the "greater Good" entails its own kind of choice (that is, to "compromise one's desire" by default) with its own kind of psychic consequences for the subject. iek explains this ethical-moral distinction through a Greimasian semiotic square based on
the four possible arrangements of the positive and negative versions of these terms and the figures corresponding to the four pairings--moral, ethical (Saint); immoral, unethical (Scoundrel); immoral, ethical (Hero); and moral, unethical (superego)--and endorses the Lacanian championing of Hero over superego (Metastases 67). iek also anticipates the anxious objection that this Lacanian ethical attitude is too radical in its practical implications: is it reasonable to propose that everyone unrelentingly pursue his or her own desire and renounce all other considerations?

Don't "ordinary" people need an "ethics of the 'common Good,'... despicable as it he concludes that this concern--"What if everyone were to do the same as me?"--is simply another way of introducing the "pathological consideration of the consequences of our act in reality" and therefore functions as a way of imposing superego injunctions, restraints, and cycles of guilt through the insistence that we renounce our desire precisely because it cannot be universalized (69).
may appear in the eyes of the suicidal heroic ethics advocated by Lacan?" (Metastases 69). But

The search for universal ethical principles is a version of the impossible quest for the big Other and an impossible state of harmony. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 127-129 ).
In the first place Lacans suggestion that the status of the Freudian conception of the unconscious is ethical (XI:33) and that Freuds initial

central intuition is ethical in kind might seem strange. However, his seminar of 195960 devoted to The Ethics of Psychoanalysis proves the importance he attributed to the question of ethics. Moreover, he was to return again and again
to the problematic of the Ethics seminar, starting from the seminar of the following year (Transference) up to Encore (19723) which starts with a reference to the seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. In fact, it is in Encore where Lacan states that his Ethics seminar was the only one he wanted to rewrite and publish as a written text (XX:53)for someone accused of logocentrism this is a very important statement. However, it is not the place here to embark on an analysis or even a presentation of Lacans seminar; instead I will use some of the insights developed there as a starting point in order to articulate an ethical position relevant to the discussion on democracy articulated in the previous section of this chapter.

Psychoanalytic ethics is clearly not an ethics of the ideal or the good as is the case with traditional ethics. The ideal, as master signifier, belongs to the field of the ideological or even the utopian: A sensitive subject such as ethics is not nowadays separable from what is called ideology (VII:182). For Lacan, the ethics of the good or the ideal is no more a real philosophical possibility (Rajchman, 1991:46). This is clearly shown in his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis where the good is definitely the most important issue in question. But Lacan makes clear from the beginning that
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he is going to speak about the good from a bizarre point of view: I will speak then about the good, and perhaps what I have to say will be bad in the sense that I dont have all the goodness required to speak well of it (VII:218, my emphasis). In Lacans view, the good as suchsomething that has been the eternal object of the philosophers quest in the sphere of ethics, the philosophers stone of all the moralities is radically
denied by Freud (VII:96). This is because the Sovereign good, which is das Ding, which is the mother, is also the object of incest, is a forbidden good, and [because]...there is no other good. Such is the foundation of the moral law as turned on its head by Freud (VII:70). Generalising from his analysis one can argue that almost the

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whole of the history of Western philosophy and ethical thought is an unending but always doomed quest for harmony based on successive conceptions of the good: I have emphasized this

since the beginning of the year: from the origin of moral philosophy, from the moment when the term ethics acquired the meaning of mans reflection on his condition and calculation of the proper paths to follow, all mediation on mans good has taken place as a function of the index of pleasure. And I mean all, since Plato, certainly since Aristotle, and down through the Stoics, the Epicureans, and even through Christian thought itself in St Thomas Aquinas. As far as the determination of different goods is concerned, things have clearly developed along the paths of an essentially hedonist problematic. It is only too evident that all that has involved the greatest of difficulties, and that these difficulties are those of experience. And in order to resolve them, all the philosophers have been led to discern not true pleasures from false, for such a distinction is impossible to make, but the true and false goods that pleasure points to. (VII:221) This is also the case with the

majority of ethical standpoints in everyday life. The clear aim of all these attempts is to reinstate the big Other, the symbolic system, the field of social construction, as a harmonious unified whole by referring it to a single positive principle; the same applies to the subject maybe primarily to the subject which, according to traditional ethics, can be harmonised by being subjected to the ethical law. It is evident that an ethical view based on the fantasy of harmony applied both to the subject and to the social is not compatible with democracy, rather it can only reinforce totalitarianism or fragmentation. Instead of a harmonious society democracy recognises a social field inherently divided; in a sense it is founded on the recognition of the lack in the Other. Instead of harmonising subjectivities democracy recognises the division of the citizens identities and the fluidity of their political persuasions. In fact it points to the lack in the subject, to a conception of subjectivity which is not unified by reference to a single positive principle. Thus the intervention of psychoanalysis in the field of this antithesis between traditional ethics and democracy is of the utmost importance. In the course of history the search for the proper ideal, for the real good, has led to numerous distinctions between true and false goods. This enterprise of ethical thought aims at the fantasmatic reduction of all impossibility, at the elimination of the intervention of t??? in human life. A certain idea of the good is instituted at the place of the constitutive aporia of the human life. But this is a dead end; the successive failures of all these attempts not only put into question the particular ideas of the good that have been dislocated but this whole strategy:

the question of the Sovereign Good is one that man has asked himself since time immemorial, but the analyst knows that that is a question that is closed. Not only doesnt he have that Sovereign Good that is asked of him, but he also knows there isnt any. (VII:300)

All efforts to organize humanity under a single ethical principle have failed. Only recognizing the impossibility of this quest can bring about liberatory politics. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 129-131).
In Lacans view, the

sphere of the good erects a strong wall across the path of our desire...the first barrier that we have to deal with (VII:230). Lacans central question is: what lies beyond this barrier, beyond the historical frontier of the good? This is the central question that guides the argumentation in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. What lies beyond the successive conceptions of the good, beyond the ways of traditional ethical thinking, is their ultimate failure, their inability to master the central impossibility, the constitutive lack around which human experience is organised. In fact, this impossibility exercises a structural causality over the history of ethical thought. Its intolerable character causes the attempts of ethical thought to eliminate it. But this elimination entails the danger of turning good to evil, utopia to dystopia: the world of the good is historically revealed to be the world of evilas epitomized not only by the famous reversibility of Kant with Sade but also by the unending murders under the reign of the politics of happiness (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1997:58). On the other hand, the irreducible character of this impossibility shows the limits of all these attempts. The name of this
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impossibility in Lacan is, of course, the real. The real stands at the heart of the Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis:
contrary, will proceed instead from the other direction by going deeply into the notion of the real. The (VII:11)

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As odd as it may seem to that superficial opinion which assures any inquiry into ethics must concern the field of the ideal, if not of the unreal, I, on the

question of ethics is to be articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the real.
As we have repeatedly mentioned in this book, the

real here is the impossible, that is to say, impossible to represent in any imaginary way or inscribe in any symbolic system. It is the impossible jouissancean enjoyment beyond any limit, any barrierthe link between death and the libido. It is this same Thing that escapes from the mediation of discourse; it escapes its representation and symbolisation and returns always to its place to show their limits. It is the constitutivity of the real that reveals the subject as a subject of lack. It is the constitutivity of the real that creates the lack in the Other; it is the constitutivity and irreducibility of the impossible real that splits the social field. The erection of the good or the ideal of traditional ethics aimed at mastering this structural impossibility of the real. Its failure opens the road to a different strategy, that of recognising its centrality and irreducibility. The ethics of psychoanalysis is an ethics without an ideal (Miller, 1987:9). The possibility of such a discourse is based on the psychoanalytic idea that there can be an ethically satisfactory (though not necessarily satisfying) position to be achieved in encircling the real, the lack, the bance as such (Lee, 1990:98). Although the
real in itself cannot be touched there are two strategies in confronting its structural causality. The first one is to defensively by-pass itas traditional ethical discourse doeswhile the second is to encircle it (Lipowatz, 1995b:139). This later strategy entails a

symbolic recognition of the irreducibility of the real and an attempt to institutionalise social lack.4 This attitude is what iek has called the ethics of the real. The ethics of the real calls us to remember the past dislocation, the past trauma: All we have to do is to mark repeatedly the trauma as such, in its very impossibility, in its nonintegrated horror, by means of some empty symbolic gesture (iek, 1991b:272). Of course we cannot touch the real but we can encircle it again and again, we can touch the tombstone which just marks the site of the dead. iek calls us not to
give way: We must preserve the traces of all historical traumas, dreams and catastrophes which the ruling ideology...would prefer to obliterate. We ourselves must become the marks of these traumas. Such

an attitude...is the only possibility for attaining a distance on the [ideological] present, a distance which will enable us to discern signs of the New (iek, 1991b: 273). The ethics of the real breaks the vicious cycle of traditional ideological or utopian ethics. The ultimate failure of the successive conceptions of the good cannot be resolved by identifying with a new conception of the good. Our focus must be on the dislocation of these conceptions itself. This is the moment when the real (through its political modality) makes its presence felt and we have to recognise the ethical status of this presence.

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link: fear
We create enemies and war as a means of controlling internal conflict. Aggression is not inevitable but it a psychological construct. Only psychoanalytic reflection offers a way out of this cycle. Byles, (Professor English, University of Cyprus) 03 (Joanna Montgomery, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of
Culture and Society 8.2 (2003) 208-213, Psychoanalysis and War: The Superego and Projective Identification). It is here of course that language plays an important role in imagining the other, the other within the self, and the other as self, as well as the enormously influential visual images each group can have of the other. In the need to emphasize similarity in difference, both verbal and visual metaphor can play a meaningful role in creating a climate for peaceful understanding, and this is where literature, especially the social world of the drama and of film, but also the more private world of poetry, can be immensely significant. Of course not all literature is equally transparent. In conclusion, war, in

all its manifestations, is a phenomenon put into action by individuals who have been politicized as a group to give and receive violent death, to appropriate the enemy's land, homes, women, children, and goods, and perhaps to lose their own. As we have seen, in wartime the splitting of the self and other into friend and enemy enormously relieves the normal psychic tension caused by human ambivalence when love and hate find two separate objects of attention. Hence the .soldier's and terrorist's willingness to sacrifice her/his life for "a just cause," which may be a Nation, a Group, or a Leader with whom he has close emotional ties and identity. I n this way s/he does not feel guilty: the destructive impulses, mobilised by her/his own superego, together with that of the social superego, have projected the guilt s/he might feel at killing strangers onto the enemy. In other words, the charging of the enemy with guilt by which the superego of the State mobilizes the individual's superego seems to be of fundamental importance in escaping the sense of guilt which war provokes in those engaged in the killing; yet the mobilization of superego activities can still involve the individual's self-punitive mechanisms, even though most of his/her guilt has been projected onto the enemy in the name of his own civilization and culture. As we all know, this guilt can become a problem at the end of a war, leading to varying degrees of misery and mental illness. For some, the killing of an enemy and a stranger cannot be truly mourned, and there remains a blank space, an irretrievable act or event to be lived through over and over again.
This dilemma is poignantly expressed in Wilfred Owen's World War One poem "Strange Meeting" the final lines of which read as follows: I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now. ... (Owen 126) The

problem for us today is how to create the psychological climate of opinion, a mentality, that will reject war, genocide, and terrorism as viable solutions to internal and external situations of conflict; to recognize our projections for what they are: dangerously irresponsible psychic acts based on superego hatred and violence. We must challenge the way in which the State superego can manipulate our responses in its own interests, even take away our subjectivities. We should acknowledge and learn to displace the vio lence in ourselves in socially harmless ways, getting rid of our fears and anxieties of the other and of difference by relating and identifying with the other and thus creating the serious desire to live together in a peaceful world. What seems to be needed is for the superego to regain its developmental role of mitigating omniscient protective identification by ensuring an intact, integrated object world, a world that will be able to contain unconscious fears, hatred, and anxieties without the need for splitting and projection. As Bion has pointed out, omnipotence replaces thinking and omniscience replaces learning. We must learn to link our internal and external worlds so as to act as a container of the other's fears and anxieties, and thus in turn to encourage the other to reciprocate as a container of our hatreds and fears. If war represents cultural formations that in turn represent objectifications of the psyche via the super-ego of the individual and of the State, then perhaps we can reformulate these psychic social mechanisms of projection and superego aggression. Here, that old peace-time ego and the reparative component of the
individual and State superego will have to play a large part. The greater the clash of cultural formations for example, Western Modernism and Islamic Fundamentalism the more urgent the need. "The

knowledge now most worth having" is an authentic way of internalizing what it is we understand about war and international terrorism that will liberate us from the history of our collective traumatic past and the imperatives it has imposed on us. The
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inner psychic world of the individual has an enormously important adaptive role to play here in developing mechanisms of protective identification not as a means of damaging and destroying the other, but as a means of empathy, of containing the other, and in turn being contained. These changes may be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, gradual ratherthan speedy. Peace and dare I say it contentment are not just an absence of war, but a state of mind. Furthermore, we should learn not to project too much into our group, and our nation, for this allows the group to tyrannize us, so that we follow like lost sheep. But speaking our minds takes courage because groups do not like open dissenters. These radical psychic changes may be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, gradual rather than speedy; however, my proposition that understanding the other so that we can reduce her/his motivation to kill requires urgent action. Peace is not just an absence of war, but a state of mind and, most importantly, a way of thinking.
Fear of the other is a form of collective psychosis which endangers everyone. Gleisner 83 (John, consultant psychiatrist at the North Western Regional Health Authority in Greater Manchester, new internationalist 121, March,
http://www.newint.org/issue121/enemy.html). Many were shocked to hear British people chant nuke the Argies and to see how the Ministry of Defense and the media portrayed Argentina as a nation of international gangsters. It was a shock, but it should not have been. After all, governments

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and media throughout the world have perfected a psychological war machine which is highly efficient in fostering fear and hatred of the enemy. True, for us in the West
past for fearing the enemy, and the distinction between them and us was once necessary for survival. But nuclear weapons have changed everything. Today that

the enemy these days is usually portrayed as toting a red flag and a fistful of nuclear missiles, but the fear and hatred are free-floating and can be attached, by skilful manoeuvering, to any object. Softened by centuries of insecurity, our minds are malleable clay for the psychological war machine. There have often been good grounds in the

ancient them us distinction threatens the survival of them and us. As Einstein once said: The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking. . . we need an essentially new way of thinking if mankind is to survive. The old them-us thinking is dangerous because it leads us to accept the unacceptable. And the reasoning goes something like this: The Russians are basically different from us. They are wicked bullies who intend to take over the world. We can stop them only by threatening them because bullies only respond to threats. And because they are basically different from us it is alright to destroy them if necessary. Nuclear weapons are terrible but it may be that the Russians cannot be stopped by any other means. Although nuclear war would be horrible, we have a reasonable chance of surviving. And anyway life under Russian rule would be far worse than death. If any individual spoke about another using logic like this they would be diagnosed as paranoid. And, indeed, them-us thinking is a time-honored symptom of psychosis (a psychotic being someone who can no longer distinguish between events in the world and events taking place
in their imagination), characterised by what psychologists call denial and projection. Denial is refusing to acknowledge ones own unpleasant motives. Projection is attaching these unacknowledged motives onto someone else and then rejecting them. It is the perfect way of having your cake and eating it too: of indulging your own bad motives and criticising them at the same time. Our media and governments depict the Russians as aggressive expansionists bent on our destruction. A powerful perception of threat is created to soften up the public for yet more defence spending, And in the Soviet Union precisely the same tricks are used to persuade Soviet citizens to make the necessary sacrifices for protection against us. Most of us have never met a Russian. Yet there are few of us without opinions about how dangerous they are. We

tend to see our own country as conciliatory, just, trustworthy, rational, legitimate. Theirs is aggressive, unjust, untrustworthy, irrational and illegitimate. Yet anyone travelling in the Soviet Union is soon struck not only by the Soviets strong belief in their own peacefulness, but also by their surprise and puzzlement at the fact that foreigners do not view them in the same light. They fear us for precisely the same reasons that we fear them.

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impact: case turnwar

We create enemies and war as a means of controlling internal conflict. Aggression is not inevitable but it a psychological construct. Only psychoanalytic reflection offers a way out of this cycle. Byles 3 (Joanna Montgomery, Professor English, University of Cyprus Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8.2 (2003) 208-213, Psychoanalysis and
War: The Superego and Projective Identification). Of course, I am not arguing that there are not some important aspects of the social superego that are beneficial, for example the ethical and moral laws which shape society and protect its citizens; nevertheless, in wartime and its most recent manifestation, international terrorism, it is precisely these civilizing aspects of the social superego that are ignored or repressed. It seems to me that the

failure of civilization historically to control the aggression, cruelty, and hatred that characterize war urgently requires a psychoanalytic explanation. Of course, I am speaking of psychic, not biological (survival of the fittest), aggression. In wartime the externalized superego of the state sanctions killing and violence that is not allowed in peacetime (in fact, such violence against others during peacetime would be considered criminal)sanctions, in fact, the gratification of warring aggression, thus ensuring that acts of violence need not incur guilt. Why do we accept this? Psychoanalysis posits the idea that aggression is not behavioral but instinctual; not social but psychological. To quote Volkan, who follows Freud, "It is man's very
nature itself." Obviously, it is vital that humanity find more mature, less primitive ways of dealing with our hatred and aggression than war, genocide, and international terrorism. The most characteristic thing about this kind of violence and cruelty is its collective mentality: war requires group co-operation, organization, and approval. Some theorists argue that one of the primary cohesive elements binding individuals into institutionalized human association is defence against psychotic anxiety. In Group Psychology Freud writes that "in a group the individual is brought under conditions which allow him to throw off the repressions of his unconscious instinctual impulses. The apparently new characteristics he then displays are in fact the manifestation of this unconscious, in which all that is evil in the human mind is contained as a predisposition" (74). Later in the same essay, when speaking of the individual and the group mind, Freud quotes Le Bon : "Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarianthat is, a creature acting by instinct. He posseses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings" (77). War

is a collective phenomenon that mobilizes our anxieties and allows our original sadistic fantasies of destructive omnipotence to be re-activated and projected onto "the enemy." Some critics have argued that we "need" enemies as external stabilizers of our sense of identity and inner control. It has also been argued that the militancy a particular group shows toward its enemies may partly mask the personal internal conflicts of each member of the group, and that they may therefore have an emotional investment in the maintenance of the enmity. In other words, they need the enemy and are unconsciously afraid to lose it. This fits in with the well-known phenomenon of inventing an enemy when there is not one readily available. War has a psychoanalytic root because it is a misguided attempt at national therapy. We translate internal anxiety into real external danger so as to control it. Psychoanalysis is necessary to understanding why wars happen and how to stop them. Byles 3 (Joanna Montgomery, Professor English, University of Cyprus, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8.2 (2003) 208-213, Psychoanalysis and
War: The Superego and Projective Identification).

The problem of warfare which includes genocide, and its most recent manifestation, international terrorism, brings into focus the need to understand how the individual is placed in the social and the social in the individual, Psychoanalytic theories of superego aggression, splitting, projection, and projective identification may be useful in helping us to understand the psychic links involved. It seems vital to me writing in the Middle East in September 2002 that we examine our understanding of what it is we understand about war, including genocide and terrorism. Some psychoanalysts argue that war is a necessary defence against psychotic anxiety (Fornari xx: Vulkan), and Freud himself first advanced the idea that war provided an outlet for repressed impulses. ("Why War'" 197). The problematic of these views is the individual \ need to translate internal psychotic anxieties into real external dangers so as to control them. It suggests that culturally warfare and its most recent- manifestation, international terrorism and the so-called "war on terrorism," may he a necessary object for internal aggression and not a patholn . Indeed, Fornari suggests that "war could be seen as an attempt at therapy, carried out by a
social institution which, precisely by institutionalizing war, in-creases to gigantic proportions what is initially an elementary defensive mechanism of the ego iii the schizoparanoid phase" (xvii-xviii). In other words, the history of war might represent the externalization and articulation of shared unconscious fantasies. This idea would suggest that the culture of war, genocide, and international terrorism provides objects of psychic need. If this is so, with. what can we replace them?

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alt solves war

Psychoanalytic reflection allows us to reformulate psychic social mechanisms so as to allow for a genuine peace. Byles 3 (Joanna Montgomery, Professor English, University of Cyprus, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8.2 (2003) 208-213, Psychoanalysis and
War: The Superego and Projective Identification).

The problem for us today is how to create the psychological climate of opinion. a mentality, that will reject war, genocide, and terrorism as viable solutions to internal and external situations of conflict; to recognize our projections for what they are-dangerously irresponsible psychic acts based on superego hatred and violence. We must challenge the way in which the State superego can manipulate our responses in its own interests, even take away our subjectivities. We should acknowledge and learn to displace the violence in ourselves in socially harmless ways, getting rid of our fears and anxieties of the other and of difference by relating and identifying with the other and thus creating the serious desire to live together in a peaceful world. What seems to be needed is for the superego to regain its
developmental role of mitigating omniscient projective identification by ensuring an intact, integrated object world, a world that will be able to contain unconscious fears, hatred, and anxieties without the need for splitting and projection. As Rion has pointed out, omnipotence replaces thinking and omniscience replaces learning. We

must learn to link our internal and external worlds so as to act as a container of the other's fears and anxieties, and thus in turn to encourage the other to reciprocate as a container of our hatreds and fears. If war represents cultural formations that in turn represent objectifications of the psyche via the super-ego of the individual and of the State, then perhaps we can reformulate these psychic social mechanisms of projection and superego aggression. Here, that old peace-tine ego and the reparative component of the individual and State superego will

have to play a large part. The greater the clash of cultural formations-for example, Western Modernism and Islamic Fundamentalism-the more urgent the need. "The knowledge now most worth having" is an authentic way of internalizing what it is we under. rand about war and inter-national terrorism that will liberate us from the history of our collective traumatic past and the imperatives it has imposed on us. The inner psychic world of the individual has an enormously important adaptive role to play here in developing mechanisms of projective identification not as a means of damaging and destroying the other, but as a means of empathy, of containing the other, and in turn being contained. Furthermore, we

should learn not to project too much into our group, and our nation, for this allows the group to tyrannize us, so that we follow like lost sheep. But speaking our minds takes courage because groups do nor like open dissenters. These
radical psychic changes may be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, gradual rather than speedy: however, my proposition that understanding the other so that we can reduce her/his motivation to kill requires urgent action. Peace importantly, a way of thinking.

is not just an absence of war, but a state of mind-and, most

Psychoanalysis is the key to stopping war because it addresses the roots of violence understanding our individual roles in sustaining a culture of violence is more important than examining the state. Byles 3 (Joanna Montgomery, Professor English, University of Cyprus, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8.2 (2003) 208-213, Psychoanalysis and
War: The Superego and Projective Identification). As already mentioned, analysts such as Volkan and Erikson have written about the processes by which an enemy is dehumanized so as to provide the distance a group needs from its perceived enemy. First the group becomes preoccupied with the enemy according to the psychology of minor differences. Then mass regression occurs to permit the group to recover and reactivate more primitive methods. What they then use in this regressed state tends to contain aspects of childish (pre-oedipal) fury. The enemy is perceived more and more as a stereotype of bad and negative qualities. The use of denial allows a group to ignore the fact that its own externalizations and projections are involved in this process. The stereotyped enemy may be so despised as to be no longer human, and it will then be referred to in non-human terms. History teaches us that it was in this way that the Nazis perceived the Jews as vermin to be exterminated. As I write, Al Qaeda terrorist

groups view all Americans as demons and infidels to be annihilated, and many Americans are comforted by demonizing all of bearded Islam. Many Israelis consider most Palestinians as dirt beneath their feetsub-humanand most Palestinians think of most Israelis as despoilers of the land they are supposed to share. In other words, the problem of the mentality of war and of terrorism mobilizes our anxieties in such a way so as to prevent critical reality testing. If we could learn the enormously difficult and painful task of re-introjection, of taking back our projections, our hatreds, anxieties, and fears of the other and of difference, long before they harm the other, there might be a transition, a link, from the state sanctioned violence of war back to individual violence. We might learn to subvert negative projective identification into a positive identification as a means of empathizing with the other and thus containing difference. The violence of the individual could then be contained and sublimated in peaceful ways, such as reconciling and balancing competing interests by asking what exactly these opposing interests are and exploring what the dynamics, conscious and unconscious, are for the hatred of deep war-like antagonisms. In other words, we would need to change our relationship with the other, giving up the dangerously irresponsible habit of splitting, projective identification, and exclusivity by recognizing difference not antagonistically but through an inclusive process that recognises the totality of human relationships in a
peaceful world. We might substitute for the libidinal object-ties involved in projective identification the re-introjection of the object into the ego, and thus reach a common feeling of sharing, of being part of the other, of empathy, in short. As Freud pointed out, the ego is altered by introjection, as suggested by his memorable formulation: "The shadow of the object has fallen on the ego."

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alt solves otherization

Fully embracing the Other wil fail as a political strategy. Alienation is inevitable. Only the Lacanian alternative can cope with this reality. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 34-35).
What should be stressed at this point is that what is at stake here is not only subjective identification but the constitution of reality itself: in order for there to be reality, adequate access to reality, in order for the sense of reality to be a reliable guide, in order for reality not to be what it is in psychosis, the Oedipus complex has to have been lived through (III:198). As we shall see in Chapter 2, reality

is symbolically constructed and articulated in language. Once again, linguistic articulation presupposes a certain loss, the exclusion of something through an act of decision: power is revealed as an inherent element of the logic of the signifier.24 There is no society and social reality without exclusion; without it the world collapses into a psychotic universe. But what is it exactly that is sacrificed in the world of language? We said that it is the mother, the maternal Thing. On a
more general level, it is also our access to an unmediated level of need relating to all animal life. It is to the constitutivity of the symbolic in human life that we owe the fact that need becomes demand and instinct becomes drive and then desire. What

is happening in all these transformations is the loss of a primordial level of the real. What is lost is all unmediated access to this real. Now we can only try to encounter the real through symbolisation. We gain access to reality, which is mainly a symbolic construct, but the signified of the signifier reality, the real itself, is sacrificed for ever.25 No identification can restore it or recapture it for us. But it is exactly this impossibility that forces us to identify again and again. We never get what we were promised but thats exactly why we keep longing for it. In other words, any identity resulting from identification is always an unstable identity, a split or even nonidentity, since every identification is marked by an alienating dimension. As argued earlier, although imaginary identification offers the subject a sense of identity it also entails a radical ambiguity, it introduces a certain antagonistic tension. The same alienation is characterising symbolic identification: in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan refers to a lack which emerges from the invasion of the symbolic, by the fact that the subject depends on the signifier but the signifier is first of all in the field of the Other (XI:2045). Here we are confronted with an ambivalence similar to the one that led to the failure of imaginary identification. What belongs to the socio-symbolic Other can never become totally ours; it can never become us: it will always be a source of ambivalence and alienation and this gap can never be bridged. The ultimate result of symbolic identification is a further alienation in language, in the social world: The paradox of the Word is therefore that its emergence resolves the tension of the pre-symbolic antagonism, but at a price: the Word...involves an irretrievable externalization-alienation (Zizek, 1997a: 42). To recapitulate our argument so far, both imaginary and symbolic identification fail to provide us with a stable identity. A lack is continuously re-emerging where identity should be consolidated. All our attempts to cover over this lack of the subject through identifications that promise to offer us a stable identity fail, this failure brings to the fore the irreducible character of this lack which in turn reinforces our attempts to fill it. This is the circular play between lack and identification which is marking the human condition; a play that makes possible the
emergence of a whole politics of the subject. In this regard we have to be very clear, assuming at the same time the risk of a certain repetition: the

politics of the subject, the politics of identity formation, can only be understood as a politics of impossibility. If the ego is based on the imaginary misrecognition of the impossibility of fullness and closure, it also entails a constitutive alienation, making visible a certain lack. This lack also constitutes an irreducible element of the symbolic order in which the subject turns for its representation; here lack is elevated to the position of a precondition for symbolic representation. In the symbolic, the subject is properly constituted but as the subject of lack; something is again missing. Identification is thus revealed as, by constitution, alienating (Laclau and Zac, 1994:14). It can never realise its aim, it can never achieve full identity, it can never bring back our lost fullness since it was its own institution that introduced this loss. Identification is always an identification doomed to fail. One has to agree with Laclau
and Zac that the proper answer to Lacoue-Labarthes rhetorical question Why, after all, should the problem of identification not be, in general, the essential problem of politics? is that the identity politics, identification

problem of politics is identification and its failure (Laclau and Zac, 1994:35). Beyond politics is revealed as the politics of impossibility.
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The desire to be re-joined with the Other, to create a state of harmony, is utterly impossible. Language can never fully represent the real or the Other and we will always be alienated. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 52-53).
What is, however, the exact political significance of the fantasmatic promise? From millenarianism to the Communist Manifesto and up to Green ideology, we know that every

political promise is supported by a reference to a lost state of harmony, unity and fullness, a reference to a pre-symbolic real which most political projects aspire to bring back. Once again, the constant presence of this idea of a lost past is not revealing anything about the true nature of such a state; it is a retroactive projection conditioned by the intervention of symbolic lack. If social reality is lacking, if enjoyment is only partial, then the pre-symbolic state we long for has to be a state of fullness, a state without limits;
jouissez sans entrants was one of the slogans of les evenements of May 1968 as it is revealed in the famous photograph taken by Cartier-Bresson. The attributes of this state as articulated in political fantasy are a retroactive effect of symbolisation: symbolisation makes us believe that what is impossible was prohibited and thus can also be recaptured.

Psychoanalysis, as we shall see, recognises the importance of such fantasies without affirming their empirical plausibility or sanctioning their imaginary projections. In that sense, although Freuds pre-civilisation state of happiness, characteristic of the primal horde, goes against all available ethnographic and archaeological material (Leledakis, 1995:175), it is a necessary fiction, a myth bringing to the fore the utopian structure of human fantasy. This state of happiness, embodying the lost/impossible jouissance, has to be posited as lost (and thus as pre-existing our current
state) if our life in the socio-symbolic world is to have any meaning; without it no desire for social and political identification would arise. This does not mean, of course, that psychoanalysis accepts the possibility of an adequate embodiment of this pre-symbolic real.12 To summarise my argument so far in this chapter, this is then the paradox of the human condition in Lacan. The

field of discursive representation, a field extending from the linguistic to the social in general, is constitutive in all our doomed attempts to achieve a perfect identity with ourselves. But the central feature of language, of the symbolic, is discontinuity: something is always missing in language, the symbolic itself is lacking. Words can never capture the totality of the real, they can never fully represent us. As Lacan points out in Television (1973), language cannot say the whole truth. The words to do it are missing; it is materially impossible (these are Lacans exact words) to achieve it and this is a source of alienation in which what emerges is the lack in every representation. This is also why entering into the field of linguistic representation permits the development of our desire and a certain structuration of our identity; but this identity can never be full since the symbolic is never full. Entering into language entails a loss of immediacy, the loss of a direct unmediated fulfilment of need. It entails symbolic castration. We are forced to approach the real through its symbolisation, by attempting to represent it, but thus we loose it for ever. Entering into the social world entails a loss of this register of the real, it entails the emptying out of jouissance from the body. And what is the agent of this castration? asks Darian Leader, What creates lack that in turn gives rise to creative efforts to suture lack? asks Ellie Ragland-Sullivan: the symbolic register as such, language. The organisms passage through and into language is castration, introducing the idea of loss and absence into the world (Leader, 1996:148). It is language that murders the referent, things as full presence (Ragland-Sullivan, 1991:4). This is the meaning of the Lacanian dictum there is no Other of the Other (E: 316). The Other cannot offer what we demand from him, that is to say our lost/impossible jouissance; precisely because the Other is structured around the prohibition, the sacrifice of this jouissance. Jouissance is forbidden, this is the Law of the Other. It is foolish to believe that this
absence is due to the particular social and political configuration (E: 317). Alas, it is a structural irreducible feature of the Other, of the symbolic as such: We must insist that jouissance is forbidden to him who speaks as such says Lacan (E: 319).

Utopian harmony with the other is impossible. A more effective strategy is to accept that we will never resolve all tensions and try to create political stratgies based around that lack. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 139).
First, it is certain that this text shares with both Connolly enhance the prospects of democracy. Our difference is that they

Otherness and difference is enough. Connollys argumentation is developed along the polarity identity/difference with the ethical sting
being a recognition of Otherness. For Critchley also, what seems to be at stake in deconstruction is the relation with The Otheralthough this Other is not understood in exactly the same terms as the Lacanian Other (Critchley, 1992:197). Drawing

and Critchley the aspiration to articulate an ethics of disharmony in order to both think that an ethics founded on a recognition of

on Levinasian ethics where the

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ethical is related to the disruption of totalising politics, he contends that: any attempt to bring closure to the social is continually denied by the non-totalisable relation to the Other (Critchley, 1992:238). Thus, the possibility of
democracy rests on the recognition of the Other: The community remains an open community in so far as it is based on the recognition of difference, of the difference of the Other (Critchley, 1992:219). Moreover, political responsibility in democracy has its horizon in responsibility for the Other (ibid.: 239). This is also Touraines position: democracy entails the recognition of the other (Touraine, 1997:192). The

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problem with such an analysis is that it presupposes the Other as a unified totality or, even if this is not always the case, it seems to be offering a positive point of identification remaining thus within the limits of traditional ethical strategies or, in any case, not undermining them in a radical way. What has to be highlighted is that it is precisely this relationthe identification with the Otherthat attempts to bring closure to the social. In order to have a non-totalisable relation to the Other we must relateidentifywith the lack in the Other and not with the Other per se. This is the radical innovation of Lacanian ethics. And this is what democracy needs today.

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alt key to politics

Traversing the fantasy is critical to a new form of politics --- much like the Nazis scapegoated the Jews, the affirmative is a false act that externalizes violence onto an other. Zizek 2k prof @ University of Ljubljana (Slavoj, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 124-127, ZR)
Now I can also answer the obvious counter-argument to this Lacanian notion of the act: if we define an act solely by the fact that its sudden emergence surprises/transforms its agent itself and, simultaneously, that it retroactively changes its conditions of (im)possibility, is not Nazism, then, an act par excellence? Did

Hitler not do the impossible', changing the entire field of what was considered `acceptable' in the liberal democratic universe? Did not a respectable middle-class petit bourgeois who, as a guard in a concentration camp, tortured Jews, also, accomplish what was considered impossible, in his previous decent existence and acknowledge his passionate attachment to sadistic torture? It is here that the notion of traversing the fantasy, and - on a different level - of transforming the constellation that generates social symptoms becomes crucial. An authentic act disturbs the underlying fantasy, attacking it from the point of `social symptom' (let us recall that Lacan attributed the invention of the notion of symptom to Marx!). The so-called `Nazi revolution', with its disavowal/displacement of the fundamental social antagonism ('class struggle' that divides the social edifice from within) - with its projection/externalization of the cause of social antagonisms into the figure of the Jew, and the consequent reassertion of the corporatist notion of society as an organic Whole - clearly avoids confrontation with social. antagonism; the Nazi revolution is the exemplary case of a pseudo-change, of a frenetic activity in the course of which many things did change something was going on al1 the time so that, precisely, something.- that which really matters - would not change; so that things would fundamentally 'remain the same'. In short, an authentic act is not simply external with regard to the hegemonic symbolic field disturbed by it: an act is an act only with regard to some symbolic field, as intervention into it. That is to say: a symbolic field is always and by definition in itself 'decentred', structured around a central void/impossibility (a personal life-narrative, say, is a bricolage of ultimately
failed attempts to come to terms with some trauma; a social edifice is an ultimately failed attempt to displace/obfuscate its constitutive antagonism);

and an act disturbs the symbolic field into which it intervenes not out of nowhere, but precisely from the
standpoint of this inherent impossibility, stumbling block, which is its hidden, disavowed structuring principle. In contrast to this authentic act which intervenes in the constitutive void, point of failure - or what Alain Badiou has called the 'symptomal torsion of a given constellation - the inauthentic act legitimizes itself through reference to the point of substantial fullness of a given contellation (on the political terrain: Race, True Religion, Nation...): it aims precisely at obliterating the last traces of the 'symptomal torsion' which disturbs the balance of that constellation. One palpable political consequence of this notion of the act that has to intervene at the `symptomal torsion' of the structure (and also a proof that our position does not involve `economic essentialism') is that in each concrete constellation there is one touchv nodal point of contention which decides where one 'truly stands'. For example, in

the recent struggle of the so-called `democratic opposition' in Serbia against the Milosevic regime, the truly touchy topic is the stance towards the Albanian majority in Kosovo: the great majority of the `democratic opposition' unconditionally endorse Milosevics anti-Albanian nationalist agenda, even accusing him of making compromises with the West and `betraying' Serb national interests in Kosovo. In the course of the student demonstrations against Milosevic's
Socialist Party falsification of the election results in the winter of 1996, the Western media which closely followed events, and praised the revived democratic spirit in Serbia, rarely mentioned the fact that one of the demonstrators' regular slogans against the special police was `Instead of kicking us, go to Kosovo and kick out the Albanians!'. So - and this is my point -

it is theoretically as well as politically wrong to claim that, in today's Serbia, 'anti-Albanian nationalism' is simply one among the `floating signifiers' that can be appropriated either by Milosevic's power bloc or by the opposition: the moment one endorses it, no matter how much one 'reinscribes it into the democratic chain of equivalences', one already accepts the terrain as defined by Milosevic, one - as it were - is already `playing his game'. In today's Serbia, the absolute sine qua non of an authentic political act would thus be to reject absolutely the ideologico-political topos of the Albanian threat in Kosovo. Psychoanalysis is aware of a whole series of `false acts': psychotic-paranoiac violent passage a l'acte, hysterical acting out, obsessional self-hindering, perverse self-instrumentalization all these acts are not simply wrong according to some external standards, they are immanently wrong since they can be properly grasped only as reactions to some disavowed trauma that they displace, repress, and so on. What we are
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tempted to say is that the Nazi anti-Semitic violence was `false' in the same way: all the shattering impact of this large-scale frenetic activity was fundamentally `misdirected', it was a kind of gigantic passage a l'acte betraying an inability to confront the real kernel of the trauma (the social antagonism). So what we are claiming is that anti-Semitic violence, say, is not only `factually wrong' (Jews are `not really like that', exploiting us and organizing a universal plot) and/or morally wrong (unacceptable in terms of elementary standards of decency, etc.), but also `untrue in the sense of an inauthenticity which is simultaneously epistemological and ethical, just as an obsessional who
reacts to his [sic] disavowed sexual fixations by engaging in compulsive defence rituals acts in an inauthentic way. Lacan claimed that even if the patient's wife is really sleeping around with other men, the patient's jealousy is still to be treated as a pathological condition; in a homologous way, even if rich Jews `really' exploited German workers, seduced their daughters, dominated the popular press, and so on, anti-Semitism is still an

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What makes it pathological is the disavowed subjective libidinal investment in the figure of the Jew the way social antagonism is displaced-obliterated by being 'projected' into the figure of the Jew. So - back to the obvious counter-argument to the Lacanian notion of the act: this second feature (for a gesture to count as an act, it must 'traverse the fantasy') is not simply a further, additional criterion, to be added to the first ('doing the impossible', retroactively rewriting its own conditions): if this second criterion is not fulfilled, the first is not really met either - that is to say; we are not actually `doing the impossible', traversing the fantasy towards the Real.
emphatically `untrue', pathological ideological condition - why?

When faced with disharmony, we have a choice a) we can continue down the failed path of utopianism or b) we can accept that social antagonism is inevitable and try to design democratic institutions capable of accomodating competing political visions. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 136-138).
To recapitulate, the starting point of this chapter was the disappointment and resentment caused by the ambiguity constitutive of democracy. We have pointed out that, contrary to what anti-democratic discourses argue, this ambiguity, the existence of an original lack at the heart of the social field, is not due to democracy.

Division and disharmony are constitutive of the human condition. The experience of modernity, the Death of God, in other words the dislocation of external universal markers of certainty, brought to the fore a sense of history with no guaranteed eschatological or other meaning and made visible the contingency of existence in its naked horror. The place of power is no longer cosubstantial with the prince under the guarantee of God. In front of this development one can act in two opposite directions. The lack of meaning that this process makes visible can lead to an attempted return to a pre-modern simulation of certainly; thus modernity is reoccupying (in the Blumenbergian sense of the word) the place of pre-modernity. Totalitarianism and particularism move in such a direction. On the other hand, democracy attempts to come to terms with that lack of meaning in a radically different way. It recognises in that lack the only possibility of mediating between universalism and particularism in achieving a non-totalitarian sense of social unity. The virtue of democracy is that it is not blind in front of the constitutivity of division, disharmony, lack; their recognition and institutionalisation is the only way of coming to terms with the human condition after Auschwitz and the Gulags. Democracy is the political form of historical society where history as punctuated by contingency, JK?D, lack, is no longer referred to as an external unifying principle of meaning. This fact alone which is stressed by Lefort shows that the virtue of democracy, its resolve to face history, disharmony, lack and to attempt to institutionalise them also constitutes the greatest danger for democracy. As Mircea Eliade has very clearly shown in The Myth of the Eternal Return, up to now, facing history in such a way was thought of as intolerable (Eliade, 1989). This is then the task of modern democracy: to persuade us that what was thought of as intolerable has an ethical status.10 This is also the reason why democracy can cause a generalised resentment or frustration and reinforce aporetic inactivity or even reactive politics. These developments are due to the fact that in the field of ethics (and ontology) the ideal of harmony is still hegemonic; an ideal which is incompatible with democracy. What constantly emerges from this exposition is that for
democracy to flourish the politics of generalised resentment must be subdued (Connolly, 1991:211), and for that to be done the ethics of harmony must be replaced by an ethics compatible with democracy. It

is here that the ethics of psychoanalysis becomes crucial for democratic theory. As I have tried to show the ethics of psychoanalysis moves beyond traditional ethics of the good, moves beyond the barrier of the fantasmatic ethics of harmony to come to terms with the impossible real, by
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recognising its ultimate irreducibility and its structural causality. As argued earlier in this chapter, the Lacanian real and
lack have a thoroughly ethical dimension and both sublimation and identification with the symptom, by moving beyond traditional ethical identification with a certain imaginary conception of the good, attest to the ethicality of recognising and institutionalising them. In that sense, with the help of psychoanalysis, democracy can promote an ethical hegemony which is essential for its political survival and effectiveness11 while Lacanian theory and Lacanian ethics can find in democracy the field of an affinity which signals their relevance for socio- political analysis and political praxis. In that sense, achieving a better (but not a perfect) society, a more democratic and just society, is possible but such a project cannot depend on the visions of the psychic imaginary as Whitebook insists. Only

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the fracture of imaginary utopian visions can create the chance of pursuing a democratic course, a course which is profoundly self-critical: The just polity is one that actively maintains
its own interruption or ironization as that which sustains it (Critchley, 1992:238). Such a standpoint seems to be at the antipodes of Whitebooks view, according to which without the input of the imaginary, any such debate [on achieving a better society]...is in danger of being empty (Whitebook, 1995:89). What Whitebook cannot realise is that it is exactly the emptiness of the Lacanian lack in the Other, the emptiness in the locus of democratic power in Lefort, that becomes the point of reference for the articulation of such a new political vision, a vision beyond imaginary lures.12 To avoid any possible confusion, it must be stressed, however, that democracy cannot be reduced to anarchy or chaos; it is a form of order. A principle of societal organisation exists. A society without a principle of organisation would be a meaningless society; it would not be able to constitute itself as such. It would amount to a state of pure anxiety insofar as, according to Lacans comments in Anxiety, the appearance of anxiety is the sign of the temporary collapse of all points of identificatory reference (seminar of 2 May 1962). As I have pointed out, the importance of the democratic invention is that, in a double movement, it provides a point of reference, a point de capiton for the institution of society, without reducing society to a positive content pertaining to this point of reference.13 This is achieved because the

positive content of democracy is the acceptance of the constitutive lack and antagonism (and consequently hegemony) that splits every total representation of the social field. And the status of this lack, as an encounter with the real, is ethical. If democracy entails, as
Niklas Luhmann argues, the principle of allowing opposition as a value-concept this means exactly that the lack acquires a certain ethical dimension. This is an ethics without ideals; the place of the ideal is occupied by the dividing line of opposition and by the undecidable moment of elections; in other words by the recognition of the real of our symptom, of the antagonistic nature of society. For Luhmann the place of the ideal is occupied by a pure difference; that between government and opposition. Thus politics loses the possibility of [total] representation. It cannot presume to beor even to represent the whole within the whole (Luhmann, 1990:233). In the democratic vision the whole of society is lacking, it is crossed, barre by the impossible real.

They are just wrong about the nature of the political. Political scientists like to pretend that they are neutral, thruthful and really in power. But, if we are right that the political is a product of shared cultural fantasy, they we represent the true political act. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University
of Essex, pages 71-73).
Chapter 2 examined the various ways in which Lacanian theory transforms our view of the objective side of human experience. If up to now our main focus was reality in general (especially in the last part of Chapter 2), I will start Chapter 3 by rearticulating some of the conclusions of the previous chapter but this time with particular reference to the field of political reality. Naturally, what we said about reality in general is also applicable to political reality.1 But what know that in

is this political reality for which Lacan is relevant? In fact what exactly is political reality in general? We mainstream political science, politics and political reality are associated with citizenship, elections, the particular forms of political representation and the various ideological families. Politics is conceived as constituting a separate system, the political system, and is expected to stay within the boundaries of this system: people, that is to say, politicians, social scientists and citizens, expect to find politics in the arenas prescribed for it in the hegemonic discourse of liberal democracies (these arenas being parliament, parties,
trade unions, etc.), and also expect it to be performed by the accordingly sanctioned agents (Beck, 1997:98). Although this well-ordered picture is lately starting to show signs of disintegration, with the politicisation of areas previously located outside the political system (as Beck has put it if the clocks of politics stop there [within the official arenas of the political system], then it seems that politics as a whole has stopped tickingBeck, 1997:98),

politics can only be represented in spatial terms, as a set of practices and institutions, as a system, albeit an expanding one. Politics is identical to political reality and political reality, as all reality, is, first, constituted at the symbolic level, and, second, supported by fantasy. But if reality in general can only make sense in its relation to a real which is always exceeding it, what can that real associated with political reality be? If reality cannot exhaust the real it must be also the case that politics cannot exhaust the political. Not surprisingly then, it is one of the most exciting
developments in contemporary political theory, and one promoted by theorists such as Laclau, Mouffe, Beck and Lefort, that the political is not reducible to political reality as we have been describing it:

The political cannot be restricted to a certain type of institution, or envisaged as constituting a specific sphere or level of society. It must be conceived as a dimension that is inherent to every human society and that determines our very ontological condition.
(Mouffe, 1993:3) In order to illustrate this emancipation of the moment of the political let us examine very briefly the relevant argument put forward by Claude Lefort. Leforts project entails the reinterpretation of the political. He considers both the Marxist and the strictly scientific definitions of the political inadequate.

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unable to recognise any substantial specificity to the political. Political sociology

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Marxism regards the political as a mere superstructure determined by a base consisting of the supposedly real level of relations of production, and thus is

and political science, on the other hand, attempt to delineate political facts in their particularity, as distinct from other social facts which are considered as belonging to other separate levels of social reality: the economic, the aesthetic, the juridical, the scientific, the social itself. Such an approach claims to provide an objective reconstruction of reality as consisting of all these strict differentiations and thus does not realise that its own constructs derive from social life and are, consequently, historically and politically conditionedour discussion on constructionism becomes relevant again. In the definition of politics (as the space of political institutions, such as parties, etc.) what is lost is the political itself, meaning the moment in which the definition of politics, the organisation of social reality, takes place: The political is thus revealed, not in what we call political activity, but in the double movement whereby the mode of institution of society appears and is obscured. It appears in the sense that the process whereby society is ordered and unified across its divisions becomes visible. It is obscured in the sense that the locus of politics (the locus in which parties compete and in which a general agency of power takes shape and is
reproduced) becomes defined as particular, while the principle which generates the overall configuration is concealed. (Lefort, 1988:11) The point here is that the

institution of political reality presupposes a certain repression of the constitutivity of the political. It entails an impossible attempt to erase the political ontology of the social. In Leforts view,
for example, and here he draws from traditional political philosophy in which what distinguishes one society from another is its regime, its shaping of human existence, the political is related to what generates society, the different forms of society. It is precisely because the very idea of society contains a reference to its political definition that it becomes impossible to localise the political within society. The

political is thus revealed as the ontological level of the institution of every particular shaping of the social (this expression denoting both giving meaning to social relations and staging them) (Lefort, 1988:217 19). When we limit our scope within political reality we are attempting a certain domestication/spatialisation of the political, we move our attention from the political per se (as the moment of the disruption and undecidability governing the reconstruction of social objectivity including political reality) to the social (as the result of this construction and reconstruction, as the sedimented forms of objectivity) (Laclau, 1990:35). This sedimentation of political reality (as a part or a subsystem of the social) requires a forgetting of origins, a forgetting of the contingent force of dislocation which stands at its foundation; it requires the symbolic and fantasmatic reduction of the political. Yet, to negate the political does not make it disappear, it only leads to bewilderment in the face of its manifestations and to impotence in
dealing with them (Mouffe, 1993:140). What constantly emerges in these currents of contemporary political theory is that the political seems to acquire a position parallel to that of the Lacanian real; one cannot but be struck by the fact that the political is revealed as a particular modality of the real. The political becomes one of the forms in which one encounters the real.

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at: annihilation
Threats of annihilation create a pure war mentality, creating conditions for personal and cultural death. Psychoanalysis is key to finding a way out of this deadlock. Borg 3 (Mark, Psychoanalyst Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8.1 (2003), Psychoanalytic Pure War: Interactions with the Post-Apocalyptic
Unconscious 57-67).

Virilio and Lotringer gave the name "pure war" to the psychological condition that results when people know that they live in a world where the possibility for absolute destruction (e.g., nuclear holocaust) exists. As Virilio and Lotringer see it, it is not the technological capacity for destruction (that is, for example, the existence of nuclear armaments) that imposes the dread characteristic of a pure war psychology but the belief systems that this capacity sets up. Psychological survival requires that a way be found (at least unconsciously) to escape inevitable destructionit requires a way outbut this enforces an irresolvable paradox, because the definition of pure war culture is that there is no escape. Once people believe in the external possibilityat least those people whose defenses cannot handle the weight of the dread that pure war imposespure war becomes an internal condition, a perpetual state of preparation for absolute destruction and for personal, social, and cultural death. The tragedy at the World
Trade Center in New York City has given us a bitter but important opportunity to study the effects of the pure war condition on individuals. It allows us to look at how this allencompassing state appears in psychoanalytic treatment and to observe its influence through the analysis of transference/countertransference dynamics. The pure war condition has been brought grimly to consciousness. In this paper, I will explore how it manifests itself in society, in character, and most specifically in the psychoanalytic treatment of one patient whose dynamics highlight significant aspects of the pure war state. How does treatment happen when, at some level, we perceive ourselves as already dead? Whatever our individual differences, our

visions of the psychoanalytic endeavor arise out of the social defense of the culture within which we live and work (I have referred to this as "community character," cf. Borg 350). And whatever our individual differences, in a pure war situation the primary task is simply to sustain the dream of psychic survival. The case of
Joyce, who saw the first explosion at the World Trade Center as she rode down Fifth Avenue in a bus after her session with me, exemplifies this task.

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at: cede the political

Academic radicals play the role of the actor who mistakes the play for the real thing. They operate within a self-referential community that accomplishes nothing. Attempts to go beyond that world are feeble and usually ignored. Gunnell, 84 (John, Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley , What should political theory be now?, ed: Nelson, p. 351-352).
Radical or critical

political theory is an idea, largely something that is talked about rather than practiced. It is an academic fantasy and a faint memory which long ago severed any real connection with the objects in their concern. Only a strange academic pretension produces the notion that finding the right philosophical grounding can make academic political theory into something more than it is. Only another pretension implies that depth of concern or other emotive attributes can make this academic practice, as either scholarly production or classroom education, a form of political action or some equivalent to it. Secured (or imprisoned) within structures of the university and profession, self-ascribed academic radicals posture like actors on a stage. They
only descend into the audience within the limits of certain avante-garde productions that would never, in the end, endanger their status as actors or propel the audience beyond the role of spectators. But

even the audience consists primarily of other actors. Caught up in this academic theater, they come to believe after a while that the play is the most real thing, that acting is a more noble and efficacious endeavor than the actual practices of life, and that its purity must be maintained. In large measure, of course, this is rhetoric, but not the rhetoric of the street. Political myth is one thing, but mythical politics is another. While these actors have visions of the world which they wish to reproduce, they have long since lost touch with the concrete character of society, and their world is the product of a script written by others. Maybe the greatest irony is that, while their performances are dedicated to changing the world, they seldom address the specific world in which they reside. They are content to play in a
theater whose management and financing is microcosm of the world which they wish to transform, but their vision is too prodigious to be directed toward such small objects. They may complain in passing about the way the players are hired and fired and about the lack of democracy in the company, but they are on the road too frequently to get involved deeply. And, after all, it is their sinecure as permanent members of the troupe that allows them to display their grand gestures without fear of contamination or reprisal. There are some, usually the more conservative players, who also think that society is a seamless web and that theater changes the world, and they become upset at stage histrionics whiff mock and criticize life. But much paranoia is surpassed only by the blind faith of those who believe that their performances transform the lives of those with whom they come into contact and that the theater is so much a part of life that any real distinction is forced and analytic. It is difficult to know how many have a real passion for the life which they represent on stage or the extent to which their drama is a surrogate for what the world denies them or what they have denied themselves. Probably, many are just actors with feigned and rehearsed concern which they have acquired from their masters and coaches. For them, the play is the thing. For a few, however, these scenes are a vehicle for higher purpose. Sadly

society reserves the theater for their activity, putting them safely away where anything can be said, because everyone knows that it is just a play. Society knows that, in the end, the demands of the profession will keep most from mixing their art with life. Of the few who escape to seek recognition outside the theater, it is safe to assume that they are too inexperienced in the way of the world to manipulate it and that the worst oppression is simply to ignore them.

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To win the Rorty turn, they need to win that we have access to the Real. Otherwise, Lacans indict of rational subjects that communicate democratic interests is damning for Rortys conception of politics. Donahue 1 (Brian, Department of English, Gonzaga University, Marxism, Postmodernism, iek, Postmodern Culture,12.2, Project Muse)
This Lacanian "hard kernel" that appears prominently in iek's work can have varying political valences. Its value for radical politics derives from its affirmation of the Lacanian notion of the inherent lack enabling subjectivity: the subject is constituted through, yet simultaneously split by, the object-cause of desire such that the "it" is always already there before the "I" can be recognized. This

at: rorty

focus on that which cannot be made consciously transparent to the subject through linguistic symbolization counters a prevailing current of contemporary mainstream U.S. culture that denies or derides the unconscious as an invention of psychoanalysis in the same way that it denies or derides class struggle as an invention of Marxism, both treated as entirely discredited projects. The idea that rational linguistic processes can never achieve transparency and that subjects are unable to know fully their own motivations is corrosive to the basic assumptions of liberalism. If rational discourse is subtended by an unassimilable, extradiscursive Real, then the model of liberal politics--free, rational subjects representing their interests through transparent communication in an effort to achieve consensus--is called into question. "Freedom," "rationality," and "transparency" are shown to be ideological fictions draped over the Real, which is never fully covered by them. Such a model poses problems for, among other projects, the Habermasian social-democratic ideal of rational intersubjective communication as well as the American liberal neopragmatism promoted by Richard Rorty. Using the far Right as a scare tactic stifles the Left. Fear drives out radical alternatives while the whole system drifts toward the Right. iek 2k (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Why we all love to hate
Haider, New Left Review, March-April, http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR23603.shtml). Plain to see, in fact, is the structural role of the populist Right in the legitimation of current liberal-democratic hegemony. For what this RightBuchanan, Le Pen, Haidersupplies is the negative common denominator of the entire established political spectrum. These are the excluded ones who, by this very exclusion (their unacceptability for governmental office), furnish the proof of the benevolence of the official system. Their existence displaces the focus of political strugglewhose true object is the stifling of any radical alternative from the Leftto the solidarity of the entire democratic bloc against the Rightist danger. The Neue Mitte manipulates the Rightist scare the better to hegemonize the democratic field, i.e. to define the terrain and discipline its real adversary, the radical Left. Therein resides the ultimate rationale of the Third Way: that is, a social democracy purged of its minimal subversive sting, extinguishing even the faintest memory of anti-capitalism and class struggle. The result is what one would expect. The populist Right moves to occupy the terrain evacuated by the

Left, as the only serious political force that still employs an anti-capitalist rhetoricif thickly coated with a nationalist/racist/religious veneer (international corporations are betraying the decent working people of our nation). At the congress of the Front National a couple of years ago, Jean-Marie Le Pen brought on stage an Algerian, an African and a Jew, embraced them all and told his audience: They are no less French than I amit is the representatives of big multinational capital, ignoring their duty to France, who are the true danger to our identity! In New York, Pat Buchanan and Black activist Leonora Fulani can proclaim a common hostility to unrestricted free trade, and both (pretend to) speak on behalf of the legendary desaparecidos of our time, the proverbially vanished proletariat. While multicultural tolerance becomes the motto of the new and privileged symbolic classes, the far Right seeks to address and to mobilize whatever remains of the mainstream working class in our Western societies. The

consensual form of politics in our time is a bi-polar system that offers the appearance of a choice where essentially there is none, since today poles converge on a single economic stancethe tight fiscal policy that Clinton and Blair
declare to be the key tenet of the modern Left, that sustains economic growth, that allows us to improve social security, education and health. In this uniform spectrum, political differences are more and more reduced to merely cultural attitudes: multicultural/sexual (etc.) openness versus traditional/natural (etc.) family values. This

choicebetween Social Democrat or Christian Democrat in Germany, Democrat or Republican in the Statesrecalls nothing so much as the predicament of someone who wants an artificial sweetener in an American cafeteria, where the omnipresent alternatives are Nutra-Sweet Equal and High&Low, small bags of red and blue, and most consumers have a habitual preference (avoid the red ones, they contain cancerous substances, or vice versa) whose ridiculous persistence merely highlights the meaninglessness of the options themselves.

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Chomskys lack of theory causes two problems: 1. It results in factual inaccuracies because it ignores history. 2. It fails as a political strategy. He writes books about the dirty details of US policies and people shrug and call him un-American. iek 2 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, inteview with Bad Subjects, I
am a Fighting Atheist: Interview with Slavoj iek, Bad Subjects, Issue #59, February, http://eserver.org/bs/59/iek.html). Or take Chomsky. There are two problematic features in his work though it goes without saying that I admire him very much. One is his anti-theorism. A friend who had lunch with him recently told me that Chomsky

at: chomsky

announced that he'd concluded that social theory and economic theory are of no use that things are simply evident, like American state terror, and that all we need to know are the facts. I disagree with this. And the second point is that with all his criticism of the U.S., Chomsky retains a certain commitment to what is the most elemental ingredient of

American ideology, individualism, a fundamental belief that America is the land of free individuals, and so on. So in that way he is deeply and problematically American. You can see some of these problems in the famous Faurisson scandal in France. As many readers may know, Chomsky wrote the preface for a book by Robert Faurisson, which was threatened with being banned because it denied the reality of the Holocaust. Chomsky claimed that though he opposes the book's content, the book should still be published for free speech reasons. I can see the argument, but I can't support him here. The argument is that freedom of the press is freedom for all, even for those whom we find disgusting and totally unacceptable; otherwise, today it is them, tomorrow it is us. It sounds logical, but I think that it avoids the true paradox of freedom: that some limitations have to guarantee it. So to

understand what goes on today to understand how we experience ourselves, to understand the structures of social authority, to understand whether we really live in a "permissive" society, and how prohibitions function today for these we need social theory. That's the difference between me and the names you
"the facts" enough? iek: Let me give you a very naive answer. I

mentioned. BS: Chomsky and people like him seem to think that if we just got the facts out there, things would almost take care of themselves. Why is this wrong? Why aren't

think that basically the facts are already known. Let's take Chomsky's analyses of how the CIA intervened in Nicaragua. OK, (he provides) a lot of details, yes, but did I learn anything fundamentally new? It's exactly what I'd expected: the CIA was playing a very dirty game. Of course it's more convincing if you learn the dirty details. But I don't think that we really learned anything dramatically new there. I don't think that merely "knowing the facts" can really change people's perceptions. To put it another way: Chomsky's own position on Kosovo, on the Yugoslav war, shows some of his limitations, because of a lack of a proper historical context. With all his facts, he got the picture wrong. As far as I can judge, Chomsky bought a
certain narrative that we shouldn't put all the blame on Milosevic, that all parties were more or less to blame, and the West supported or incited this explosion because of its own geopolitical goals. All are not the same. I'm not saying that the Serbs are guilty. I just repeat my old point that Yugoslavia was not over with the secession of Slovenia. It was over the moment Milosevic took over Serbia. This triggered a totally different dynamic. It is also not true that the disintegration of Yugoslavia was supported by the West. On the contrary, the West exerted enormous pressure, at least until 1991, for ethnic groups to remain in Yugoslavia. I saw [former Secretary of State] James Baker on Yugoslav TV supporting the Yugoslav army's attempts to prevent Slovenia's secession. The

ultimate paradox for me is that because he lacks a theoretical framework, Chomsky even gets the facts wrong sometimes.

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at: impossible demands good (iek)

Impossible demands maintain the political status quo. We have clear consciences when we demand things like open borders but we speak from a position of privilege that is not really threatened by our demands. iek 2 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Welcome to the Desert of the
Real, p.59). In a strict Lacanian sense of the term, we should thus posit that happiness relies on the subjects inability or unreadieness fully to confont the consequences of its desire: the price of happiness is that the subject remains stuck in the inconsistency of its desire. In our daily lives, we (pretend to) desire things which we do not really desire, so that, ultimately the worst thing that can happen is for us to get what we officially desire. Happiness is thus inherently hypocritical: it is the happiness of dreaming about things we do not really want.

When todays Left bombardes the capitalist system with demands that it obviously cannot fulfill (Full employment! Retain the welfare state! Full rights for immigrants!), it is basically playing a game of hysterical provocation, of addressing the Master with a demand which will be impossible for him to meet, and will thus expose his impotence. The problem this strategy, however, is not only that the system cannot meet these demands, but that, in addition, those who voice them do not really want them to be realized. For example, whenradical academics demand full rights for immigrants and opening of the borders, are they aware that the direct implementation of this demand would, for obvious reasons, inundate developed Western countries with millions of newcomers, thus provoking a violent working-class racist backlash which would then endanger the privleged position of these very academics? Of course they are, but they count on the fact their demand will not be metin this way, they can hypocritically retain their clear radical conscience while continuing to enjoy their priveleged position. In 1994,

when a new wave of emigration from Cuba to the USA was on the cards, Fidel Castro warned the USA that if they did not stop inciting Cubans to emigrate, Cuba would no longer prevent them from doing itwhich the Cuban authorities in effect did a couple of days later, embarrassing the USA with thousands of unwanted newcomers....Is this not like the proverbial woman who snapped back at a man who was making macho advances to her: Shut up, or youll have to do what youre boasting about! In both cases, the gesture is that of calling the others bluff, counting on the fact that what the other really fears is that one will fully comply with his or her demand. And would not the same gesture also throw our radical academics into a panic? Here the old 68 motto Soyons realistes, demandons limpossible! acquires a new cynical and sinister meaning which, perhaps, reveals its truth: Lets be realists: we, the academic Left, want to appear critical, while fully enjoying the priveleges the system offers us. So lets bombard the system with impossible demands: we all know that these demands wont be met, so we can be sure that nothing will actually change, and well maintain our privileged status! If someone accuses a big corporation of particular financial crimes, he or she is exposed to risks which can go right up to murder attempts; if he or she asks the same corporation to finance a research project into the link between global capitalism and the emergence of hybrid postcolonial identities, he or she stands a good chance of getting hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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at: iek has no political theory (at: homer, gigante)

iek is explicitly politicalhe advocates an anti-capitalist agenda as an aspect of a radically democratic state. Donahue 1 (Brian, Department of English, Gonzaga University, Marxism, Postmodernism, iek, Postmodern Culture,12.2, Project Muse)
This conception of iek as a political cipher is perhaps understandable on a first reading of a text like Looking Awry or even The Sublime Object of Ideology and on a hasty categorization of him as a "poststructuralist psychoanalytic theorist" (a categorization that would require considerable elaboration). But

in light of careful analysis of a wide selection of his writings, it would be difficult to insist on iek's political inscrutability. On the contrary, his work evinces a general ideological commitment to a radical democracy that is critical of both the globalizing capitalism of the present and the bureaucratic state socialism of the recent past. Thus, he advocates an (admittedly somewhat nebulous) "third way" for the future while acknowledging the need for nation-states in the present as a counter both to the increasing transnationalism of capital and to the dialectically co-determined phenomenon of increasing ethnic and religious "fundamentalist" violence and racism. While iek does not frequently perform detailed analysis of specific policy issues, he does write
consistently from within the broad ideological framework I have described above--contrary to the effort of Gigante to build an entire argument on the premise that iek's "subjective transparency is precisely his point" (154) and of Homer to chastise him for failing to draw connections between his critical writing and the political sphere. Indeed, the following passage provides a clear statement of his ideas about at least one major topic of recent political philosophy, the "civil society" of late capitalism: People have this ethics of the bad state and good civic, independent structures. But sorry, in Slovenia I am for the state and against civil society! In Slovenia, civil society is equal to the rightwingers. In America, after the Oklahoma bombing, they suddenly discovered that there are hundreds of thousands of jerks. Civil society is not this nice social movement but a network of moral majority conservatives and nationalist pressure groups, against abortion, for religious education in schools: a real pressure from below. ("Japan," par. 24)

As for his stance with respect to political economy, it is clear that a major aim of iek's work is a critique of capitalism in an effort to contribute to the building of an anti-capitalist agenda in the realm of the political, where struggles for hegemony are constantly engaged and renewed. Following the general thrust of post-Gramscian Marxism, he
stresses that this hegemonizing process of "winning consent" is always at work, even at the supposedly objective level of the economy.

Turn: the fact that these articles are written about iek proves that his strategy of overidentification with the system is working. This discomfort IS the point because it forces us to take a personal stand. Instead of just buying into empty political rhetoric, we are forced to become our own analyst. iek 95 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, LAW AND THE
POSTMODERN MIND: SUPEREGO BY DEFAULT, Cardozo Law Review, 1995, 16 Cardozo L. Rev. 925) In the process of the disintegration of socialism in Slovenia, the postpunk group Laibach staged an aggressive inconsistent mixture of Stalinism, Nazism, and Blut und Boden ideology. The first reaction of the enlightened leftist critics in Slovenia was to conceive of Laibach as the ironic imitation of totalitarian rituals. However, their support of Laibach was always accompanied by an uneasy feeling: "What if they really mean it? What if they truly identify with the totalitarian ritual?" Or, a more cunning version of it, transferring their own doubt onto the Other: "What if Laibach overestimates its public?" "What if the public takes seriously what Laibach mockingly imitates, so that Laibach actually strengthens what it purports to undermine?" Their

uneasy feeling is fed on the assumption that ironic distance is automatically a subversive attitude. What if, on the contrary, the dominant attitude of the contemporary "postideological" universe is precisely the cynical distance towards public values? What if this distance, far from posing any threat to the system, designates the supreme form of conformism, since the normal functioning of the system required cynical distance? In this case, the strategy of Laibach appears in a new light: it frustrates the system (the ruling ideology) precisely insofar as it is distanced from its ironic imitation; but over identification with it, by bringing to light the obscene superego underside of the system, suspends its efficiency. The ultimate expedient of Laibach is their deft manipulation of
transference; their public (especially intellectuals) is obsessed with the "desire of the Other" - whether Laibach's actual position is truly totalitarian or not. They address Laibach with a question and expect an answer, failing to notice the crucial fact that Laibach itself does not function as an answer but as a question.

By means of the elusive character of their desire, the indecision regarding where they actually stand, Laibach compels us to take a position and decide upon our desire. Laibach actually accomplishes here the reversal that

defines the psychoanalytic cure. At the outset of the cure is transference: the transferential relationship is put in force as soon as the analyst appears in the guise of the subject who is supposed to know the truth about the patient's desire. When, in the course of the psychoanalysis, the patient complains that he does not know what he wants, the complaint is addressed to the analyst, with the implicit supposition that the analyst already knows it. In other words, insofar as the analyst stands for the big Other, the analyst's illusion lies in reducing his ignorance about his desire to an "epistemological" incapacity: the truth about his desire already exists, it is registered somewhere in the big Other, and one has only to bring it to light and his desiring will run smoothly. The

end of psychoanalysis, dissolution of transference, designates the moment when the question that the patient aimed at the analyst turns back towards the patient himself. First, the patient's (hysterical) question addressed an analyst who was supposed to possess the answer; now, the analyst is forced to acknowledge that he is merely a reflective question mark addressed back to the patient. Here, one can explain Lacan's thesis that an analyst is authorized only by himself: the patient becomes the analyst upon assuming that his desire has no support in the Other, that the authorization of his desire has no support in the Other, and that the authorization of his 47

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the shift from desire to drive.

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desire can come only from himself. Insofar as this reversal defines drive, one can explain Lacan's thesis that what takes place at the end of psychoanalysis is

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at: iek is a totalitarian

iek does not advocate literally repeating Leninist politicshe only means that Lenin found revolutionary way out of an ideological deadlock and that we need to look for one as well. iek 2 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis , inteview with Bad Subjects,
I am a Fighting Atheist: Interview with Slavoj iek, Bad Subjects, Issue #59, February, http://eserver.org/bs/59/iek.html).

iek: I am careful to speak about not repeating Lenin. I am not an idiot. It wouldn't mean anything to return to the Leninist working class party today. What interests me about Lenin is precisely that after World War I broke out in 1914, he found himself in a total deadlock. Everything went wrong. All of the social democratic parties outside Russia supported the war, and there was a mass outbreak of patriotism. After this, Lenin had to think about how to reinvent a radical, revolutionary politics in this situation of total breakdown. This is the Lenin I like. Lenin is usually presented as a great follower of Marx, but it is impressive how often you read in Lenin the ironic line that "about this there isn't anything in Marx." It's this purely negative parallel. Just as Lenin was forced to reformulate the entire socialist project, we are in a similar situation. What Lenin did, we should do today, at an even more radical level. For example, at the most
elementary level, Marx's concept of exploitation presupposes a certain labor theory of value. If you take this away from Marx, the whole edifice of his model disintegrates. What do we do with this today, given the importance of intellectual labor? Both standard solutions are too easy to claim that there is still real physical production going on in the Third World, or that today's programmers are a new proletariat? Like

Lenin, we're deadlocked. What I like in Lenin is precisely what scares people about him the ruthless will to discard all prejudices.

Totalitarianism is the product of utopian politics. Stalin and Hitler could commit horrible acts of violence in the name of bringing about a harmonious new social order. Stavrakakis, 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 108-110).
As Jerrold Post has pointed out, we are always bound to those we hate: We need enemies to keep our treasuredand idealisedselves intact (Post, 1996:289). And this for fear of being free (Sartre, 1995:27). The

fantasy of attaining a perfect harmonious world, of realising the universal, can only be sustained through the construction/localisation of a certain particularity which cannot be assimilated but, instead, has to be eliminated. There exists then a crucial dialectic
between the universal fantasy of utopia and the particularity of thealways localenemy who is posited as negating it. The result of this dialectic is always the same: The

tragic paradox of utopianism has been that instead of bringing about, as it promised, a system of final and permanent stability, it gave rise to utter restlessness, and in place of a reconciliation between human freedom and social cohesion, it brought totalitarian coercion. (Talmon, 1971:95) In that sense, as it
was implicitly argued in Chapter 2, the notion of fantasy constitutes an exemplary case of a dialectical coincidentia opositorum.13 On the one hand, fantasy has a beatific side, a stabilising dimension, it is identical to the dream of a state without disturbances, out of reach of human depravity; on the other hand, we have fantasy as something profoundly destabilising: And

does the fundamental lesson of so-called totalitarianism not concern the co-dependence of these two aspects of the notion of fantasy? asks iek. All those who aspire fully to realise its first harmonious side have recourse to its other dark dimension in order to explain their failure: the foreclosed obverse of the Nazi harmonious Volksgemeinschaft returned in their paranoiac obsession with the Jewish plot. Similarly, the Stalinists compulsive discovery of ever-new enemies of socialism was the inescapable obverse of their pretending to realise the idea of the New Socialist Man. (iek, 1996a:116) For iek, these two dimensions are like front and back of the same coin: insofar as a community experiences its reality as regulated, structured, by fantasy, it has to disavow its inherent impossibility, the antagonism in its very heartand fantasy (the figure of the conceptual Jew for example) gives body to this disavowal. In short, the effectiveness of fantasy is the condition for fantasy to maintain its hold (ibid.). Utopia is not that far from dystopia. What is at stake in the Lacanian conception of fantasy is, as we have already pointed out,
enjoyment (jouissance). If the effects of the normative idealist or Enlightenment-style critique of racism are severely limited, if this critique is not enough (Lipowatz, 1995a:213), this is because, to use one of Sloterdijks formulations, it has remained more naive than the consciousness it wanted to expose (Sloterdijk, 1988:3). In its rationality it has exhausted itself. In other words, it didnt take into account that what is at stake here is not rational argumentation but the organisation and administration of enjoyment: The impotence of the attitude of traditional Enlightenment is best exemplified by the anti-racist who, at the level of rational argumentation, produces a series of convincing reasons against the racist Other, but is nonetheless clearly fascinated by the object of his critiqueand consequently, all his defence disintegrates in the moment of real crisis (when the fatherland is in danger for example). (Sloterdijk, 1988:3) Thus,

the question of la traverse du fantasme, that is to say of how to gain the minimum of distance from the fantasmatic frame that organises our enjoyment, of how to suspend its efficiency, is crucial not only for the concept of the psychoanalytic cure and its conclusion: today, in our era of renewed racist tensions, of universalised anti-Semitism, it is perhaps the foremost political question (iek, 1996a:11718). In light of this, traversing the fantasy of utopian thought seems to be one of the most
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important political tasks of our age. The current crisis of utopia is not cause for concern but for celebration. But then why is the politics
of today a politics of aporia? There can be only one plausible explanation: just because, in the ethical sphere, the fantasmatic ideal of harmony is still dominant. If we are situated today in a terrain of aporia and frustration it is because we still fantasise something that is increasingly revealed as impossible and catastrophic. Accepting

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state.

this ultimate impossibility seems to be the only way out of this troubling

Totalitarianism is inherently tied to politics of utopiawe are the opposite. Stavrakakis, 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages
external threats to democracy: democracy

125).

The uniqueness of democracy will be more clearly shown in its opposition to two trends that threaten it. These trends are defined by Touraine as the true

can be destroyed either from above, by authoritarian power, or from below, through chaos, violence and civil war (Touraine, 1994:2). The rise and electoral success today of neofascist parties and movements makes imperative the comparison between democracy and totalitarianism. Totalitarianism emerges when a particular party or political movement claims by its own nature to be different from all the other parties and forces. It destroys all opposition since it claims to represent the whole of society and to possess a legitimacy that places it above the law (Lefort, 1988:13). If democracy recognises and institutionalises the division of the social, totalitarianism in contrast claims to understand the universal law of societal organisation and development which, applied to the social, can bring back the lost organic unity and eliminate any division and disharmony; with totalitarianism the dawn of utopia is never too far away.2 Democracy, however, is not threatened only by universalist totalitarian tendencies attempting to reinstate a universal organic unity: There is also a symmetrically opposite danger of a lack of all reference to this unity (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985:188). This is the danger of particularism and of the fragmentation of the social fabric into segments that deny the possibility of any meaningful articulation between them.

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at: iek marxism is totalizing

iek does not deploy the vulagr Marxism of simple, totalizing class struggle. Rather, Marxism calls upon us to see class as one aspect of ongoing and plural critique. Donahue 1 (Brian, Department of English, Gonzaga University, Marxism, Postmodernism, iek, Postmodern Culture,12.2, Project Muse)
Slavoj iek discusses the implications of the way this dividing line is usually presented in contemporary theory. In

a defense of dialectical totalization against the notions of dissemination and radically irreconcilable fragmentation that prevail in postmodern theory, iek claims that the very form of the opposition as posed in the question "gives predominance to the second term of the alternative" because it "silently assumes that every attempt at rational totalization is in advance doomed to failure" (For They 99). But this characterization misrepresents the Hegelian understanding of a rational totality, he writes, in that "the very
impetus of the 'dialectical progress'" has to do with "the possibility of 'making a system' out of the very series of failed totalizations, to enchain them in a rational way, to discern the strange 'logic' that regulates the process by means of which the breakdown of a totalization itself begets another totalization" (99). He goes on

to make a similar argument with regard to the Marxist notion of the class struggle, which is widely criticized by postmodernists as "the 'totalizing' moment of society, its structuring principle,... a kind of ultimate guarantee authorizing us to grasp society as a rational
totality" (100). Such characterizations, iek argues, overlook "the ultimate paradox of the notion of 'class struggle,'" which is that society is "held together" by the very antagonism, split, that forever prevents its closure in a harmonious, transparent, rational Whole--by the very impediment that undermines every rational totalization. Although "class struggle" is nowhere directly given as a positive entity, it none the less functions, in its very absence, as the point of reference enabling us to locate every social phenomenon not by relating it to class struggle as its ultimate meaning ("transcendental signified") but by conceiving it as an(other) attempt to conceal and "patch up" the rift of the class struggle, to efface its traces--what we have here is the typical structural-dialectical paradox of an effect which exists only in order to efface the causes of its existence; of an effect which in a way "resists" its own cause. (100) Here

iek, like Jameson, rebuts condemnations of the maligned "closed, totalized system," claiming that Hegelian and Marxist dialectical theory never aimed at total closure in the first place and reasserting its methodological value in the face of postmodern criticisms by arguing that those criticisms are based on a generalized and mistaken conception of Hegelian and Marxist thinking in terms of absolute, total, and unified systems. In other words, even Hegel knew that Absolute Spirit's destiny of perfect, static self-contemplation was always already rendered impossible by the ineluctable necessity of movement, and, as iek writes, even Marx understood that the "'normal' state of capitalism is the permanent revolutionizing of its own conditions of existence," even
though he sometimes proceeded "as if he [did] not know it, by describing the very passage from capitalism to socialism in terms of... vulgar evolutionist dialectics" (Sublime 52-53). While he does defend the dialectical tradition, iek does not simply revert to a "vulgar" Marxism (although Jameson has recently suggested that such a move might in fact be called for in the post-Cold War era5). I develop a more thorough discussion of his work below.

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at: hurley (intrapsychic critique leaves no room for politics)

Lacanian psychoanalysis is the opposite of what the intrapsychic critics claim. Rather than turning inward, to some personal struggle between the Symbolic and the Real, psychoanalysis is about cultural ideologyit is psychology turned outward and is therefore explicitly political. iek 1 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Interview with Christopher
Hanlon, Ph.D. from UMass-Amherst, Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj iek, New Literary History, 32.1, 1-21, Project Muse).

CH: I want to ask about one common critique of your work, most recently voiced by James Hurley, that centers on what we might call your "intrapsychic" focus. 7 For you, of course, ideological coercion occurs at the libidinal level, at the constitutive level of a subject who "is" a disjunction between the Symbolic and the Real. But some commentators have expressed concern that this intrapsychic focus has the effect of leaving us little to do by way of intervening upon specifically institutional mechanisms of coercion. Do such objections concern you? SZ: No, because I think that such criticism misses the point of Freudian subjectivity. I think that the very term "intrapsychic" is misleading; I think that, at least for Lacan, who emphasizes this again and again, the proper dimension of the unconscious is not "deep inside." The proper dimension is outside, materialized in the state apparatuses. The model of split subjectivity, as later echoed by Louis Althusser, is not that there is something deep in me which is repressed; it's not this internal psychic conflict. What subverts my conscious attitudes are the implicit ideological beliefs externalized, embodied in my activity. For instance, I'm interested in
so on. I think this split is false. I take here quite literally Lacan's dictum that psychoanalysis

this new fashion of Hollywood Holocaust comedy. Have you noticed how, starting with Life Is Beautiful, we have a new genre, repeated in Jakob the Liar, and so on? Apropos of this, I ask, "Why do Holocaust tragedies fail?" For me, Speilberg is at his lowest during a scene from Schindler's List, when the concentration-camp commander faces the Jewish girl and we have this internal monologue, where he is split between his attraction to the girl and his racist tract: you know, "Are you a rat? Are you a human being?" and

is not psychology, that the ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis is that when you analyze phenomena like Nazis or Stalinism, it is totally wrong to think that you will arrive at any pertinent result through so-called in-depth profiles of figures like Stalin or Hitler. Here there is a lesson to be learned from Hannah Arendt--though at a different level I disagree with her--about the banality of evil. The banality of evil means for me
with--to reference my eternal idea about canned laughter--what I am tempted to call a kind of canned hatred. In

that the key is not, for example, the personality of Eichmann; there is a gap separating the acts of Eichmann from Eichmann's self-experience. But what I would add is that this doesn't mean that Eichmann was simply innocent in the sense that he was possessed by some kind of brutally objective logic. My idea is more and more that we are dealing

the same way that the TV set laughs for you, relieves you of the obligation to really laugh, Eichmann himself didn't really have to hate the Jews; he was able to be just an ordinary person. It's the objective ideological machinery that did the hating; the hatred was imported, it was "out there." CH: He even reported that he admired the Jews, that he used to literally vomit with disgust at the efficiency of the extermination . . . SZ: Yes! So again, I would say that this reproach misses the point in the sense that the fundamental lesson of psychoanalysis is that the unconscious is outside, crystallized in institutional practices.

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at: derrida (the big other is a form of essentialization)

The claim that Lacan essentializes a Big Other is a misreading. His point is that the desire for the other will always be frustrated because the Big Other does not properly existmeaning that it is a cultural construct, not a fixed origin of meaning. iek, 1 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis , Interview with Christopher
Hanlon, Ph.D. from UMass-Amherst, Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj iek, New Literary History, 32.1, 1-21, Project Muse).

SZ: I would just like to make two points. First, I still think, as I first developed in Enjoy Your Symptom!, that "resistance" is the appropriate term here. In deconstructionist
"phallic signifier," and so on, and so on, but the figure of Lacan they construct is precisely what Lacan was trying to undermine. For example, one

circles, you can almost feel it, this strong embarrassment about Lacan. So they can buy Lacan only, as it were, conditionally, only insofar as they can say he didn't go far enough. I claim that the truth is the exact opposite; the only way they can appropriate Lacan is to submit him to a radical misreading. You know, all the time we hear about the

of the standard criticisms of some deconstructionists here in the States is that Lacan elevates the "Big Other" into some kind of non-historical, a priori symbolic order . . . . My only, perhaps nave answer to this is that the big Lacanian thesis from the mid-fifties is that "The Big Other doesn't exist." He repeats this again and again, and the point of this is precisely that there is no symbolic order that would serve as a kind of prototranscendental guarantor.

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at: sokal ad bricmont (general)

Sokal and Bricmont do not have a well educated perspective on Lacan. They are part of a vacuous pop culture backlash as French intellectuals. Glynos & Stavrakakis 1 (Jason & Yannis, Department of Government at the University of Essex Postures and Impostures: On Lacan's Style and Use of
Mathematical Science, American Imago 58.3, 685-706, Project Muse). No doubt such a Derridean response will have its effects. Our opinion, however, is that a different sort of intervention here was also important. It was important not because it promised to be intellectually rewarding in a substantive sense. We do not in this essay make any contributions to the understanding of psychoanalysis or philosophy of science. Such an intervention was important because the

debate taps into a widespread sentiment characteristic of the current Zeitgeist, entailing a kind of reactionary backlash against psychoanalysis and poststructuralism in general. This backlash is epitomised by a kind of pathological reaction against the likes of Lacan. By pathological here we mean simply symptomatic from the perspective of a polity that imagines it is governed by principles of reasonableness and pluralism. That is to say, by pathology we mean only what you get when dismissive opinions about a person's work are taken seriously even if expressed by those who admit to their ignorance regarding that person's discipline, substituting sensationalized irony for intellectual rigor and relying--through mere association--on the crutch of the scientific establishment's institutional authority. The poor citizen who inhabits such a "polity of reasonableness" cannot but be horrified, struggling to offer what can only
is not examined in any detail." It

appear as an impotent response: "It is one thing for someone to disagree with Lacan, or to conclude that Lacan is too difficult to be worth the trouble, or to decide that Lacan is not one's 'cup of tea'; it is quite another to go out of one's way to invoke institutional faith to endorse and encourage cheap entertainment at the expense of authors whose work

is clear that S&B's Intellectual Impostures owes its popularity not to any kind of sound scholarship, intellectual integrity, or literary erudition. How then to explain all the fuss surrounding it? Deconstructive commonsense suggests that its popularity comes not so much from the content between its covers as it does from the cultural and academic context in which it appears. We close with a Lacanian hypothesis, suggesting that its success is buoyed up by a satisfaction or enjoyment (jouissance) that has at least two sources: (1) the fun poked at French intellectuals who are difficult to understand; and (2) the fun poked at those who poke fun at French intellectuals. It is not so easy to steer clear of these two sources of satisfaction.

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at: sokal and bricmont (lacan too dense)

The density of Lacans writing is not an indict of his theory. In fact, the difficulty level is meant to encourage responsible, reflective understandingit is a deliberate, ethical position for him as an author. Glynos & Stavrakakis 1 (Jason & Yannis, Department of Government at the University of Essex Postures and Impostures: On Lacan's Style and Use of
Mathematical Science, American Imago 58.3, 685-706, Project Muse). Why should he go out of his way to caution his audience to resist understanding too quickly? Precisely because he is concerned that analysts are tempted to understand their patients too quickly. And what does "understand" mean? To understand something means to translate a term into other terms that we are already familiar with. This means, for Lacan, that in understanding the patient's discourse analysts understand only what they are already familiar with. Instead of accessing the patient in his or her uniqueness, instead of being open to something new and different, analysts effectively reinforce their own self-understanding. No doubt it is unsettling when we are confronted with something we cannot immediately understand. No doubt it is comforting to believe that we understand each other and that we all share certain aspirations and standards of morality. But, Lacan wants to claim, this comes at a price. The

price we pay for an undue reliance on immediate understanding is an unthinking acceptance of premises we have come to rely on and that cease to elicit the need for justification. Think, for instance, of the ideal of pedagogy. This is often taken as an unquestioned ideal that requires no justification. Ultimately, Lacan's point is an ethical one, finding application not just in the clinic, but in theoretical work and quotidian life as well. It has to do with taking responsibility for one's understanding, rather than relying on a consensus of understanding. And the strategy he chose to adopt in this regard involved systematically creating a margin of nonunderstanding. He recognized in this strategy its potential productiveness-- productive in terms of generating a desire for responsible understanding and in terms of generating research. In short, Lacan is not celebrating misunderstanding. Rather, he is making an argument in favour of responsible understanding.

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at: sokal and bricmont (lacan uses math poorly)

Sokal and Bricmont attack a straw person when discuss Lacan and mathematics. Lacan thoroughly discussed different possible interpretations of mathematical terms and does not use them in the sense they attack. Glynos & Stavrakakis 1 (Jason & Yannis, Department of Government at the University of Essex Postures and Impostures: On Lacan's Style and Use of
Mathematical Science, American Imago 58.3, 685-706, Project Muse).

No doubt S&B's hostility to Lacan's use of mathematics is also compounded by their particular understanding of the nature of mathematics. S&B take for granted, for example, that mathematical statements have unique meanings. But this view stems from only one possible perspective on the nature of mathematics. Admittedly, it is intuitively appealing and taps into commonsense ways about how we think of mathematics. But it is based on an underdeveloped analogy with an equally underdeveloped idea of linguistic meaning. It is worth noting, in this respect, that Lacan spent considerable time and effort articulating concepts such as analogy and meaning in relation to much literature on the philosophy of science and mathematics. According to Lacan, mathematics finds itself occupying a privileged locus at the limits of language. In this view, mathematics is essentially meaningless: "The mathematical formalization of signifiers runs counter to meaning. . . .

In our times, philosophers of mathematics say 'it means nothing' concerning mathematics, even when they are mathematicians themselves, like Russell" (1975, 93). This, after all, is why identical squiggles on a piece of paper may acquire vastly different meanings depending on the domain of their application (and therefore interpretation). The fact that the physicist Richard Feynman (1963) emphasized that quantum mechanics cannot be understood is also relevant in this regard--it simply "works" (117).

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at: essentialism
It is impossible to accuse Lacan of essentialismhis theory of the subject is the oppositehe claims that we are marked by the Lack. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, Lacan and the Political, The Lacanian Subject p.14-5) MH
This is not the case only with poststructuralism. It seems that the Lacanian subject can fill a lot of lacks and that lacks are increasingly proliferating around us (or maybe today we are becoming more aware of their presence and alert to their persistence). To provide only a few examples, giving particular attention to those having some political relevance, Rosalind Coward and John Ellis point out that Lacans subject is therefore this new subject of dialectical materialism. The emphasis on language provides a route for an elaboration of the subject demanded by dialectical materialism (Coward and Ellis, 1977:93). Michele Barrett, for her part, argues that psychoanalysis [and she is mainly referring to Lacan] is the place one might reasonably start to correct the lamentable lack of attention paid to subjectivity within Marxisms theory of ideology (Barrett, 1991:11819, my emphasis), while Mark Bracher concludes that Lacanian theory can provide the sort of account of subjectivity that cultural criticism needs (Bracher, 1993:12). To sum up, the core idea of this argument is that Lacan is relevant for contemporary sociopolitical analysis because of his vision of the human subject.

As FeherGurewich states propos of social theory: Lacans psychoanalytic approach is founded on premises that are in sharp contrast to the ones which have led to the failure of an alliance between psychoanalysis and social theory. And what are these premises? Lacan provides social theory with a vision of the human subject that sheds new light on the relations between individual aspirations and social aims (Feher-Gurewich, 1996:154). Simply put, the Lacanian conception of subjectivity is called to remedy the shortcomings or supplementthis term is not used here in its strictest Derridean sense, although a deconstructionist flavour is not entirely absent poststructuralism, social theory, cultural criticism, theory of ideology, etc. But isnt such a move a reductionist move par excellence? Although our own approach, as it will be developed in the following chapters, is clearly located beyond a logic of supplementation, it would be unfair to consider the Lacanian subject as the point of an unacceptable reduction.

This would be the case only if the Lacanian notion of subjectivity was a simple reproduction of an essentialist subject, of a subject articulated around a single positive essence which is transparent to itself and fully representable in theoretical discourse. But this essentialist subject, the subject of the humanist philosophical tradition, the Cartesian subject, or even the Marxist reductionist subject whose essence is identified with her or his class interests, is exactly what has to be questioned and has been questioned; it cannot be part of the solution because it forms part of the initial problem. The Lacanian subject is clearly located beyond such an essentialist, simplistic notion of subjectivity. Not only is Lacan obviously the most distant from those who operate with essentialist categories or simplistic notions of psychic cause or origin (Barrett, 1991:107), but the Lacanian subject is radically opposing and transcending all these tendencies without, however, throwing away the baby together with the bath water, that is to say, the locus of the subject together with its essentialist formulations.

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at: our impacts are true

Its impossible to directly access reality -- traversing the fantasy is necessary for true engagement with the political Zizek 2004 (Slavoj, Birkbeck Institite for the Humanities, Conversations with Zizek, Glyn Daly, 78-79)
Here I would agree with Laclau and Mouffes notion that society

doesnt exist: that there is no neutral space, no neutral reality that can be first objectively described and from which we then develop the idea of antagonism. Again, this would be my idea of fantasy as constituting reality. Of course Nazis are a real obstacle, but the question is why are they a real obstacle? The answer is, because they are sustained by a certain fantasmatic universe. That is to say that of course you can describe the way Nazis are a real threat, how they threaten social reality for Jews, but the reason they are a threat in reality has to do with fantasies about radical antagonism. In this sense, the only thing I am claiming is that you cannot account for antagonism as Real in the terms of just a reflection or an effect of some conflicts in social reality. To return to the notion of the
real Real and reality, the crucial point to bear in mind is that, again, the Lacanian Real is not some kind of a hard kernel: the true reality as opposed to only our symbolic fictions. This is why the notion of the imaginary Real, which I evoked before, is so important. I think that the

Real is in a way a fiction; Real is not some kind of raw nature which is then symbolized. You symbolize nature but in order to symbolize nature, in this very symbolization, you produce an excess or a lack symmetrically: and thats the Real. This is the crucial Lacanian lesson. Its not, as it is sometimes misrepresented, that you havelets
call it naively pre-symbolic reality: you symbolize it and then something cannot be symbolized and that is the Real. No, this is just a kind of stupid reality; we dont even have an ontological name for it. IT is, rather, that the

very gesture of symbolization introduces a gap in reality. It is this gap which is the Real and every positive form of this gap is constituted through fantasy. So again the crucial thing is to avoid any reification of the Real. The Real can be considered almost as a
topological term, a topological twist, and any substantialization of the Real is a kind of perspective illusion. Real is a purely topological category. With reference to the passage from special to general theory of relativity in Einstein, one could put in these terms: through symbolization space itself is curved, and the

Real is the illusion that this curvature of the space is caused by some positive entity. But the whole point about the Real is that the impossibility is not the result of some positive obstacle, but is purely inherent: the impossibility is produced as the very condition of symbolic space. That is the ultimate paradox of the Real. You cannot have it all, not because there is something opposing you, but because of this purely formal, structurally inherent, self-blockade. Objective reality is a mythlanguage can never fully represent the real so we use inevitably use cultural fantasy to cover over holes in our knowledge. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages p 54-55).

At first it is indeed possible to confuse the anti-objectivist dimension of Lacanian theory with the standard social constructionist argumentation recently in vogue. Lacan suggests that social

reality is not a stable referent, a depository of identity, but a semblance created by the play of symbolisation and fantasmatic coherence. Reality is lacking and, at the same time, attempting to hide this lack through the symbolic and imaginary means at its disposal. Social constructionism
is also articulated on the basis of the critique of objectivist and essentialist conceptions of reality. If, in the past, it was thought possible to acquire an objective representation or symbolisation of reality, even of the deep essence of things, constructionism argues that the failure of all these attempts, the

What we accept as (objective) reality is nothing but a social construction with limited duration. Reality is always constructed at the level of meaning and discourse.14 The importance of constructionism is very clearly shown in our representation of nature since nature is something we usually perceive as objectively real. Nature, in everyday discourse, refers to the idea of an objective externality which can
historical and social relativity of human representations of reality, show that this reality is always the result of a process of social construction. be absolutely intelligible through the mediation of sensation and without the intervention of social meaning. This is a belief still widely shared by natural scientists, Green activists and lay people. But

how natural is nature? In order to answer this question social constructionists focus their

attention on the coexistence, in the same social terrain, of different, if not contradictory, representations of nature. It is obvious that in our societies a

Green activist and an industrialist do not share the same conception of nature. Social constructionism is based on the recognition of this social relativity of knowledge. As Berger and Luckmann have pointed out, what is real for a Tibetan monk may not be real for an American businessman (Berger and Luckmann, 1967:15). The same applies to the level of diachrony. Our perception of reality is not only socially relative but also historically relative. As Collingwood
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and Kelsen have shown, the

ancient Greek conception of nature differs from the Renaissance and the modern conception, while the primitive attitude towards nature is markedly different from modern scientific conceptions of nature (Collingwood, 1945; Kelsen, 1946). What social constructionism concludes from the social and historical relativity of human knowledge is that reality is socially constructed; that it is impossible, for example, to pin down once and for all the essence of nature. For humans, reality comes to existence as a meaningful whole only within a network of meaning, within the level of discourse in which the elusive objective reality is articulated with the meaning with
which it becomes visible for us. This shift from a naturalist to a culturalist paradigm signifies a change of perspective: it is not social meaning that is reduced to nature but nature that is

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revealed as socially constructed at the level of meaning. Within the naturalist framework, real nature (as represented in the objective discourse of the naturalist) is accepted as the signified of all social meaning. Social constructionism introduces an important reversal: nature is only a signifier and its signified is society, which sets the rules according to which we understand the world (Eder, 1996:31). Not only nature is a signifier and not an object or a signified, but its own signified, the signified of nature, is not reality (as a hard extra-discursive entity), but the level of construction, of the production of social meaning. The signified is itself a signifier; in a very Lacanian manner
signification refers only to another signification, and so on and so forth. Today that social constructionism is hegemonising the terrain of the social sciences, it is standard textbook knowledge (normal science in Kuhns vocabulary) that nature is increasingly being seen as a social construction.

Social science can no longer suppose the objectivity of nature as an unchanging essence (Delanty, 1997:5).
External reality may exist but it is irrelevant because we do not have access to it. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex Lacan and the Political, Encircling the Political, p.86) MH
Let me illustrate this point by returning to one of the examples I used earlier, that of nature. The crucial question regarding our access to the natural world becomes now:

how can we then, if in fact we can, approach nature before it becomes Nature, the real before it becomes reality, before its symbolisation? This is the question posed by Evernden: how can we return to things before they were captured and explained, in which transaction they ceased to be themselves and became instead functionaries in the world of social discourse [?] (Evernden, 1992:110). How can we encounter the pre-symbolic Other in its radical otherness, an otherness escaping all our representations, if he is always beyond? (ibid.: 118). Well, in fact we cant; what we can do, however, is acknowledge this failure, this constitutive impossibility, within our symbolisations. Trapped as we are within the world of social meaning, all our representations of reality are doomed to fail due to their symbolic character. Every attempt to construct what is impossible to be constructed fails due to our entrapment within the world of construction. The only moment in which we come face to face with the irreducible real beyond representation is when our constructions are dislocated. It is only when Nature, our construction of external reality, meets a stumbling block, something which cannot be symbolically integrated, that we come close to the real of nature. Nature, constructed Nature, is nothing but a mode of concealment, a cloak of abstractions which obscures that

discomforting wildness that defies our paranoid urge to delineate the boundaries of Being (Evernden, 1992:132). Only when these boundaries collapse, in that minute

intermission before we draw new ones, can we sense the unheimlich of real nature. It is in that sense that as argued in Chapter 2Lacanian theory opens the road to a realist constructionism or a constructionist realism; it does so by accepting the priority of a real which is, however, unrepresentable, but, nevertheless, can be encountered in the failure of every construction. One final point before concluding this section: when applied to our own discourse isnt this recognition introducing a certain ethical principle? Recognising at the same time the impossibility of mastering

the real and our obligation to recognise this impossibility through the failure of our attempts to symbolise it, indeed seems to introduce a certain principle which cannot be by-passed. Of necessity this is a principle affecting the
structure of knowledge and science in late modern societies.

The capital T truth can never be accessedonly embracing the Lack, or that impossibility, allows for better understanding of the world. Stavrakakis 7 (Yannis, professor of Ideology and Discourse Analysis Program in the Department of Government at the University of Essex, The Lacanian Left,
Introduction: Locating the Lacanian Left, p. 9-11) MH But wait a minute,

how can the paths of experience, belonging to what is impossible to be adequately represented in the domain of the symbolic (where theory is usually constructed and analysis practiced), the paths belonging to what Lacan names the real, acquire a place within a theory of psychoanalysis or within theory in general? Is not Lacan himself arguing that the real is radically incommensurable with our symbolic constructs? What is needed then is a reorientation of the way we construct our theories and conduct our analyses. Instead of repressing the recognition of their limits, of their ultimate failure to capture the real this is the standard reductionist theoretical strategy we can start incorporating this destabilising element within our theories. Instead of repressing the paradoxical relation, the tension between knowledge and experience that marks our lives, we would be probably better off 59

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acknowledging this tension, repeatedly inscribing the limits of theoretical discourse within its own symbolic fabric. In that sense, beyond the banality of normal science, a science which limits itself within the field of banal experience, Lacanian theory introduces the idea of a permanent scientific revolution. Furthermore, if epistemology can only be political epistemology and politics . . . are one and the same thing, writes Latour (2004: 28) this ethics of theorising has to be situated within its broader political background, one related to the legacy of the democratic revolution. But is this (thoroughly political) mode of theorising possible, and how is it possible? According to Lacan it is. This is exactly because, right from the start, the real, although incommensurable, is not alien to the symbolic.18 If the real is defined as that which resists symbolisation, this is because we can indeed experience the failure of symbolisation to master it. If the question is: How do we know that the real
resists symbolisation in the first place?, the answer must be: Exactly because this resistance, this limit of symbolisation, is shown within the level of symbolisation itself. Psychoanalysis is based on the idea that the real, the real of experience, is shown in certain

effects persisting in representation, although it lacks any final positive representation per se. The limits of every discursive structure (of the conscious articulation of meaning, for example), the limits dividing the discursive from the extra-discursive, can only be shown in relation to this same discursive structure (through the subversion of its meaning). In Kuhns vocabulary, anomaly
appears only against the background provided by the paradigm (Kuhn 1996: 65). Hence Freuds focus on the formations of the unconscious: dreams, slips of the tongue, symptoms, and the like the places where ordinary conscious meaning is distorted or disrupted and negativity acquires a paradoxical and perplexing positive embodiment (both symbolic and affective). Furthermore, psychoanalysis

argues that it is possible to enact the symbolic gestures, the modes of

positivisation, that can encircle these moments of showing or resurfacing of the real; otherwise the talking cure itself would have no effects at all. The question that remains open, of course, is what is the nature of these symbolic gestures. It is not so much a question of if as a question of how. Now, it is clear that Lacan believes that, in the first instance, it

is possible to escape from the illusion of theoretical closure and analytical reduction and approach the real by means of a study of paradox and bizarre representational structures such as those found in topology: the Borromean knot,19 for example, is capable of showing a certain real (XX: 133). In his 19723 seminar, Encore, he makes it clear that the real can only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse of formalisation (XX: 93). It is through the failures of symbolisation the play of paradox, the areas of inconsistency and incompleteness that it becomes possible to grasp the limits, the points of impasse, of dead-end, which show the real yielding to the symbolic (Lacan in Lee 1990: 171). Lacans neologisms and statements like The Woman
does not exist or There is no sexual relation attempt to reproduce this kind of paradoxical encircling of impossibility, this new orientation in theorising. As Nasio has put it, Lacans formula there is no sexual relation is precisely an attempt to delineate the real, to trace or delimit the lack of the signifier of sex in the unconscious. In that sense

theoretical work is not reduced simply to stating here is the real that is unknown, but involves an attempt to delimit, to write the limits of, the real (Nasio 1998: 112). This is, then, the Lacanian position, which underlies the epistemological and theoretical orientation of the present book.20 Although we can never fully symbolise the real of experience in itself, it is possible to encircle (even in a metaphorical way) the limits it poses to signification and representation, the limits it poses to our theories. It is

possible to become alert to the modes of positivisation these limits acquire beyond the fantasmatic reduction of negativity to positivity, of non-identity to identity, of the real to reality. Although it is impossible to touch the real, to master experience fully, it is possible to encircle this impossibility, exactly because this impossibility is always emerging within symbolisation, within a theoretical terrain. This is not to say, of course, that such an encircling can ever be total; on the contrary, insofar as this strategy is also articulated at the symbolic level, it is doomed to fail. It remains, though, open to this failure, to the ontological trace of its own contingency. It assumes the responsibility of this limit, thereby highlighting the ethical dimension of the knowledge/experience dialectics. This has nothing to do, however, with some kind of nihilistic, even masochistic,

acceptance of passivity and failure. Why? Not least because the registering of the limits of understanding allows for a better, or rather a different, type of understanding: one of the things we must guard most against is to understand too much . . . it is on the basis of a kind of refusal of understanding that we push open the door of analytic understanding (II: 265). Only through the assumption of this failure can theory remain open to the truth of experience. The point, in other words, is not to endorse the absence of knowledge, nihilistically celebrating its disintegration, but rather to adopt a position of docta ignorantia, a knowledge about the limits of knowledge, a profound awareness of the significance of not-knowing (Nobus and Quinn 2005: 25). Which
brings us back to Lacans statement quoted earlier. It is impossible to speak the whole truth. Nevertheless, one needs to try. Not in the hope that he or she will eventually manage to say it all; on the contrary, fully assuming the failure of our own words to say it: it is through this very impossibility that truth holds onto the real. It is this solid orientation which, as we shall see throughout this text, underlies the continuous and often radical shifts marking Lacans trajectory with regard to his views on affect, desire, and so on.

Political fantasy is all we havethere is no access to the really real so all that we can do is play with pieces of the fantasy. Zizek 2 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Welcome to the Desert of
the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, Passions of the Real, Passions of Semblance, p. 17-8) MH The fact that the September 11 attacks were the stuff of popular fantasies long before they actually took place provides yet another case of the twisted logic of dreams: it is easy to account for the fact that poor people around the world dream about becoming Americans - so what do the well-to-do Americans, immobilized in their well-being, dream about? About a global catastrophe that would shatter their lives - why? This is what psychoanalysis is about: to explain why, in the midst of wellbeing, we are haunted by nightmarish visions of catastrophes. This paradox also indicates how we should grasp Lacan's notion of 'traversing the fantasy' as the concluding moment of the psychoanalytic treatment. This notion may seem to fit perfectly the

common-sense idea of what psychoanalysis should do: of course it should liberate us from the hold of idiosyncratic fantasies, and enable us to confront reality as it really is! However, this, precisely, is what Lacan does not have in mind - what he aims at is almost the exact opposite. In our daily

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Updated Lacan K 61 existence, we are immersed in 'reality' (structured and supported by the fantasy), and this immersion is disturbed by symptoms which bear witness to the fact that another, repressed, level of our psyche resists this immersion. To 'traverse the fantasy' therefore, paradoxically, means fully identifying oneself with the fantasy - namely, with the fantasy with structures the excess that resists our immersion in daily reality; or, to quote a succinct formulation by Richard Boothby: 'Traversing the fantasy' thus does not mean that the subject somehow abandons its involvement with fanciful caprices and accommodates itself to a pragmatic 'reality,' but precisely the opposite: the subject is submitted to that effect of the symbolic lack that reveals the limit of everyday reality. To traverse the fantasy in the Lacanian sense is to be more profoundly claimed by the fantasy than ever, in the sense of being brought into an ever more intimate relation with that real core of the fantasy that transcendslmagmg. 10 Boothby is right to emphasize the Janus-like structure of a fantasy: a fantasy is simultaneously pacifying, disarming (providing an imaginary scenario which enables us to endure the abyss of the Other's desire) and shattering, disturbing, inassimilable into our reality. The ideologico-political dimension of this notion of 'traversing the fantasy' was dearly revealed by the unique role the rock group Top Lista
Nadrealista (The Top List of'the Surrealists) played during the Bosnian war in the besieged town of Sarajevo: their ironic performances - which, in the midst of war and hunger, satirized the predicament of Sarajevo's population - acquired a cult status not only in the counterculture, but also among citizens of Sarajevo in general (the group's weekly TV show went on throughout the war, and was extremely popular). Instead of bemoaning the Bosnians' tragic fate, they daringly mobilized all the cliches about the 'stupid Bosnians' which were commonplace in Yugoslavia, fully identifying with them - the point thus made was that the path, of true solidarity leads through direct confrontation with the obscene racist fantasies which circulated in the symbolic space of Bosnia, through playful identification with them, not 10 Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher, New York: Routledge 2001, pp.275-6. through the denial of these obscenities because they do not represent people as they 'really are'. This means that the dialectic of

semblance and Real cannot be reduced to the rather elementary fact that the virtualization of our daily lives, the experience that we are living more and more in an artificially constructed universe, gives rise to an irresistible urge to 'return to the Real', to regain firm ground in some 'real reality'. The Real which returns has the status of another semblance: precisely because it is real, that is, on account of its traumatic / excessive character, we are unable to integrate it into (what we experience as) our reality, and are therefore compelled to experience it as a nightmarish apparition. This is what the compelling image of the collapse of the WTC was: an image, a semblance, an 'effect', which, at the same
time, delivered 'the thing itself'. This 'effect of the Real' is not the same as what Roland Barthes, way back in the 1960s, called leffet du reel: it is, rather, its exact opposite: leffet de l'irreel. That is to say: in contrast to the Barthesian leffet du reel, in which the text makes us accept its fictional product as 'real'. Usually we
say that we should not mistake fiction for reality - remember the postmodern doxa according to which 'reality' is a discursive product, a symbolic fiction which we misperceive as a substantial autonomous entity. We should be able to discern, in what we experience as fiction, the hard kernel of the Real which we are able to sustain

only if we fictionalize it. In short, we should discern which part of reality is 'transfunctionalized' through fantasy, so that, although it is part of reality, it is perceived in a fictional mode. (This, of course, brings us back to the old Lacanian notion that, while animals can deceive by presenting what is false as true, only humans (entities inhabiting the symbolic space) can deceive by presenting what is true as false.) And this insight also allows us to return to the example of cutters: if the true opposite of the Real is reality, what if, then, what they are actually escaping from when they cut themselves is not simply the feeling of unreality, of the artificial virtuality of our lifeworld, but the Real itself which explodes in the guise of uncontrolled hallucinations which start to haunt us once we lose our anchoring in reality?

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at: nihilism
Recognizing the impossibility of resolving all social tensions does not slide into nihlism. It the beginning of radically democratic politics. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 126-127).
Simply put, modern

societies are faced with an irreducible unbridgeable gap between a universal pole the need for a force which acts in the name of the whole communityand the particularism of all social forces (Laclau, 1991:59). This gap is not produced by democracy; it precedes democracy. As a matter of fact it is exactly what makes
democracy possible: The recognition of the constitutive nature of this gap and its political institutionalisation is the starting point of modern democracy (Laclau, 1994:8). In that sense the

irreducibility of this gap should not be viewed as a source of disappointment or resentment, feelings fuelling an aporia that can clearly lead to totalitarian or particularist identifications, the results of which can only be catastrophic. On the contrary, this gap should be viewed as opening the optimistic possibility of democracy as opposed to totalitarianism or radical fragmentation;3 a possibility that rests on the recognition of the constitutive character of this gap, this division, the inherent disharmony between universalism and particularism, community and individual, the government and the governed, etc. Democracy depends on an originary disharmony or disorder. The demos is at the same time the name of a community and of its division (Ranciere, 1992:3).
Up to now in this chapter I have tried to show that the historical specificity and uniqueness of modern democracy, its difference from totalitarianism and fragmentation and its potential efficacy in mediating between these two opposed tendencies that characterise modern societies, depends on the recognition and preservation of the emptiness in the locus of power, on the

recognition of a gapa constitutive divisionat the heart of society and on the institutionalisation of this division. No one, however, can deny that such an understanding of democracy raises an important ethical issue. The goals of traditional ethical discourse are radically overturned; instead of a utopian harmony we are meant to legitimise disharmony and recognise division. Thus the disappointment with democracy is revealed as a deeply ethical problem. Democracy has to show that recognising division and institutionalising social lack, far from being detrimental and intolerable both at the subjective and the collective/objective levelthis is a common misperception is, in fact, opening an ethically satisfactory way beyond the barrier of traditional ethics. It is in that sense that Connolly asserts that what democracy needs is an ethics of disharmonyan ethics compatible with the antiutopian ambiguities of democracy. Connolly seems to be in agreement here with Mouffes call for a democratic ethos. They are both also close to Touraines idea of the need for a new democratic culture beyond all semi-modern (if we want to use Ulrich Becks vocabulary) or even antimodern reoccupations of fantasmatic politics. It is this democratic ethos or culture that is associated with modernity because real modernity is based on the disappearance of the One, on the elimination of all utopian principles used to define a unitary harmonious society (Touraine, 1997:147). In the rest of this chapter, I will argue that the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacanian ethics, seem to be the most likely candidate for the job. Our alternative is the opposite of political nihlism. Institutionalizing the lack and abandoning utopianism allows for the creation of radically democratic politics. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 119-121 ).
One final point before concluding our argumentation in this chapter. There is a question which seems to remains open. It is the following: if we resist the reoccupation put forward by Homer and others does that mean that we accept the supposed political impotence of psychoanalytic political theory? Assuming that psychoanalytically inspired political theory is based on the recognition of the political as an encounter with the real (although he doesnt formulate it in exactly these terms), Rustin argues that it seems likely that a politics constructed largely on this principle will generate paranoid-schizoid states of mind as its normal psychic condition. If we prioritise the negative what kind of progressive political or social project can be built if the positivethat is concepts, theories, norms and consistent techniquesis to be refused as innately inauthentic? (Rustin, 1995:2413). Political impotence seems to be the logical outcome. Homers argument seems finally vindicated. Yet this conclusion is accurate only if we identify progressive political action with traditional fantasmatic utopian politics. This is, however, a reductionist move par excellence. This idea, and Homers whole argumentative construction, is based on the foreclosure of another political possibility which is clearly situated beyond any reoccupations and is consistent with psychoanalytic theory instead of deforming it. This is the possibility of a post-fantasmatic or less-fantasmatic politics. The best example is democratic politics. It is true that democracy is an essentially contested term and that the struggle for a final decontestation of its meaning constitutes a fundamental characteristic of modern societies. It is also true that in the past these attempts at decontestation were articulated within an essentialist, foundationalist framework, that is to say, democracy was conceived as a natural law, a natural right, or even as something guaranteed by divine providence. Today, in our postmodern terrain, these foundations are no longer valid. Yet democracy did not share the fate of its various foundations. This is because democracy cannot be reduced to any of these fantasmatic positive contents. As John Keane, among others, has put it, democracy is not based on or guided by a certain positive, foundational, normative principle (Keane, 1995:167). On the contrary, democracy

is based on the recognition of

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the fact that no such principle can claim to be truly universal, on the fact that no symbolic social construct can ever claim to master the impossible real. Democracy entails the acceptance of antagonism, in other words, the recognition of the fact that the social will always be structured around a real impossibility which cannot be sutured. Instead of attempting this impossible suture of the social entailed in every utopian or quasi- utopian discourse, democracy envisages a social field which is unified by the recognition of its own constitutive impossibility. As Chaitin points out, democracy provides a concrete example of what we would call a post- fantasmatic or less-fantasmatic politics:
most significant [in terms of Lacans importance for literary, ethical and cultural theory and political praxis], perhaps, is the new light his analysis of the interaction of the universal and the particular has begun to shed on the question of maintaining a democratic social order which can safeguard universal human rights while protecting the difference of competing political and ethnic groups. (Chaitin, 1996:11) Thus, a whole political project, the by Homer.21 Today, it seems that we

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project of radical democracy, is based not on the futile fantasmatic suture of the lack in the Other but on the recognition of its own irreducibility.20 And this is a political possibility totally neglected have the chance to overcome or limit the consequences of traditional fantasmatic politics. In that sense, the collapse of utopian politics should not be the source of resentment, disappointment or even nostalgia for a supposedly lost harmony. On the contrary, it is a development that enhances the prospects for radicalising modern democracy. But this cannot be done for as long as the ethics of harmony are still hegemonic. What we need is a new ethical framework. This cannot be an ethics of
harmony aspiring to realise a fantasy construction; it can only be an ethics that is articulated around the recognition of the ultimate impossibility of such an idea and follows this recognition up to its politicaland, in fact, democraticconsequences. In the next chapter I will try to show that Lacanian other psychoanalytic institutions (the cole Freudienne de Paris was, in certain of its aspects, an extremely democratic society) nor because psychoanalysis is stigmatised or banned in almost all anti-democratic regimes. Beyond these superfluous approaches,

theory is absolutely crucial in such an undertaking. Not only because some Lacanian societies tend to be more democratic than Lacanian ethics can offer a non-fantasmatic grounding for radical democracy. Accepting that utopianism is impossible is not nihilism. It is the first step in creating a radically democratic politics. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University
of Essex, pages 110-112).

Does not, however, this acceptance of the impossibility of utopia entail the danger of a de facto legitimisation of the existing socio-ideological order? This seems to be Paul Ricoeurs fear since for him the judgement of
ideology is always the judgement from a utopia (Ricoeur, 1986:1723). Ricoeur, although critical of Mannheims inability to solve the problem of the contrast to a, more or less, objectively perceived reality, albeit a changing and relational one, builds on his idea to contrast utopia to ideology, and particularly on his idea that ideology serves a certain social order while utopia shatters it (Mannheim, 1991). According to this point of view, if the central function of ideology is integration, the preservation of the established status quo, the central function of utopia is exploring the possible. Utopian constructions question the present social order; utopia is an imaginative variation on the nature of power, the family, religion, and so on. We are forced to experience the contingency of the social order.... The intention of utopia is to change to shatterthe present order.... Here Ricoeur builds on a sentiment of Mannheims that the latter was not able to incorporate into his theory, that the death of utopia would be the death of society. A society without utopia would be dead, because it would no longer have any project, any prospective goals. (Taylor, 1986:xxi) With utopia, then, we experience the contingency of order. This is, for Ricoeur, the main value of utopias. At a certain historical period, when everything is blocked by systems which although failed seem unbeatable this is his appreciation of the presenthe sees utopia as our only recourse. For him, it is not only an escape, but also, and most importantly, an arm of critique (Ricoeur, 1986:300). In that sense, Ricoeurs solution to the aporia of contemporary politics is the

reinvigoration of the utopian operation. But such a reinvigoration entails the danger of producing new arch-enemies, new Jews. This seems to be a structural risk inscribed in the kernel of the utopian operation. In other words, what Ricoeur does not see is that utopia constitutes an ideological critique of ideology (Marin, 1984:196), providing no solution whatsoever to the misery and injustice entailed in our social arrangements and political orders. What should not be neglected however in Ricoeurs standpoint is the centrality of the element of hope. No doubt, a society without hope is a dead society. Yet, in reality, to eliminate the element of hope from human life is not only undesirable but also impossible. As Jacques Derrida has put it:
There is no language without the performative dimension of the promise, the minute I open my mouth I am in the promise. Even if I say I dont believe in truth or whatever, the minute I open my mouth there is a believe me at work. Even when I lie, and perhaps especially when I lie, there is a believe me in play. And this I promise you that I am speaking the truth is a messianic a priori, a promise which, even if it is not kept, even if one knows it cannot be kept, takes place and qua promise is messianic. (Derrida, 1996:823)

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In addition, for Derrida, this element of hope is not necessarily utopian: I would not call this attitude utopian. The messianic experience of which I spoke takes place here and now; that is the fact of promising and speaking is an event that takes place here and now and is not utopian (ibid.).

Can we have passion in politics without holocausts? Furthermore, is it possible to have a politics of hope, a politics of change without utopia? The experience of the democratic revolution permits a certain optimism. Democratisation is certainly a political project of hope. But democratic discourse is not (or should not be) based on the vision of a utopian harmonious society. It is based on the recognition of the impossibility and the catastrophic consequences of such a dream. What differentiates democracy from other political forms of society is the legitimisation of conflict and the refusal to eliminate it through the establishment of an authoritarian harmonious order. Within this framework the antagonistic diversity between different conceptions of the good is not seen
Is it then possible to retain this element of hope without incorporating it into a utopian vision? as something negative that should be eliminated, but as something to be valued and celebrated. This requires the presence of institutions that establish a specific dynamic between consensus and dissent...this is why

democratic politics cannot aim towards harmony and reconciliation. To believe that a final resolution of conflict is
eventually possible, even when it is envisaged as asymptotic approaching to the regulative idea of a free unconstrained communication, as in Habermas, is to put the pluralist democratic project at risk.

Democratic politicsand politics in generalcan never eliminate conflict and dislocation, antagonism and division. The aim is rather to establish unity within an environment of conflict and diversity; to create a thoroughly doubtful society, beset by productive self-doubt, a society that traverses its utopian mirror image by identifying with its supposed enemy (Beck, 1997:169). In that sense, understanding and accepting the nature of democratic politics requires accepting the anti-utopian dimension of antagonism and dislocation, the constitutivity of the political qua encounter with the real. Today, the hegemonic appeal of this democratic anti-utopian hope
depends on the creation of a democratic ethos: the real issue is not to find arguments to justify the rationality and universality of liberal democracy...what is needed is the creation of a democratic ethos.15 The

emergence and maintenance of democratic forms of identity is a matter of identification with this democratic ethos, an ethos associated with the mobilisation of passions and sentiments, the multiplication of practices, institutions and language games providing the conditions of possibility for the radicalisation of democracy (Mouffe, 1996b:58).16 But this is not an identification with a utopian image, it is an identification entailing the acceptance of the impossibility of attaining such a goal, it is an identification with the symptom in the Lacanian sense of the word. Isnt it something worth fighting for? Yet, before answering this
question, before developing our argument for this psychoanalytic grounding of modern democracy, we have to deal with the argumentation put forward against this kind of confluence between Lacan and the political (democracy being an order based on the recognition and institutionalisation of the political par excellence).

Nihilism is the result of the continued failure of the politics of utopia. Lacanian politics offers us a way out Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, Lacan and the Political, Beyond the Fantasy of Utopia p.99100)MH

Our age is clearly an age of social fragmentation, political disenchantment and open cynicism characterised by the decline of the political mutations of modern universalisma universalism that, by replacing God with Reason, reoccupied the ground of a pre-modern aspiration to fully represent and master the essence and the totality of the real. On the political level this universalist fantasy took the form of a series of utopian constructions of a reconciled future society. The fragmentation of our present social terrain and cultural milieu entails the collapse of such grandiose fantasies.1 Today, talk about utopia is usually characterised by a certain ambiguity. For some, of course, utopian constructions are still seen as positive results of human creativity in the sociopolitical sphere: utopia is the expression of a desire for a better way of being (Levitas, 1990:8). Other, more suspicious views, such as the one expressed in Marie Berneris book Journey through Utopia, warntaking into account experiences like the Second World Warof the dangers entailed in trusting the idea of a perfect, ordered and regimented world. For some, instead of being how can we realise our utopias?, the crucial question has become how can we prevent their final realisation?. [How can] we return to a non-utopian society, less perfect and more free (Berdiaev in Berneri,
1971:309).2 It

is particularly the political experience of these last decades that led to the dislocation of utopian sensibilities and brought to the fore a novel appreciation of human finitude, together with a growing suspicion of all grandiose political projects and the meta-narratives traditionally associated with them (Whitebook, 1995:75). All these developments, that is to say the crisis of the utopian imaginary, seem however to leave politics without its prime motivating force: the politics of today is a politics of aporia. In our current political terrain, hope seems to be replaced by pessimism or even resignation. This is a result of the crisis in the dominant modality of our political imagination (meaning utopianism in its various forms) and of our inability to resolve this crisis in a productive way.3 In this chapter, I will try to show that Lacanian theory provides new angles through which we can reflect on our historical experience of utopia and reorient our political imagination beyond its suffocating strait-jacket. Lets start our
exploration with the most elementary of questions: what is the meaning of the current crisis of utopia? And is this crisis a development to be regretted or cherished? In order to answer these questions it is crucial to enumerate the conditions of possibility and the basic characteristics of utopian thinking.

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Updated Lacan K 65 First of all it seems that the need for utopian meaning arises in periods of increased uncertainty, social instability and conflict, when the element of the political subverts the fantasmatic stability of our political reality. Utopias are generated by the surfacing of grave antagonisms and dislocations in the social field. As Tillich has put it all utopias strive to negate the negativein human existence; it is the negative in that existence which makes the idea of utopia necessary (Tillich in Levitas, 1990:103). Utopia then is one of the possible responses to the ever-present negativity, to the real antagonism which is constitutive of human experience. Furthermore, from the time of Mores Utopia (1516) it is conceived as an answer to the negativity inherent in concrete political antagonism. What is, however, the exact nature of this response? Utopias are images of future human communities in which these antagonisms and the dislocations fuelling them (the element of the political) will be forever resolved, leading to a reconciled and harmonious worldit is not a coincidence that, among others, Fourier names his utopian community Harmony and that the name of the Owenite utopian community in the New World was New Harmony. As Marin has put it, utopia sets in view an imaginary resolution to social contradiction ; it is a simulacrum of synthesis which dissimulates social antagonism by projecting it onto a screen representing a harmonious and immobile equilibrium (Marin, 1984:61). This final resolution is the essence of the utopian promise.

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at: realism
Realism and deterrence fail because they do not account for psychological realities.
AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS, pdf, accessed July 7, 2011, ZR] Obstacles to collaboration between psychoanalysis and diplomacy Given the pervasive influence of Realpolitik on governments, it is not surprising that politicians, diplomats or political scientists do not embrace psychoanalytic observations with open arms. Since Ludwig von Rochau (1853) introduced the concept of realpolitik, this idea has evolved, in general, to mean the rational evaluation and realistic assessment of the options available to ones large group and its enemies without considering psychological processes. Following the spectacular success of Realpolitik practitioner Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), first Chancellor and architect of the German Empire, realism dominated political thinking for the next century. The international relations scholar, John A. Vasquez (1986), suggested that Realpolitiks tenacity in the twentieth century was a direct result of the failure of Woodrow Wilson and other idealists to prevent World War I: [I]dealists were perceived as exaggerating the influence of reason by assuming a fundamental harmony of interests, when in fact, according to realists, there are often conflicts of interest that can only be resolved by a struggle for power (Vasquez, 1986, p. 2-3) Though the idealist-realist debate persisted through the decades between the wars, the 1940s saw that dispute decisively resolved in favor of realism, which would dominate much Cold War-era theory and practice. Hans J. Morgenthaus 1948 work, Politics Among Nations, is especially recognized as widely influential in this period.

Volkan 3 [Vamik D. M.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry University of Virginia, PSYCHOANALYSIS IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

The influence of Realpolitik gave birth to what became known, especially in the United States, as rational actor models of politics and diplomacy. Eventually, shortcomings of various rational actor models became evident. For example, on Yom Kippur (October 6, 1973), Anwar Sadat surprised both Israeli and U.S. military intelligence by launching a massive attack on Israel across the Suez Canal. Based on rational actor models, policy analysts did not believe that an Egyptian offensive could be launched before 1975, and so regarded the Egyptian troop movements reported in September 1973 as mere exercises. Thus Egyptian forces
were able to overrun poorly manned Israeli defenses and drive deep into the Sinai, though Sadats army ultimately suffered heavy losses before a ceasefire was declared later that year. Israels

air superiority and credible commitment to engage fully any attacker should have provided an effective deterrent, but Sadat was not deterred. Sadats personality organization played a key role in the initiation of the Yom Kippur War. Accordingly, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, some political scientists and even some government decision-makers and diplomats began to borrow concepts from cognitive psychology to explain faulty decision-making (Volkan, et al, 1998). Still, they did not look to psychoanalysis for insights. Exploration of shared, unconscious forces was avoided despite a long history of attempts to introduce psychoanalysis into politics and diplomacy, including the efforts of Harold Lasswell
(1927, 1930), a pioneer in the study of psychosocial warfare. Other difficulties that complicate collaboration between psychoanalysts and practitioners and scholars of politics and international relations come from psychoanalysis itself. I sensed these difficulties myself as I became more and more involved in collaborative work with scholars and practitioners of other disciplines. I noted that the difficulties within psychoanalytic discipline that hindered collaboration between psychoanalysis and diplomacy could be divided into various inter-related categories. As expected, at first it was difficult for me to realize these obstacles and define them. But slowly I was able to free myself from some established psychoanalytic assumptions.

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at: robinson
Robinson only has it half rightLacan does see utopian political projects as impossible. But, he has the political implications backwards. If a harmonious political order isimpossible, then only radically democratic politics can institutionalize the lack. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University
of Essex, pages 94-95).
nature. It Thus we are brought to the second difficulty. If the first difficulty was of an epistemological and theoretical nature the second is of an ethico-political

is not concerned with the possibility of showing and encircling the real within the symbolic, but with the political desirability of such a move; is it desirable to encircle the political within politics?
What changes in our political reality would such an attempt inspire? Are these changes ethically justified? This whole discussion has to do, first of all, with the supposedly reactionary nature of Lacans views. This criticism, reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattaris critique of the reactionary character of psychoanalysis (both Lacanian and non-Lacanian) (Elliott, 1994:31), and staged, to give only a first example, by Anthony Elliott in his Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition, is based on the fact that Lacan posits an inevitable human condition which is the no-exit of lack and antagonism (Elliott, 1992:191). Hence, to

move to another example from contemporary critical theorisation, due to his pessimist account of the human condition Lacan has been accused of the obscuring of political choices and the authoritarianism implicit in his anti-humanist stance (Frosh, 1987:271). Well, it is true; for Lacan there is no Aufhebung, there is no utopian solution to human suffering: when one gives rise to two (quand un fait
(XX:86).

deux), there is never a return. They dont revert to making one again, even if it is a new one. The Aufhebung is one of philosophys pretty little dreams

The elimination of lack through a definite symbolisation of the real is impossible. Yet this is the

condition of possibility of our freedom because it means that no order, no matter how repressive it might be, can acquire a stable character: Lacans

formulation of what might be termed a circular causality between the symbolic and the real makes it possible to account for the fact that individual subjects are produced by discourse and yet manage to retain some capacity for resistance (Bracher, 1994:1). Besides, the ethics of psychoanalysis, as formulated in the Lacanian tradition, point to the possibility and the ethical superiority of a symbolic recognition and institutionalisation of the political moment of real lack and this opens a huge field of creation of which the democratic revolution constitutes only one exampleperhaps the most important.
Why then have attempts to demonstrate the centrality of the Lacanian problematic in the construction of an ethico-political project for our times and I am mainly thinking of the work of iek and Laclau and Mouffe generated so much criticism? Take the example of Bellamy, Butler and Lane. Bellamys concern is articulated at the subjective level: Can certain forms of political compromise (a collective we that must be formed out of diversity and conflict) be usefully characterised as the overcoming of psychic conflict? (Bellamy, 1993:35). Butlers concern is articulated at the social level. Her fear is that stressing the irreducibility and constitutivity of antagonism (or, more properly, political dislocation qua encounter with the real) may preclude the very possibility of a future rearticulation of that boundary which is central to the democratic project that iek, Laclau and Mouffe promote (Butler, 1994:2067). In a similar vein, Lane asks why does the left continue to advance contingency and alienation as if both were not simply a psychic condition par excellence but also a reason for celebration? Why does the argument that society is radically incomplete and now alarmingly fraying generate a certain optimism[?]. (Lane, 1996:115) According to my reading, Bellamy, Butler and Lane are questioning the value of recognising the effects and the structural causality of the real in society;

Even if this move is possibleencircling the unavoidable political modality of the realis it really desirable, is it ethically and politically satisfactory? The fear behind all these statements is common; it is that the stress on the political qua encounter with the real precludes the possibility of presenting a more or less stable (present or future) ground for ethics and democracy, that it undermines their universal character and the possibility of any final reconciliation at either the subjective or the social level. Frosh is summarising this fear propos of the issue of human rights: if humanism is a fraud [as Lacan insists] and there is no fundamental human entity that is to be valued in each person [an essence of the psyche maybe?], one is left with no way of defending the basic rights of the individual (Frosh,
instead of the political they prioritise politics, in fact traditional fantasmatic politics. This seems to be the kernel of their argument: 1987:137). In the two final chapters of this book I shall argue that the reason behind all these fears is the continuing hegemony of an ethics of harmony. Against such a position the

ethics of the real entails a recognition of the irreducibility of the real and an attempt to institutionalise social lack. Thus it might be possible to achieve an ethically and politically satisfactory institution of the social field beyond the fantasy of closure which has proved so problematic, if not catastrophic. In other words, the best way to organise the social might be one which recognises the ultimate impossibility around which it is always structured.
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Their Robinson evidence begs the questionif we are right about the nature of the political, then we are the only means to create real change. Parker 4 [IanProfessor in the Discourse Unit at Manchester Metropolitan University and author of books on psychoanalysis, discourse, politics
and culture, SLAVOJ ZIZEK A Critical Introduction, p 62-63, ZR]

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There is clearly a political aspect to this subversive role of psychoanaly- sis. There is a connection with radical politics which the early psychoanalytic movement in Freuds day had often made and with a radical political understanding of the way contemporary institutions try to tame psychoanalysis. There is also a connection with what we could see as a radical personal politics of self-understanding and transformation that the analysand embarks upon. Lacanian psychoanalysis is the practice of that selfunderstanding and transformation, and that is why it avoids quick fixes, suggestion or the attempt to bring about identification between
analysand and analyst. This is why, although

Lacanian psychoanalysis includes therapeutic moments, it goes far beyond the usual psychotherapeutic aims of developing coping strategies or recasting problems into opportunities by way of more positive thinking. Psychoanalysis is the space for de- constructing how someone copes and how their problems are bound up with the way they think. For Zizek, another homologous space is that of cultural critique and political action. When Freudian concepts are embedded in language, psychoanalytic understanding of the relationship between what is forbidden, the truth and enjoyment can become a tool to tackle ideology. For Lacan in his later writing, for example, and for Zizek, the super-ego operates not only through prohibition but also through an obscene injunction to enjoy. It incites and contains jouissance, and it then functions as an incitement to ironic distance that actually confirms the hold of the system upon individuals; thus the strategy of overidentification elaborated by groups like Laibach in Slovenia is driven by a psychoanalytic
under- standing of the way desire is structured in the service of ideology: by bringing to light the obscene superego underside of the system, overidentification suspends its efficiency.22

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at: perm
The permutation is impossible. Our alternative relies on admiting the failure of utopianismto combine that with utopianism is to eliminate the radical potential of the alternative. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 116-117). Since, however, Lacanian political theory aims at bringing to the fore, again and again, the lack in the Other, the same lack that utopian fantasy attempts to mask, it would be self-defeating, if not absurd, to engage itself in utopian or quasi-utopian fantasy construction. Is it really possible and consistent to point to the lack in the Other and, at the same time, to attempt to fill it in a quasi-utopian move? Such a question can
also be posed in ethical or even strategic terms. It could be argued of course that Homers vision of a psychoanalytic politics does not foreclose the recognition of the impossibility of the social but that in his schema this recognition, and the promise to eliminate it (as part of a quasi-utopian regulative principle) go side by side; that in fact this political promise is legitimised by the conclusions of psychoanalytic political theory. But this coexistence is nothing new. This

recognition of the impossibility of society, of an antagonism that cross-cuts the social field, constitutes the starting point for almost every political ideology. Only if presented against the background of this disorder the final harmonious order promised by a utopian fantasy acquires hegemonic force. The problem is that all this schema is based on the elimination of the first moment, of the recognition of impossibility. The centrality of political dislocation is always repressed in favour of the second moment, the utopian promise. Utopian fantasy can sound appealing only if presented as the final solution to the problem that constitutes its starting point. In that sense, the moment of impossibility is only acknowledged in order to be eliminated. In Marx, for instance, the constitutivity of class struggle is recognised only to be eliminated in the future communist society. Thus, when Homer says that he wants
to repeat Marxs error today he is simply acknowledging that his psychoanalytic politics is nothing but traditional fantasmatic politics articulated with the use of a psychoanalytic vocabulary.

We cannot both accept that utopianism is impossible and endorse it. The crisis highlighted by the affirmative is an opportunity to reject the fantasmic ideal of harmony. Stavrakakis, 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 109-110). What is at stake in the Lacanian conception of fantasy is, as we have already pointed out, enjoyment (jouissance). If the effects of the normative idealist or Enlightenment-style critique of racism are severely limited, if this critique is not enough (Lipowatz, 1995a:213), this is because, to use one of Sloterdijks formulations, it has remained more naive than the consciousness it wanted to expose (Sloterdijk, 1988:3). In its rationality it has exhausted itself. In other words, it didnt take into account that what is at stake here is not rational argumentation but the organisation and administration of enjoyment:
The impotence of the attitude of traditional Enlightenment is best exemplified by the anti-racist who, at the level of rational argumentation, produces a series of convincing reasons against the racist Other, but is nonetheless clearly fascinated by the object of his critiqueand consequently, all his defence disintegrates in the moment of real crisis (when the fatherland is in danger for example). (Sloterdijk, 1988:3) Thus, the

question of la traverse du fantasme, that is to say of how to gain the minimum of distance from the fantasmatic frame that organises our enjoyment, of how to suspend its efficiency, is crucial not only for the concept of the psychoanalytic cure and its conclusion: today, in our era of renewed racist tensions, of universalised anti-Semitism, it is perhaps the foremost political question (iek,
1996a:11718).

In light of this, traversing the fantasy of utopian thought seems to be one of the most important political tasks of our age. The current crisis of utopia is not cause for concern but for celebration. But then why is the politics of today a politics of aporia? There can be only one plausible explanation: just because, in the ethical sphere, the fantasmatic ideal of harmony is still dominant. If we are situated today in a terrain of aporia and frustration it is because we still fantasise something that is increasingly revealed as impossible and catastrophic. Accepting this ultimate impossibility seems to be the only
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way out of this troubling state.

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The permutation failsthe alternative depends upon maintaining distance from the fantasmic politics of utopia. Stavrakakis, 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 118-119).
In fact, articulating

Lacanian theory with fantasmatic politics is equivalent to affirming the irrelevance of Lacanian theory for radical politics since this articulation presupposes the repression of all the political insights implicit in Lacans reading and highlighted in this book. The alleged irrelevance of Lacan for radical politics is also the
argument put forward by Collier in a recent article in Radical Philosophy. Colliers argument is that since it is capitalism that shatters our wholeness and disempowers us (as if without capitalism we would be on the road to utopia; obviously, capitalism occupies the structural position of the antichrist in this sort of leftist preaching), then Lacans theory is, in fact, normalising capitalist damage, precisely because alienation is so deep for Lacan that nothing can be done to eliminate it (Lacan is deeply pessimistic, rejecting cure or happiness as possible goals, my emphasis).19 Thus Lacan has nothing to offer radical politics. Something not entirely surprising since, according to Collier, psychological theory in general has no political implications whatsoever. The conclusion is predictable: Let us go to Freud and Klein for our psychotherapy [Lacan is of course excluded] and to Marx and the environmental sciences for our politics, and not get our lines crossed (Collier, 1998:413). Surprisingly enough this is almost identical with Homers conclusion: Lacanian theory is OK as an analytical tool but let us go back to Marx for our ideological seminar and our utopian catechism! It is clear that from

a Lacanian point of view it is necessary to resist all such reoccupations of traditional fantasmatic politics. At least this is the strategy that Lacan follows on similar occasions. Faced with the alienating dimension of every identification, Lacan locates the end of analysis beyond identification. Since utopian or quasiutopian constructions function through identification it is legitimate, I think, to draw the analogies with the social field. If analysis resists the reoccupation of the traditional strategy of identification although it recognises its crucial, but alienating, role in the formation of subjectivitywhy should psychoanalytic politics, after unmasking the crucial but alienating character of traditional, fantasmatic, identificatory politics, reoccupy their ground? This rationale underlying the Lacanian position is not far away
from what Beardsworth articulates as a political reading of Derrida. For Beardsworth, deconstruction also refuses to implicate itself in traditional politics, in the local sense of politics in Beardsworths terminology: In its affirmative refusal to advocate a politics, deconstruction forms, firstly, an account of why all political projects fail. Since the projection of any decision has ethical implications, deconstruction in fact generalizes what is meant by the political well beyond the local sense of politics. In this sense it becomes a radical critique of institutions. (Beardsworth, 1996:19) Similarly, the

radicality and political importance of the Lacanian critique depends on its ability to keep its distance from fantasmatic politics, from politics in the traditional sense; which is not the same as saying that psychoanalysis is apolitical: in fact, it becomes political precisely by being critical of traditional politics, exactly because, as argued in the previous chapter, the political is located beyond the utopian or quasi-utopian sedimentations of political reality.

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at: rationality good

It is not a question of whether rationality is good or notLacan simly points out that subjectivity based only on individualism and rationality is simply not how the world works. Stavrakakis, 99 (Yannis, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, Lacan and the Political, The Lacanian Subject p.15) MH
. For Lacan it

is true that the philosophers cogito is at the centre of the mirage that renders modern man so sure of being himself even in his uncertainties about himself (E: 165). But this essentialist fantasy, reducing subjectivity to the conscious ego, cannot sustain itself any more: the myth of the unity of the personality, the myth of synthesisall these types of organisation of the objective field constantly reveal cracks, tears and rents, negation of the facts and misrecognition of the most immediate experience (III:8). It is clear that the Freudian discovery of the unconscious, of an agency splitting the subject of this whole tradition, cannot be overlooked; it brings to the fore something that this tradition had to foreclose in order to sustain itself. As Lacan formulates it in the Freudian Thing, as a result of Freuds discovery the very centre of the human being is no longer to be found at the place the humanist tradition had assigned to it (E: 114). It follows that, for Lacan, any project of asserting the autonomy of this essentialist free ego is equally unacceptablewhich is not the same, of course, with promoting heteronomy as a general theoretical or political principle: I designated that the discourse of freedom is essential to modern man insofar as he is structured by a certain conception of his own autonomy. I pointed out its fundamentally biased and incomplete, inexpressible, fragmentary, differentiated, and profoundly delusional character [which should not be confused with psychosis but, nevertheless, operates in the same place] (III:145). Lacan argues that Freuds discovery of the unconscious is more radical than both the Copernican and the Darwinian revolutions in that they both left intact the belief in the identity between human subject and conscious ego. In his view, we owe to Freud the possibility of effecting a subversion of this conception of the subject. It is the subversion of the subject as cogito which, in fact, makes psychoanalysis possible (E: 296): psychoanalysis opposes any philosophy issuing directly
from the cogito (E: 1).2

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at: science good

Absolute knowledge, even through science, is a myth. It is part of an ancient desire to be in total control of the world. Lacanian politics asks us to accept this impossibility. Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, Lacan and the Political, Encircling the Political, p.88-90)MH
In this regard, Lacan is extremely clear. Through this fantasy modern society returns to a state of myth: How is one to return, if not on the basis of a peculiar (special) discourse, to a prediscursive reality? That is the dreamthe dream behind every conception (idea) of knowledge. But it is also what must be considered

Theres no such thing as a prediscursive reality. Every reality is founded and defined by a discourse. (XX:32) In the irreducible character of impossibility, the constitutivity of the real as expressed primarily in the failure of our discursive world and its continuous rearticulation through acts of identification, far from being a postmodern move, reveals the truly modern character of the Lacanian project; instead of a postmodern mysticism it leads to a reorientation of science and knowledge. Recognising the constitutivity of the real does not entail that we stop symbolising; it means that we start trying to incorporate this recognition within the symbolic itself, in fact it means that since the symbolic entails lack as such, we abstain from covering it over with fantasmatic constructs or, if one accepts that we are always trapped within the field of fantasy, that we never stop traversing it. The
mythical.
opposition to such a regressive attitude, Lacanian theory promotes a return to the founding moment of modernity. Recognising guiding principle in this kind of approach is to move beyond fantasy towards a self-critical symbolic gesture recognising the contingent and transient character of every symbolic construct. This is a scientific discourse different from the reified science of standard modernity. I take my lead, in this regard, from Lacans text

Lacan stages a critique of modern science as it has been articulated up to now, that is as a discourse constantly identifying the knowledge it produces with the truth of the real. If the constitutive, nonreducible character of the real introduces a lack into human reality, to our scientific constructions of reality for example, science usually attempts to suture and eliminate this gap. Lacan, for his part, stresses the importance of that which puts in danger this self-fulfilling nature of scientific axioms: the importance of the real, of the element which is not developing according to what we think about it. In that sense, science la Lacan entails the recognition of the structural causality of the real as the element which interrupts the smooth flow of our fantasmatic and symbolic representations of reality. Within such a context, this real, the obstacle encountered by standard science, is
Science and Truth (it is the opening lecture of his 19656 seminar on The Object of Psychoanalysis). In this particular text, Jacques not bypassed discretely but introduced within the theory it can destabilise. The point here is that truth as the encounter with the real is encountered face to face (Fink, 1995a:1401). It is in this sense that psychoanalysis can be described as a science of the impossible, a science that does not repress the impossible real. For Lacan, what is involved in the structuration of the discourse of science is a certain Verwerfung of the Thing which is presupposed by the ideal of absolute knowledge, an ideal which as ENCIRCLING THE POLITICAL 90 everybody knowswas historically proved in the end to be a failure (VII: 131). In other words, we cannot be certain that definite knowledge is attainable. In fact, for Lacan, certainty is not something we should attribute to our knowledge of things. Certainty is a defining characteristic of psychosis. In Lacans view, it constitutes its elementary phenomenon, the basis of delusional belief (III:75). Opening up our symbolic resources to uncertainty is, on the other hand, the only prudent

move we have left. What we can know has to be expressed within the structure of language but this structure has to incorporate a recognition of its
own limits. This is not a development which should cause unease; as Nancy has put it What will become of our world is something we cannot know, and we can no longer believe in being able to predict or command it. But we can act in such a way that this world is a world able to open itself up to its own uncertainty as such. Invention is always without a model and without warranty. But indeed that implies facing up to turmoil, anxiety, even disarray. Where certainties come apart, there too gathers the strength that no certainty can match.

The truthfulness of scientific data is not relevantthe ways in which those conclusions are translated into politics are always mediated by culture and fantasy and are therefore just as open to critique as any other claim. Stavrakakis 7 (Yannis, professor of Ideology and Discourse Analysis Program in the Department of Government at the University of Essex, The Lacanian Left,
Introduction: Locating the Lacanian Left, p. 5-8) MH These last statements, which underlie the epistemological and methodological premises of this text, call for some elaboration. This is a book of theory and theoretically informed analysis; but what kind of theory? How can and how should theory position itself in relation to the experience it desires to analyse?10 And how should it relate to the desire that stands at its own root as an experience? Here, the starting point can only be the constitutive tension between knowledge and experience, a tension

that is neither epiphenomenal nor accidental. On a fairly simple level, the main purpose of knowledge and theory construction seems to be to approach and account for experience and then direct our praxis, that is to say, canalise experience and guide action along ethically sound, truthful, and legitimate channels. This is a very simple almost simplistic and neutral statement. It is a widely shared belief that the main reason for believing scientific theories is that they explain the coherence of our experience. This is, in fact, a quotation from Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmonts now infamous book Intellectual Impostures (Sokal and Bricmont 1998: 55).11 The problem is, however, that theoretical inquiry and scientific discourse

continuously fail to account for, and understand, the totality of our experience, let alone to predict and direct human praxis. Even in Sokal and Bricmonts text, where the holy integrity of science is defended at all cost, the aforementioned statement makes sense only when
experience is reduced to scientific experiments and scientific theories to the best-verified ones; this is again a quotation (ibid.). The problem here is, however, that,

instead of entailing an encounter with the real, scientific experiments are often limited within an already domesticated field of experience, a field of measurements that are already paradigm-determined that is to say, 72

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Updated Lacan K 73 contaminated by the same theory they are called to verify (Kuhn 1996: 126).12 Nevertheless, the verification they provide usually seems enough to sustain the fantasy that the scientific community knows what the world is like, the fantasy that verified theories adequately represent the field of raw experience (p. 5). Besides, this is exactly what permits the word totality to enter into the picture. In this circularity of an already symbolised experience sustaining the fantasy of a closed and accurate order of theory is revealed the nature of what Thomas Kuhn calls normal science. Needless to
say, the constitution of this order is a predominantly political issue; it is not a coincidence that Kuhns account of the historicity of science is articulated using a

political vocabulary, thus revealing its direct relevance for political reflection. The

fantasy of normal science rests on the power given to those who can move back and forth between the reality of raw experience and our socio-political world. These subjects supposed to know, to use a Lacanian formulation13, these few elect, as they themselves see it, are endowed with the most fabulous political capacity ever invented. And what is this supposed capacity? They can make the mute world speak, tell the truth without being challenged, put an end to the interminable arguments through an incontestable form of authority that would stem from things themselves (Latour 2004: 14). One has to agree with Latour that we cannot pass this fairy tale
off as a political philosophy like any other and even less as superior to all others (p. 15). Why? For one reason and here I am advancing a Lacanian line of reasoning because the circularity of this play between theory and experience, knowledge and truth, can be sustained only when something is excluded; what remains outside the equation is the unsymbolised or rather the unsymbolisable part of experience, what always escapes symbolisation and theoretical representation in short, the real as distinct from reality. Theory can only appear as a truthful representation or adequation of experience if the field of experience is reduced to that which is already symbolised, at best, to what is symbolisable according to the prevailing rules of symbolisation: if, in Lacanian terms, the real is reduced to reality (which, according to Lacan, is constructed the lacanian left at the symbolic and imaginary levels, through the signifier and the image). What is disputed here, then, is not that knowledge can be truthful to reality; of course it can. Only this will be a reality already produced through the scientific rules of symbolisation; an already theorised reality. Knowledge can be truthful to the reality of our experience and still miss foreclose, repress or disavow the real of experience, what falls outside the grasp of this reality. It is this exclusion that explains the banality of many scientific theories; and this is true in both natural and social sciences, provided one makes the appropriate translations and modifications. The discourse of science is usually devoted to representing and accounting for this field of domesticated experience, the field of what could be called banal experience.14 One only has to go through a list of PhD titles and abstracts in our universities to become instantly aware of that. There are no surprises here, since the destabilising real is excluded: only the anticipated and usual are experienced, even under circumstances where anomaly is later to be observed (Kuhn 1996: 64). Dealing with banal experience, with the rationalisations grafted on the automatism of natural and social reproduction, theory becomes part of the same banality. In fact, the more successful it is in representing reality the reality of banal experience, the reality of what Latour calls matters of fact, risk-free objects which are supposed to have clear boundaries, a well-defined essence and properties (Latour 2004: 22) the more banalised it becomes. Within the schema of normal science, all encounters with the real, with the anomalous (what violates the paradigm-induced expectations governing normal science), are reduced to the expected (Kuhn 1996: 55).15 This repression, however, can only be temporary. Sooner or later the real re-emerges and dislocates theory. Now matters of fact become matters of concern, paradoxical objects which disturb any fantasy of absolute representation, control and predictability: asbestos, the perfect modernist substance, the magic material, turns into a nightmare of contamination; prions unexpectedly emerge to account for BSE where nothing of the sort was even imaginable in mainstream science (Latour 2004: 224). It is in such moments of disruption of surprises and events (p. 79) that experience qua encounter with the real, to use a Lacanian phrase, makes its presence felt. This can lead to a crisis of normal science and to a scientific revolution although this dramatic impact is not always so visible, being retroactively absorbed by the various self-representations of scientific disciplines. In such encounters we come across a radical scientific of anomaly [which] opens a period in which conceptual categories are adjusted until the initially anomalous has become [again] the anticipated, initiating the hegemony of a new paradigm (Kuhn 1996: 64). It seems that science, if one looks at it more closely, has no memory . . . it

forgets the circuitous paths by which it came into being (E2006: 738). Even Prusiner, the heretic who put forward the revolutionary
prion hypothesis to explain CJD and mad cow disease, was eventually awarded the Nobel prize and his theories gradually acquired the status of a new orthodoxy, becoming increasingly resistant to questioning and dispute. However, the restoration of normality does not mean that the new paradigm is now safe. The reason is simple: isnt it founded on a similar banalisation of the real of experience? Isnt the real always exceeding its normalised representation? If this is the case, normal science is never safe. According to Kuhns schema, it always remains susceptible to crises and scientific revolutions, to the forces of negativity and their partial positivisation/ sedimentation into ever-new orders of (scientific) discourse. The conclusion flows almost naturally: contrary to a popular unconditional Enlightenment optimism, knowledge in general is never adequate; something always escapes. It looks as if theory is a straightjacket unable to contain our vibrant and unpredictable field of real experience. Scientific analysis is revealed as unable to map its frontiers. The real seems to be a terra which wishes to remain incognita.16 Frustrated by its inability to articulate fully the truth of the real in knowledge, science prefers to forget its reliance on its traumatic encounter, it does-not-want-to-know-anything

about the truth as cause (E2006: 742).

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at: accepting lack bad

Failure to accept the lack causes us to pursue strategies of impossible control which culminate in warfare.

Brennan 93 lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences @ Cambridge (Dr. Teresa Brennan, History After Lacan, p. 40-45)
From the beginning,

Lacan had asserted that the lure of spatial identification in the mirror-stage accounts for the mconnaissances that mark the ego in all its structures (Lacan 1949, pp. 46). The mirror-stage identification is an
inverse one, in which the image is outside and opposed to the self; it is, so to speak, a reversal. This spatial lure is an energetic formation which also structures the subject as a rival within itself. Subsequently, its energetic aspect will implicitly, as ever with Lacan who is always implicit, bear on the link between the ego and the environment. Turning here to the mirror-stage as an internal rivalrous structure: the key point here is that this structure not only constitutes the subject-to-bes identity. It is also a precondition for the subjects Oedipal rivalry with the other. Note that this means that an internal

The narcissism of the mirror-stage is inextricably bound up with aggressiveness against this other, and is the locus of the master-slave struggle for recognition that binds the ego as master and the ego as slave one to another.
structure prefigures a similar external one. A psychical reality, or fantasy, pre-dates its subsequent acting out. In steps that are not clear (and to which I return) Lacan discusses this bondage and the aggressiveness it generates in the first four theses of On Aggressivity. He introduces the fifth, final thesis by saying that Such

a notion of aggressivity as one of the intentional coordinates of the human ego, especially relative to the category of space, allows us to conceive of its role in modern neurosis and in the discontents of civilization. (Lacan 1948, p. 25) The fifth thesis is avowedly social. It is about aggression in the present social order (ibid., p. 25). In it, Lacan indicates how the spatial dimensions of the environment and the ego intersect. He seems to be saying that aggression increases in the spatial restrictions of an urban environment. He explicitly refers to the dialectic common to the passions of the soul and the city and to the effects of the ever-contracting living space in which human competition is becoming ever keener (ibid., pp. 267).22 For Lacan the citys spatial restrictions result in needs to escape on the one hand, and an increased social aggressiveness on the other. The
apparent banality of Lacans statement that overcrowding leads to aggressiveness is alleviated in that his account gestures to why overcrowding leads to aggressiveness, and as we shall see, to a territorializing

imperative whereby the ego seeks to make the globe over in its own image. Aggressiveness motivates the drive to dominate not only the earths surface but outer space through psycho-techniques (ibid.). It is also part of a competitive Darwinian ethic which projected the predations of Victorian Society and the economic euphoria that sanctioned for that society the social devastation that it initiated on a planetary scale (ibid., p. 26). It is with Victorian imperialism that the egos era gathers steam. The Darwinian ethic, Lacan notes, presents itself as natural, although its true origins lie in the aggression generated by the masterslave dialectic. In its entirety, On Aggressivity suggests a fundamental connection between the spatial dimension of the ego and the spatial environment. However, the precise nature of this egoic/environmental spatial dialectic needs to be constructed from Lacans allusions. There are some
indications as to how this might be done. To begin explicating them, it is necessary to hark back to Lacans comment on anxiety, and its intersection with the spatial dimension. Lacans introduction of anxiety at that point in the text on aggressiveness appears somewhat ad hoc. Yet he has obliquely referred to anxiety earlier in the same text, through referring to Melanie Klein. Lacans text is dated 1948, a time when Kleins name was associated with the view that anxiety and aggressiveness played a dominant part in very early psychical life.23 Lacan refers to Klein in On Aggressivity when discussing the paranoiac structure of the ego and the especial delusion of the misanthropic belle me, throwing back onto the world the disorder out of which his being is composed (Lacan 1948, p. 20). After referring to Kleins work, Lacan turns to aggressiveness and its relation to narcissism (ibid., p. 21). I take this mention of the belle me as a signpost to the formation of the modern ego, given that Lacan referred to the belle me when saying that he had indicated elsewhere how the modern ego takes on its form. Projection

is a mechanism of the imaginary, and the subject who throws his disorder back into the world is engaging, evidently, in the act of projection. Klein was particularly concerned with the early operation of projection, whose force she linked to anxiety: for her, the extent of a subjects persecutory anxiety not only affects its ability to link; it also determines the degree to which it projects bad internal objects. Projection is the mode for putting bad feelings and bad internal objects (to which Lacan explicitly refers) (ibid., p. 21) outside the self: this projective process in turn generates feelings of persecution about bad objects returning, hence paranoia. This is not the only reference to this projective process in the text on aggressiveness. The projection of internal negativity is a mobilizing factor in war, as indeed is the need to dominate physical space (ibid.,

p. 28). Taking physical pressure, its dialectical counterpart in the physical environment and the aggressive anxiety they trigger into account, there are grounds for setting out how a historical, spatial dynamic might work. If, as Lacan says, the more spatially constricted the environment is, the more anxiety and the aggressive desire to dominate space increase, then that desire and anxiety must increase as space becomes more constricted and more dominated. Yet as Lacan also says that this process produces an increase in aggressive competitiveness, his dialectic requires an economic, technological supplement. The supplement should illuminate the egos rigidity and desire for control. The rigidity, the basis of the egos resistance to truth, is first formed in the spatial positioning of the mirror-stage. I want to suggest here that, just as there is a dialectic between the spatial dimensions of the ego and of the environment, so too might the egos rigidity have a dialectical counterpart in the things the subject constructs. It is this dialectical counterpart

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which accounts for the temporal process at work in the foreclosure of the sense of time, and which explains why the sense of history is fading. As will be plain by Chapter 5, the things constructed physically alter the perception of time. Things means the whole technological apparatus by which the environment is controlled. The modern age begins that way of being human which mans the realm of human capability as a domain given over to measuring and executing, for the purpose of gaining mastery over that which is as a whole (Heidegger 1949, p. 132). Apart from the fact that the construction of things is one expression of the desire to dominate space, it is also consistent with Lacans otherwise puzzling question as to whether the master-slave dialectic will find its resolution in the service of the machine. It fits, too, with his suspicion of reality-testing. If the construction of things is one expression of what Lacan elsewhere refers to as the passionate desire peculiar to man to impress his image on reality(Lacan 1948, p. 22) then reality-testing is suspect because the ego has constructed the reality it then proceeds to test. As the point of departure for this supplement on how the egos rigidity has a counterpart in the environment it constructs, it is worth recalling that Lacan

ties both the egos rigidity and the social psychosis to paranoia. The ego, in part, has a paranoid dimension because both the ego and the egos objects are conceived of as fixed, and the ego wants them to stay fixed. Any unregulated movement or change in these objects poses a threat to the egos concept of itself as fixed, in that its own fixity is defined in relation to them. Here we can locate the need to control the environment in an attempt to predict and regulate changes within it, to subject the irregularity of living things to a form of domination in which the ego closes off to itself the truth about itself, by making its dream of fixation come true. That is to say, at the same time as it closes off the truth on which its psychical health depends, it also, and in a parallel

manner, restricts the regeneration of the natural environment on which it depends to stay alive. This coupling of spatial shifts with technological expansion is repeated, although the emphasis is reversed in Marxs account. For Marx, the division of town and country is at one and the same time the basis of the accumulation of capital, which accelerates and requires the technological expansion necessary for winning in the competition of the marketplace. This does not solve the problem of what triggers aggressive competitiveness in so far as Marx himself continued to seek, and was unhappy with, his own accounts of the cause of the accumulation of capital; he sought them in a variety of places, from the relaxation of the churchs laws restricting usury, to the shift whereby the merchant became an industrialist through employing small rural producers.24 Marxs critics, notably Max Weber, have argued that he overlooked the extent to which substantial urbanization preceded capitalization (Giddens 1981, p. 109). Yet whatever the cause of capitalization, the technological expansion that accompanied it is the means whereby the ego is able to secure the reversal in knowledge, as it makes the world over in its own image. It is also, and this is critical to the dynamics of the egos era, a means of generating continuous economic insecurity and anxiety over survival in the majority, and guarantees their dependence on those identified with the dominant egos standpoint. In fact to say that the above points can be made in the form of an economic supplement is drastically to understate the case: the unelaborated relation between the economic dimension and the ego is the subjective flaw in Lacans historical theory, because it is only through the elaboration of this relation that the mechanism by which the social psychosis could exist simultaneously in and around individuals will emerge. Aggressive competitiveness is tied to imperialism (loosely) but the fact that this tie is also fundamental in the competitive profit motive is not followed through (despite, or perhaps because of, the Heideggerian allusions). This tie can be effected after the foundational fantasy is identified in more detail in Part II. And once this is done, the details of the mechanism by which the fixity or rigidity that Lacan so frequently refers to as a hallmark of the individual ego has a counterpart in the historical egos era will be apparent. So will another reason for scepticism about reality-testing.

Lacan refers to the egos era approach to knowledge as paranoid, as it is based on a need for control. But he does not take account of how the ego technologically constructs an environment it can control, and how this, in turn, reinforces paranoia, precisely because the damage done to nature in the process makes the ego fear (rightly) for its own survival.

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***AFF ANSWERS

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zizek authoritarian
Zizeks alternative is authoritarianhis concept of human nature requires political domination. Robinson 04 (Andrew, PhD, political theory, University of Nottingham, Introduction: The Basic Zizekian Model, Theory Blog, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/zizek-notes-and-work-inprogress_15.html) The Act also seems to be authoritarian in the sense that it involves an unfounded imposition of will which reshapes the symbolic edifice. Perhaps even worse is Zizek's conception of human nature. Zizek thinks people are basically too chaotic to live without rulers, repeating the claims of the likes of Hobbes. He sees 'unruliness' and going to the end beyond every human measure as a primordial drive and part of human nature - a drive ethics tries to contain - a drive involving "clinging to wild egotistical freedom unbound by any constraints" which "has to be broken and 'gentrified' by the pressure of education" (PF 236-7). Humanity is as such unnaturally prone to excess, and has to be gentrified through institutions (PF 135). There is a basic drive to disattach from the world which fantasy is a protection against (TS 289). The role of paternal Law is to expose people to the harsh demands of social reality, demands which lead to entry into desire (FA 76; Zizek is presumably some kind of expectationist). He even seems to endorse Kant's view that people need a Master and (hierarchic) discipline to tame their 'unruly' insistence on their own will and force them to submit to being placed in subjection to "the laws of mankind and brought to feel their constraint" (TS 36 - clearly a substitutionist term). So Zizek endorses Kant's work on education, where he claims the role of schools is not for children to learn but to accustom them "to sitting still and doing exactly what they are told", to "counteract man's natural unruliness" (TS 36)! (Zizek also conflates social control with the unrelated issue of "venturing wildly and rashly into danger" in this discussion of Kant). Once accustomed to freedom, one will do anything for it, so this urge must be "smoothed down" (TS 36). Zizek calls this text of Kant's a "marvellous text" (TS 36). He also makes the (apparently contradictory with all the above, but equally conservative) claim that "a human being is... in need of firm roots" and that this basic need is the root of the symbolic order (CHU 250). On the whole Zizek seems to be endorsing a conservative or even reactionary view of human nature; though this is not entirely clear. Zizek is an authoritarian bully his arguments are non-falsifiable. Kirsch, 8 senior editor of The New Republic (Adam, The New Republic, The Deadly Jester, http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=097a31f3-c4404b10-8894-14197d7a6eef)
When Zizek employed this phrase as the title of a short book about the September 11 attacks and their aftermath, he was not making an ironic pop reference. He was drawing an edifying parallel. Why is it, the communist revolutionary must inevitably reflect, that nobody wants a communist revolution? Why do people in the West seem so content in what Zizek calls "the Francis Fukuyama dream of the 'end of history'"? For most of us, this may not seem like a hard question to answer: one need only compare the experience of communist countries with the experience of democratic ones. But Zizek is not an empiricist, or a liberal, and he has another answer. It is that capitalism is the Matrix, the illusion in which we are trapped. This, of course, is merely a flamboyant sci-fi formulation of the old Marxist concept of false consciousness. "Our 'freedoms,'" Zizek writes in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, "themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom." This is the central instance in Zizek's work of the kind of dialectical reversal, the clever anti-liberal inversion, that is the basic movement of his mind. It could hardly be otherwise, considering that his intellectual gods are Hegel and Lacan--masters of the dialectic, for whom reality never appears except in the form of the illusion or the symptom. In both their systems, the interpreter--the philosopher for Hegel, the analyst for Lacan--is granted absolute, unchallengeable authority. Most people are necessarily in thrall to appearances, and thereby to the deceptions of power; but the interpreter is somehow immune to them, and can singlehandedly recognize and expose the hidden meanings, the true processes at work in History or in the Unconscious.

Their refusal to compromise with any liberal action is not noble its totalitarian. Kirsch, 8 senior editor of The New Republic (Adam, The New Republic, The Deadly Jester, http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=097a31f3-c44078

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There is a name for the politics that glorifies risk, decision, and will; that yearns for the hero, the master, and the leader; that prefers death and the infinite to democracy and the pragmatic; that finds the only true freedom in the terror of violence. Its name is not communism. Its name is fascism, and in his most recent work Zizek has inarguably revealed himself as some sort of fascist. He admits as much in Violence, where he quotes the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk on the "re-emerging Left-Fascist whispering at the borders of academia"--"where, I guess, I belong." There is no need to guess.
Zizek endorses one after another of the practices and the values of fascism, but he obstinately denies the label. Is "mass
choreography displaying disciplined movements of thousands of bodies," of the kind Leni Riefenstahl loved to photograph, fascist? No, Zizek insists, "it was Nazism that stole" such displays "from the workers' movement, their original creator." (He is willfully blind to the old and obvious conclusion that totalitarian form accepts content from the left and the right.) Is there something fascist about what Adorno long ago called the jargon of authenticity--"the notions of decision, repetition, assuming one's destiny ... mass discipline, sacrifice of the individual for the collective, and so forth"? No, again: "there is nothing 'inherently fascist'" in all that. Is the cult of martyrdom that surrounds Che Guevara a holdover from the death worship of reactionary Latin American Catholicism, as Paul Berman has argued?

"To be clear and brutal to the end," he sums up, "there is a lesson to be learned from Hermann Goering's reply, in the early 1940s, to a fanatical Nazi who asked him why he protected a well-known Jew from deportation: 'In this city, I decide who is a Jew!'... In this city, it is we who decide what is left, so we should simply ignore liberal accusations of inconsistency." That sentence is a remarkable moment in Zizek's writing. It stands out even among the many instances in which Zizek, before delivering himself of some monstrous sentiment, warns the reader of the need to be harsh, never to flinch before liberal pieties. In order to defend himself against the charge of proto-fascism, Zizek falls back on Goering's joke about Jews! This is not just the "adrenalin-fueled" audacity of the bold writer who "dares the reader to disagree." To produce this quotation in this context is a sign, I think, of something darker. It is a dare to himself to see how far he can go in the direction of indecency, of an obsession that has nothing progressive or revolutionary about it.
Perhaps, Zizek grants, "but--so what?"

Zizeks work is a revival of totalitarianism, revolutionary terror, and anti-Semitism. Kirsch, 8 senior editor of The New Republic (Adam, The New Republic, The Deadly Jester, http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=097a31f3-c4404b10-8894-14197d7a6eef)
And there is no doubt that this scale of killing is what Zizek looks forward to in the Revolution. "What makes Nazism repulsive," he writes,
"is not the rhetoric of a final solution as such, but the concrete twist it gives to it." Perhaps there is supposed to be some reassurance for Jews in that sentence; but perhaps not. For in In Defense of Lost Causes, again paraphrasing Badiou, Zizek writes: "To put it succinctly, the only true solution to the 'Jewish question' is the 'final solution' (their annihilation), because Jews ... are the ultimate obstacle to the 'final solution' of History itself, to the overcoming of divisions in all-encompassing unity and flexibility." I hasten to add that Zizek dissents from Badiou's vision to this extent: he believes that Jews "resisting identification with the State of Israel," "the Jews of the Jews themselves," the "worthy successors to Spinoza," deserve to be exempted on account of their "fidelity to the Messianic impulse." In this way, Zizek's allegedly progressive thought leads directly into a pit of moral and intellectual squalor. In his New York Times piece against torture, Zizek worried that the normalization of torture as an

This is a good description of Zizek's own work. Under the cover of comedy and hyperbole, in between allusions to movies and video games, he is engaged in the rehabilitation of many of the most evil ideas of the last century. He is trying to undo the achievement of all the postwar thinkers who taught us to regard totalitarianism, revolutionary terror, utopian violence, and anti-Semitism as inadmissible in serious political discourse. Is Zizek's audience too busy laughing at him to hear him? I hope so, because the idea that they can hear him without recoiling from him is too dismal, and frightening, to contemplate.
instrument of state was the first step in "a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone."

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zizek = violence
Zizeks alternative is an endorsement of authoritarian violence, like 9/11. Kirsch, 8 senior editor of The New Republic (Adam, The New Republic, The Deadly Jester, http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=097a31f3-c440-4b10-8894-14197d7a6eef)
This sacerdotal notion of intellectual authority makes both thinkers essentially hostile to democracy, which holds that the truth is available in principle to everyone, and that every individual must be

. Zizek, too, sees the similarity--or, as he says, "the profound solidarity"--between his favorite philosophical traditions. "Their structure," he acknowledges, "is inherently 'authoritarian': since Marx and Freud opened up a new theoretical field which sets the very criteria of veracity, their words cannot be put to the test the same way one is allowed to question the statements of their followers." Note that the term "authoritarian" is not used here pejoratively. For Zizek, it is precisely this authoritarianism that makes these perspectives appealing. Their "engaged notion of truth" makes for "struggling theories, not only theories about struggle." But to know what is worth struggling for, you need theories about struggle. Only if you have already accepted the terms of the struggle--in Zizek's case, the class struggle--can you move on to the struggling theory that teaches you how to fight. In this sense, Zizek the dialectician is at bottom entirely undialectical. That liberalism is evil and that communism is good is not his conclusion, it is his premise; and the contortions of his thought, especially in his most political books, result from the need to reconcile that premise with a reality that seems abundantly to indicate the opposite. Hence the necessity of the Matrix, or something like it, for Zizek's worldview. And hence his approval of anything that unplugs us from the Matrix and returns us to the desert of the real--for instance, the horrors of September 11. One of the ambiguities of Zizek's recent work lies in his attitude toward the kind of Islamic fundamentalists who perpetrated the attacks. On the one hand, they are clearly reactionary in their religious dogmatism; on the other hand, they have been far more effective than the Zapatistas or the Porto Alegre movement in discomfiting American capitalism. As Zizek observes, "while they pursue what appear to us to be evil goals with evil means, the very form of their activity meets the highest standard of the good." Yes, the good: Mohammed Atta and his comrades exemplified "good as the spirit of and actual readiness for sacrifice in the name of some higher cause." Zizek's dialectic allows him to have it all: the jihadis are not really motivated by religion, as they say they are; they are actually casualties of global capitalism, and thus "objectively" on the left. "The only way to conceive of what happened on September 11," he writes, "is to locate it in the context of the antagonisms of global capitalism."
allowed to speak for himself

Zizek knows his revolution is doomed to fail their utopianism arguments are excuses to ignore real suffering and create more human sacrifices to the ivory tower. Kirsch, 8 senior editor of The New Republic (Adam, The New Republic, The Deadly Jester, http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=097a31f3-c4404b10-8894-14197d7a6eef)
'Will America finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen that separates it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival in the Real world"? Zizek asked in 2002. The answer was no. Even September 11 did not succeed in robbing the West of its liberal illusions. What remains, then, for the would-be communist? The truly dialectical answer, the kind of answer that Marx would have given, is that the adaptations of capitalism must themselves prove fatally maladaptive. This is the answer that Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt gave in their popular neo-Marxist treatises Empire and Multitude: as global capitalism evolves into a kind of disembodied, centerless, virtual reality, it makes labor autonomous and renders capital itself unnecessary. But Zizek, in In Defense of Lost Causes, has no use for Negri's "heroic attempt to stick to fundamental Marxist coordinates." When it comes to the heart of the matter

, what Zizek wants is not dialectic, but repetition: another Robespierre, another Lenin, another Mao. His "progressivism" is not linear, it is cyclical. And if objective conditions are different from what they were in 1789 or 1917, so much the worse for objective conditions. "True ideas are eternal, they are indestructible, they always return every time they are proclaimed dead," Zizek writes in his introduction. One of the sections in the book is titled "Give the dictatorship of the proletariat a chance!" Of course, Zizek knows as well as anyone how many chances it has been given, and what the results have been. In his recent books, therefore, he has begun to articulate a new rationale for revolution, one that acknowledges its destined failure in advance. "Although, in terms of their positive content, the Communist regimes were mostly a dismal failure, generating terror and misery," he explains, "at the same time they opened up a certain space, the space of utopian expectations." He adds elsewhere: "In spite of (or, rather, because of) all its horrors, the Cultural Revolution undoubtedly did contain elements of an enacted utopia." The crimes denoted not the failure of the utopian experiments, but their success. This utopian dimension is so precious that it is worth any number of human lives. To the tens of millions already lost in Russia, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere, Zizek is prepared to add however many more are required. He endorses the formula of the French radical philosopher Alain Badiou: "mieux vaut un desastre qu'un desetre," better a disaster than a lack of being. This ontology of revolution raises some questions. On several occasions, Zizek describes the "utopian" moment of revolution as "divine." In support of this notion he adduces Walter Benjamin on "divine violence." "The most obvious candidate for 'divine violence,'" he writes in Violence, "is the violent explosion of resentment
which finds expression in a spectrum that ranges from mob lynchings to revolutionary terror." It is true that Benjamin did, in his worst moments, endorse revolutionary violence in these terms. But for

For Zizek, who sometimes employs religious tropes but certainly does not believe in religion, "divine" is just an honorific--a lofty way of justifying his call for human sacrifices.
Benjamin, who had a quasi-mystical temperament, the divine was at least a real metaphysical category: when he said divine, he meant divine.

The alternative relies on the imposition of a messianic leader ensuring violence Tormey and Robinson, 5 teaches in the School of Politics and Critical Theory at the University of 80

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Updated Lacan K 81 Nottingham; doctoral student in the School of Politics at the University of Nottingham (Simon; Andrew, SAGE Publications, A Ticklish Subject? Zizek and the Future of Left Radicalism) Furthermore, despite Zizeks emphasis on politics, his discussion of the Act remains resolutely individualist as bets its clinical origins. Zizeks examples of Acts are nearly all isolated actions by individuals, such as Mary Kay Letourneaus deance of juridical pressure to end a relationship with a youth, a soldier in Full Metal Jacket killing his drill sergeant and himself, and the acts of Stalinist bureaucrats who rewrote history knowing they would later be purged (Zizek, 1997a: 21; 1999: 3857; 2001b: 989). Even the Russian Revolution becomes for Zizek a set of individual choices by Lenin, Stalin and the aforementioned bureaucrats, as opposed to the culmination of mass actions involving thousands of ordinary men and women. This is problematic as a basis for understanding previous social transformations, and even more so as a recommendation for the future. The new subject Zizek envisages is an authoritarian leader, someone capable of the inherently terroristic action of redening the rules of the game (Zizek, 1999: 377). We would argue that this is a conservative, if not reactionary, position. Donald Rooums cartoon character Wildcat surely grasps the essence of left radical ambition rather better when he states, I dont just want freedom from the capitalists. I also want freedom from people t to take over (Rooum, 1991: 24). Regarding social structures, furthermore, Zizek consistently prefers overconformity to resistance. For him, disidentication with ones ideologi-cally-dened role is not subversive; rather, an ideological edice can be undermined by a too-literal identication (Zizek, 1997a: 22). Escapism and ideas of an autonomous self are identical with ideology because they make intolerable conditions liveable (Butler et al., 2000: 104); even petty resist- ance is a condition of possibility of the system (Zizek, 1997a: 20), a supplement which sustains it. To be free of the present, one should renounce the transgressive fantasmic supplement that attaches us to it, and attach oneself instead to the public discourse which power ofcially promotes (see, for example, Butler et al., 2000: 220; Zizek, 2000: 149). So how does Zizek distinguish his leftist politics from rightist alternatives which would equally meet the formal criteria of an Act? To resolve this dilemma he introduces the idea of the false Act (or rightist suspension of the ethical) to deal with this problem. False acts, such as the Nazi seizure of power and the bombing of Afghanistan, have the formal structure of an Act, but are false because they involve impotent acting-out against a pseudoenemy, and therefore do not traverse the actual social fantasy (see, for example, Butler et al., 2000: 1267; Zizek, 2001c: 4). Their function, rather, is to preserve the system throughthe acting-out. One can tell a true Act from a false Act by assessing whether an act is truly negative, i.e. negates all prior standards, and by whether it emerges from a single touchy nodal point ...which decides where one truly stands (Butler et al., 2000: 125).19 This is problematic because Zizek here introduces external criteria while elsewhere stating that the Act must negate all such criteria. Furthermore, if the authenicity of an Act is dependent on an empirical assessment of where the actual social void is, then Zizeks account of the Act as the assertion of a Truth over andagainst the facts is undermined.

Zizek celebrates war and endorses terrorism. Tormey and Robinson, 05 teaches in the School of Politics and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham; doctoral student in the School of Politics at the University of Nottingham (Simon; Andrew, SAGE Publications, A Ticklish Subject? Zizek and the Future of Left Radicalism) As becomes evident, class struggle is not for Zizek an empirical referent and even less a category of Marxisant sociological analysis, but a synonym for the Lacanian Real. A progressive endorsement of class struggle means positing the lack of a common horizon and assuming or asserting the insolubility of political conict.8 It therefore involves a glorication of conict, antagonism, terror and a militaristic logic of carving the eld into good and bad sides, as a good in itself (see, for example, the discussion in Zizek, 2000: 57, 126). Zizek celebrates war because it undermines the complacency of our daily routine by introducing meaningless sacrice and destruction (Zizek, 1999: 105). He fears being trapped by a suffocating social peace or Good and so calls on people to take a militant, divisive position of assertion of the Truth that enthuses them (Zizek, 2001b: 2378).9 The content of this Truth is, however, a secondary issue. For Zizek, Truth has nothing to do with truth claims and the eld of knowledge. Truth is an event which just happens, and in which the thing itself is disclosed to us as what it is.10 Truth is therefore the exaggeration which distorts any balanced system. 81

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Updated Lacan K 82 A truth-effect occurs whenever a work produces a strong emotional reaction, and it need not be identied with empirical accuracy: lies and distortions can have a truth-effect, and factual truth can cover the disavowal of desire and the Real. Zizeks alternative is always ruthless, resulting in terrorism and slavery. Tormey and Robinson, 5 teaches in the School of Politics and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham; doctoral student in the School of Politics at the University of Nottingham (Simon; Andrew, SAGE Publications, A Ticklish Subject? Zizek and the Future of Left Radicalism) Zizek uses an example from the lm The Usual Suspects where the hero shoots his family to give him a pretext for chasing the gang who held them hostage. This is the crazy, impossible choice of, in a way, shooting at himself, at that which is most precious to himself, through which the subject gains a space of free decision by cutting himself loose from the precious object through whose possession the enemy kept him in check, and clears the terrain for a new beginning (Butler et al., 2000: 1223). Through an Act, one negates ones position in the social system and destroys the person one was before. The concept of the Act is therefore palingenetic: one destroys ones former self to go through a moment of rebirth, but a rebirth grounded on a desire for Nothingness rather than on any particular programme of change (Zizek, 2000: 1667). For Zizek the only legitimation of revolution is negative, the will to break with the Past, and revolutionaries should not have positive conceptions of an alternative to be realized (Butler et al., 2000: 131). Ruthlessness is characteristic of the Act: Zizek hates soft-heartedness because it blurs the subjects pure ethical stance and calls for an Act impervious to any call of the Other (Zizek, 2001b: 111, 175). The Act thus reproduces in the socio-political eld the Lacanian concept of traversing the fantasy. Traversing the fantasy involves accepting that there is no way one can be satised, and therefore a full acceptance of the pain ... as inherent to the excess of pleasure which is jouissance, as well as a rejection of every conception of radical difference (Zizek, 1997a: 301). It means an acceptance of the fact that there is no secret treasure in me (Zizek, 1997a: 10), and a transition from being the nothing we are today to being a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing paradoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack (Zizek, 2000: 1467). It involves being reduced to a zero-point or ultimate level similar to that seen in the most broken concentration-camp inmates (Zizek, 2001b: 767, 86), so the role of analysis is to throw out the baby in order to confront the patient with his dirty bathwater (Zizek, 1997a: 62 3), inducing not an improvement but a transition from Bad to Worse, which is inherently terroristic (Zizek, 1999: 377). It is also not freedom in the usual sense, but prostration before the call of the truth-event, something violently imposedon me from the Outside through a traumatic encounter that shatters the very foundation of my being (Zizek, 1999: 377). With shades of Orwell, Zizek claims that the Act involves the highest freedom and also the utmost passivity with a reduction to a lifeless automaton who blindly performs its gestures. In other words, in the Act freedom equals slavery (Zizek, 1999: 377).

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No fixed understanding of the political applies to all situations. They might have persuasive descriptions of Lacans theory but nothing that applies it to our aff. Robinson (PhD Political Theory, University of Nottingham) 05 (Theory and Event, Andrew, 8:1, The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique). One of the functions of myth is to cut out what Trevor Pateman terms the "middle level" of analytical concepts, establishing a short-circuit between high-level generalizations and ultra-specific (pseudo-) concrete instances. In Barthes's classic case of an image of a black soldier saluting the French flag, this individual action is implicitly connected to highly abstract concepts such as nationalism, without the mediation of the particularities of his situation. (These particularities, if revealed, could undermine the myth. Perhaps he enlisted for financial reasons, or due to threats of violence). Thus, while myths provide an analysis of sorts, their basic operation is anti-analytical: the analytical schema is fixed in advance, and the relationship between this schema and the instances it organizes is hierarchically ordered to the exclusive advantage of the former. This is precisely what happens in Lacanian analyses of specific political and cultural phenomena. iek specifically advocates 'sweeping generalizations' and short-cuts between specific instances and high-level abstractions, evading the "middle level". 'The correct dialectical procedure... can be best described as a direct jump from the singular to the universal, bypassing the mid-level of particularity'. He wants a 'direct jump from the singular to the universal', without reference to particular contexts. Prefer our specific solvency evidence over their generic theory. We will defend against any specific case turn but cannot defend against a turn that they say is rooted in the unconscious. Robinson (PhD Political Theory, University of Nottingham) 05 (Theory and Event, Andrew, 8:1, The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique). The technical term operates in much the same way as in positivistic theories, where the use of a noun turns a set of observed "facts" into a "law". Lack (in the sense of the verb "to lack") is explained by means of a nominalized lack (for instance, the failure of society by the fact of antagonism), and the various versions of nominalized lack are arranged in sentences involving the verb "to be". It is not simply a relation of dislocation but a theoretical entity in its own right. For instance, '"class struggle" is that on account of which every direct reference to universality... is... "biased", dislocated with regard to its literal meaning. "Class struggle" is the Marxist name for this basic "operator of dislocation"'90. One might compare this formula to the statement, "I don't know what causes dislocation". iek also refers to history 'as a series of ultimately failed attempts to deal with the same "unhistorical", traumatic kernel. Dallmayr similarly writes of Laclau and Mouffe's concept of antagonism that 'negativity designates not simply a lack but a "nihilating" potency', 'a nihilating ferment with real effects'92, and Newman writes of a 'creative and constitutive absence'. Butler notes that 'the "real" that is a "rock" or a "kernel" or sometimes a "substance" is also, and sometimes within the same sentence, "a loss", a "negativity"'94. Constitutive lack is a positivity - an "operator of dislocation", a "nihilating" element in the Lacanian vocabulary. It is this process of mythical construction which allows lack to be defined precisely, and which therefore meets (for instance) Newman's criterion that it be less 'radically underdefined' than Derrida's concept of lack95. One can only avoid an "I-don't-know" being underdefined if one misrepresents it mythically.

does not apply to aff

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alt fails individuals

Zizeks alternative conceptualizes culture as having so much power over individuals that liberation is impossible. Robinson 04 (Andrew, PhD, political theory, University of Nottingham, Introduction: The Basic Zizekian Model, Theory Blog, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/zizek-notes-and-work-inprogress_15.html) The Act is a fundamentally negative occurrence in which one strips oneself of all human dignity and 'recognises' that one is nothing but excrement, that there is no 'little treasure' inside and that the subject is nothing but a void. (It is therefore utterly incompatible with approaches which involve action - eg. praxis - as a humanising phenomenon). "By traversing the fantasy, the subject accepts the void of his nonexistence" (TS 281). Traversing the fantasy leads to subjective destitution: abandoning the notion of something 'in me more than myself' and recognising that the big Other is nothing but a semblance. This involves a change in one's worldview: the "analyst's desire" makes possible a community minus its phantasmic support, without any need for a 'subject supposed to...' (know, enjoy or believe) (TS 296). (In this passage Zizek portrays the Act as leading to a fundamental shift in character-structure, although this is not a claim he repeats consistently). An Act is defined by the characteristic that it "surprises/transforms the agent itself" (CHU 124; a choice in the usual sense cannot therefore be an Act). It involves subjective destitution, a (supposedly) liberating moment, "the anti-ideological gesture par excellence by means of which I renounce the treasure within myself and fully admit my dependence on the externality of symbolic apparatuses - that is to say, fully assume the fact that my very self-experience of a subject who was already there prior to the external process of interpellation is a retrospective misrecognition brought about by the process of interpellation" (CHU 134; NB how this means endorsing control by the system, not opposing it; cf. MATERIALISM). The Act therefore involves an utter prostration before symbolic apparatuses: NOT the liberation of the human from the system, but the total victory of the system over humans (cf. Zizek's support for Big Brother-type surveillance; see MARX). The alternative fails: Lacan under-develops the connection between individual psyches and universal understandings. They will not be able to explain how one person thinking will change society. Robinson (PhD Political Theory, University of Nottingham) 05 (Theory and Event, Andrew, 8:1, The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique). Lacanian analysis consists mainly of an exercise in projection. As a result, Lacanian "explanations" often look more propagandistic or pedagogical than explanatory. A particular case is dealt with only in order to, and to the extent that it can, confirm the already-formulated structural theory. Judith Butler criticizes iek's method on the grounds that 'theory is
applied to its examples', as if 'already true, prior to its exemplification'. 'The theory is articulated on its self-sufficiency, and then shifts register only for the pedagogical purpose of illustrating an already accomplished truth'. It is therefore 'a theoretical fetish that disavows the conditions of its own emergence'52. She alleges that Lacanian psychoanalysis 'becomes a theological project' and also 'a way to avoid the rather messy psychic and social entanglement' involved in studying specific cases53. Similarly, Dominick LaCapra objects to the idea of constitutive lack because specific 'losses cannot be adequately addressed when they are enveloped in an overly generalised discourse of absence... Conversely, absence at a "foundational" level cannot simply be derived from particular historical losses'54. Attacking 'the long story of conflating absence with loss that becomes constitutive instead of historical'55, he accuses several theorists of eliding the difference between absence and loss, with 'confusing and dubious results', including a 'tendency to avoid addressing historical problems, including losses, in sufficiently specific terms', and a tendency to 'enshroud, perhaps even to etherealise, them in a generalised discourse of absence'56. Daniel Bensad draws out the political consequences of the projection of absolutes into politics. 'The fetishism of the absolute event involves... a suppression of historical intelligibility, necessary to its depoliticization'.

The space from which politics is evacuated 'becomes... a suitable place for abstractions, delusions and hypostases'. Instead of actual social forces, there are 'shadows and spectres'. The operation of the logic of projection is predictable. According to Lacanians, . A contingent example or a generic reference to "experience" is used, misleadingly, to found a claim with supposed universal validity. For instance, Stavrakakis uses the fact that existing belief-systems are based on exclusions as a basis to claim that all belief-systems are necessarily based on exclusions58, and claims that particular traumas express an 'ultimate impossibility'59. Similarly, Laclau and Mouffe use the fact that a particular antagonism can disrupt a particular fixed identity to claim that the social as such is penetrated and constituted by antagonism as such60. Phenomena are often analysed as outgrowths of something exterior to the situation in question. For instance, iek's concept of the "social symptom" depends on a reduction of the acts of one particular series of people (the "socially excluded", "fundamentalists", Serbian paramilitaries, etc.) to a psychological function in the psyche of a different group (westerners). The "real" is a supposedly self-identical
simplest, the Lacanian myth functions by a short-circuit between a particular instance and statements containing words such as "all", "always", "never", "necessity" and so on

there is a basic structure (sometimes called a 'ground' or 'matrix') from which all social phenomena arise, and this structure, which remains unchanged in all eventualities, is the reference-point from which particular cases are viewed. The "fit" between theory and evidence is constructed monologically by the reduction of the latter to the former, or by selectivity in inclusion and reading of examples. At its

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Updated Lacan K 85 principle which is used to reduce any and all qualitative differences between situations to a relation of formal equivalence. This shows how mythical characteristics can be projected from the outside, although it also raises different problems: the under-conceptualization of the relationship between individual psyches and collective phenomena in Lacanian theory, and a related tendency for psychological concepts to acquire an ersatz agency similar to that of a Marxian fetish. "The Real" or "antagonism" occurs in phrases which have it doing or causing something. As Barthes shows, myth offers the psychological benefits of empiricism without the epistemological costs. Zizeks Act fails to accomplish fundamental changeit is merely therapeutic for individuals. Robinson 04 (Andrew, PhD, political theory, University of Nottingham, Introduction: The Basic Zizekian Model, Theory Blog, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/zizek-notes-and-work-inprogress_15.html) Why does Zizek support the Act? Although he connects the Act to 'radicalism', he does not state anywhere that the Act accomplishes any fundamental change in the deep structure of existence; at best, it can temporarily suspend (for instance) exclusion. This is not an attempt to achieve a better world (still less a perfect one!) but a purely structural attempt to restore something which Zizek thinks is missing. In this sense, even in its 'radicalism', the Act is conservative. Zizek is concerned that the matrix of sublimation - the possibility of producing 'sublime' objects which seem to encapsulate the absolute - is under threat (FA 26; elsewhere, Zizek attacks postmodernists and other 'new sophists' for this). The Act in whatever form reproduces the possibility of sublimity; in this sense, it reproduces old certainties in new forms, undermining all the gains made by theories of historicity and contingency. The purpose of the Act, which Zizek has transplanted from psychoanalytic practice (directed at individual psyches) to socio-political practice (directed at entire social systems) without considering whether this is possible or appropriate, is primarily therapeutic. The role of the Act is to solve the antinomy of the present by asserting a Real against the combined Imaginary and Real of simulacra, thereby reintroducing the impossibility that shatters the Imaginary, enabling us to traverse the fantasy (TS 374; the fantasy is the extimate kernel of libidinal investment which Zizek sees lurking almost everywhere). Zizek seems to be restoring to psychoanalysis a naive conception of psychological health: via the ex nihilo act, one can escape the logic of the symptom (DSST 178).

Zizeks politics rely on extreme individualismit results in no social change. Robinson 04 (Andrew, PhD, political theory, University of Nottingham, Introduction: The Basic Zizekian Model, Theory Blog, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/zizek-notes-and-work-inprogress_15.html) The category of the Act involves extreme methodological individualism. The assumption that an individual Act can alter society as a whole, whatever its earth-shattering psychological consequences for a particular individual, is deeply flawed. This problem is related to Zizek's inappropriate expansion of what are at root clinical/therapeutic concepts into socio-political analysis. Individual Acts do not have direct social effects. The Mary Kay Letourneau case, for instance, has not substantially changed popular perceptions of non-abusive relations between legal- and illegal-age people; it certainly has not shattered the social structure. Rather, Letourneau has been anathematised and victimised by the state. On a social level, the Act is impotent and politically irrelevant; it has no transformative role and makes sense only in a closed analytical system. Even when Acts of Zizek's type do have social effects, there is no reason to believe that these effects shatter or reformulate entire social structures. Zizek's account here rests on psychologising social structures, imagining that these structures rest on the same basis as a Lacanian account of the psyche. Actually, a single act on the superficial level is unlikely to alter the social structure any more than a tiny amount. For instance: suppose Letourneau's Act worked; suppose the law was changed to make love a defence for consensual sex across the age-of-consent boundary. Would this have any deep-rooted social effects? Surely not. Such changes have not, for instance, taken us very far towards gay liberation; the situation is better than it was, but the social position of gay men has not been reshaped dramatically. Acts are impotent against deep prejudices. Since Acts do not have meaningful social effects, they cannot really help the worst-off group (social symptom). If the "cathartic 85

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Updated Lacan K 86 moment" of a break with the dominant ideology only occurs in a single individual, the social system would not be harmed. To be effective, it would have to produce a new conception of the world which is expansive and convinces wide strata of the population. Zizek is missing the significance of revolutions such as in Russia when he sees them as pure Acts by leaders; this is an intentionalist delusion. As Gramsci rightly puts it, each revolution involves an "intense critical labour" whereby a new conception of the world is formulated, spread and used to create a collective will. The collective will does not simply spring miraculously from a leader's whim.

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alt fails calling for the ballot

The material reality of our lives is more important than the critique. Given that we have no real intention of implementing the alternative beyond the empty gesture of the ballot, the criticism turns itself by giving us false ideological distance from the existing orderplacing us more firmly within it. Donahue 1 (Brian, Department of English, Gonzaga University, Marxism, Postmodernism, iek, Postmodern Culture,12.2, Project Muse)
Developing this idea in specifically Marxist terms, iek emphasizes the point that commodity fetishism is a property not of consciousness but of objective behavior and that

in their everyday activity, people fetishize commodities, even though consciously, they are perfectly aware that the "relations between things" mask "relations between people" ("Supposed" 41). In
belief in the fetish is always ascribed to a "subject presumed to believe." Thus in their actual socioeconomic behavior, such a context, iek points out, the task for theory is not to "demonstrate how the original human belief was transposed onto things"; on the contrary, "displacement is original and constitutive" ("Supposed" 41). No

one consciously acknowledges that he or she believes in the magical properties of commodities; rather, this belief is attributed always to an Other, in this case, to the uncritical consumer who is duped by the messages of advertising, ignorantly seeking happiness through the consumption of commodities: There are some beliefs, the most fundamental ones, which are from the very outset "decentered," beliefs of the Other; the phenomenon of the "subject

supposed to believe" is thus universal and structurally necessary.... All concrete versions of this "subject supposed to believe" (from the small kids for whose sake their parents pretend to believe in Santa Claus to the "ordinary working people" for whose sake communist intellectuals pretend to believe in socialism) are stand-ins for the big Other. So the answer to the conservative platitude according to which every honest man has a profound need to believe in something is that every honest man has a profound need to find another subject who would believe in his place. ("Supposed" 41-42) After summarizing this argument about the psychological displacement of belief that characterizes the subject's relation to commodities in capitalist society, iek specifies the appropriate Marxist response, which is not to perform a kind of primary-level ideology critique, since the bourgeois subject is already consciously critical: What the fetish objectivizes is "my true belief," the way things "truly seem to me," although I never effectively experience them this way.... So when a critical Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, the Marxist's reproach to him is not "Commodity may seem to you a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified expression of relations between people"; the actual Marxist's reproach is rather "You may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple embodiment of social relations (that, for example, money is just a kind of voucher entitling you to a part of the social product), but this is not how things really seem to you--in your social reality, by means of your participation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that a commodity really appears to you as a magical object endowed with special powers." ("Supposed" 54) In other words, commodity form and rest

bourgeois subjects think they see through the veil of the comfortably in that critical knowledge of socioeconomic relations; but in reality, they behave as if they believe differently from what they know, and their relation to commodities is the objective illustration of this disavowed belief. This line of reasoning, then, locates ideology not in consciousness but in real activity. iek cites the formula for contemporary cynical ideology proposed in Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason: as opposed to the traditional
Marxist notion, according to which people are "duped" into believing the ruling ideology and thus "do not know what they are doing" when they effectively participate in their

contemporary popular cynicism forces us to consider the notion of an "enlightened false consciousness" whereby "they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it" (Sublime 29). Like most
own subjugation, altering all ideological symbolization. To use iek's Lacanian language:

analyses of subjectivity in contemporary theory, this version disrupts radically the notion of a fully self-present subject: the grain of material practice in time is always already

the irreducible "hard kernel" of the Real remains unassimilated into the Symbolic order. One can, for example, have a self-conception as an ironic, critical viewer who watches TV comedies as kitsch or as the detritus of the culture industry, but according to iek's version of externalized ideology, as long as one sits and watches--whether laughing idiotically or making ironic, cynical comments--objectively, one is doing one's duty to "enjoy the show." This
be read as another way of stating the existentialist slogan that there is no "dress rehearsal" for life:

notion has significant implications for theories of both ideology and subjectivity. For example, the determining effect of objective activity regardless of subjective intention can

at each moment actions are final and decisive, even if one believes oneself to be, for example, merely "performing a role" temporarily before returning to some other "real life." That real life is being determined at each instant by numerous material factors in the face of which
a concept like "personal choice" loses the certainty of its suggestion of direct action in pursuit of clearly understood interests.

Protests are organized for the enjoyment of the protester, not as a real attack on the system. Debates are the perfect examplethe ballot is an empty gesture of theoretical resistance that has no effect on the actual operation of the systemit simply makes you feel better about your place in it. Carlson 99 (David Gray, Professor, Cardozo School of Law Columbia Law Review, 99 Colum. L. Rev. 1908). Schlag presents a dark vision of what he calls "the bureaucracy," which crushes us and controls us. It operates on "a
field of pain and death." n259 It deprives us of choice, speech, n260 and custom. As bureaucracy cannot abide great minds, legal education must suppress greatness through mind numbing repetition. n262 In fact, legal thought is the bureaucracy and cannot be distinguished from it. n263 If legal thought tried to buck the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy would instantly crush it. Schlag observes that judges have taken "oaths that require subordination of truth, understanding, and insight, to the preservation of certain bureaucratic governmental institutions and certain sacred texts." n265 Legal scholarship and lawyers generally n266 are the craven tools of bureaucracy, and those who practice law or scholarship simply serve to justify and strengthen the bureaucracy. "If there were no discipline of American law, the liberal state would have to invent it."

n267 "Legal thinkers in effect serve as a kind of P.R. firm for the bureaucratic state." n268 Legal scholarship has sold out to the bureaucracy: Insofar as the expressions of the state in the form of [statutes, etc.] can be expected to endure, so can the discipline that so helpfully organizes, rationalizes, and represents these expressions as intelligent knowledge. As long as the discipline shows obeisance to the authoritative legal forms, it enjoys the backing of the state... Disciplinary knowledge of law can be true not because it is true, but because the state makes it true. n269 Scholarship produces a false "conflation between what [academics] celebrate as 'law' and the ugly bureaucratic noise that grinds daily in the [*1946] [ ] courts...." n270 Scholarship "becomes the mode of discourse by which bureaucratic institutions and practices re-present themselves as subject

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to the rational ethical-moral control of autonomous individuals." n271 "The United States Supreme Court and its academic groupies in the law schools have succeeded in doing what many, only a few decades ago, would have thought impossible. They have succeeded in making Kafka look naive." Lacanian theory allows us to interpret the meaning of this anti-Masonic vision precisely. Schlag's bureaucracy must be seen as a "paranoid construction according to which our universe is the work of art of unknown creators." In Schlag's view, the bureaucracy is in control of law and language and uses it exclusively for its own purposes. The bureaucracy is therefore the Other of the Other, "a hidden subject who pulls the strings of the great Other (the symbolic order)." The bureaucracy, in short, is the superego (i.e., absolute knowledge of the ego), but rendered visible and projected outward. The superego, the ego's stern master, condemns the ego and condemns what it does. Schlag has transferred this function to the bureaucracy. As is customary, by describing Schlag's vision as a paranoid construction, I do not mean to suggest that Professor Schlag is mentally ill or unable to function. Paranoid construction is not in fact the illness. It is an attempt at healing what the illness is - the conflation of the domains of the symbolic, imaginary, and real. This conflation is what Lacan calls "psychosis." Whereas the "normal" subject is split between the three domains, the psychotic is not. He is unable to keep the domains separate. The symbolic domain of language begins to lose place to the real domain. The psychotic raves incoherently, and things begin to talk to him directly. The psychotic, "immersed in jouissance," n280 loses desire itself. Paranoia is a strategy the subject adopts to ward off breakdown. The paranoid vision holds together the symbolic order itself and thereby prevents the subject from slipping into the psychotic state in which "the concrete 'I' loses its absolute power over the entire system of its determinations." This of course means - and here is

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if the bureaucracy were to fold up shop and let the natural side of the subject have its way - subjectivity would soon be enveloped, smothered, and killed in the night of psychosis. Paranoid ambivalence toward bureaucracy (or whatever other fantasy may be substituted for it) is very commonly observed. Most recently, conservatives "organized their enjoyment" by opposing communism. By confronting and resisting an all-encompassing, sinister power, the subject confirms his existence as that which sees and resists the power. As long as communism existed, conservatism could be perceived. When communism disappeared, conservatives felt "anxiety" - a lack of purpose. Although they publicly opposed communism, they secretly regretted its disappearance. Within a short time, a new enemy was found to organize conservative jouissance - the cultural left. (On the left, a similar story could be told about the organizing
the deep irony of paranoia - that bureaucracy is the very savior of romantic metaphysics. If the romantic program were ever fulfilled n287 As Schlag has perceived, the

function of racism and sexism, which, of course, have not yet disappeared.) These humble examples show that the romantic yearning for wholeness is always the opposite of what it appears to be. We paranoids need our enemies to organize our enjoyment. Paranoid construction is, in the end, a philosophical interpretation, even in the clinical cases.

symbolic order of law is artificial. It only exists because we insist it does. We all fear that the The normal person knows he must keep insisting that the symbolic order exists precisely because the person knows it is a fiction. The paranoid, however, assigns this role to the bureaucracy (and thereby absolves himself from the responsibility). Thus, paranoid delusion allows for the maintenance of a "cynical" distance between the paranoid subject and the realm of mad psychosis. In truth, cynicism toward bureaucracy shows nothing but the unconfronted depth to which the cynic is actually committed to what ought to be abolished.
house of cards may come crashing down. Paradoxically, it is this very "anxiety" that shores up the symbolic.

There is no connection between the ballot and the alterativeZizek argues that the alternative cannot be consciously brought aboutit can only be recognized in hindsight.
Tell, 04 Communication Arts and Sciences at The Pennsylvania State University, 2004

(David, On Belief (Review), Philosophy and Rhetoric 37.1 (2004) 96-99, Project MUSE) Most scholars of rhetoric, however, will not be satisfied with Zizek's belief. For although this belief provides the necessary subjective conditions for public intervention, it is difficult to imagine it being publicly deployed. This belief is, after all, radically privatized; it is the internal repetition of a "primordial decision," or an "unconscious atemporal deed" (147). One must wonder about the public possibilities of such a private (and subconscious) experience. Moreover, most rhetoricians may well be troubled by Zizek's claim that all "acts proper"acts of actual freedomoccur outside the symbolic order. Insofar as rhetoric can be considered symbolic action, then, its action can never provide for innovative intervention into the public sphere. Zizek admits as much in an endnote: "true acts of freedom are choices/decisions which we make while unaware of itwe never decide (in the present tense); all of a sudden, we just take note of how we have already decided " (156n46). It is precisely here that the rhetorician will not be satisfied: if Rorty marginalized the rhetorical purchase of [End Page 98] belief by banishing it to the private sphere, Zizek does so by marginalizing rhetoric itself.

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alt fails politics

Zizeks Act is radically nihilistic and accomplishes nothing political. Robinson 04 (Andrew, PhD, political theory, University of Nottingham, Introduction: The Basic Zizekian Model, Theory Blog, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/zizek-notes-and-work-inprogress_15.html) It is important to realise that the Act is not revolutionary in the sense of creating something new on the basis of an ideal, or an imaginary, or the restoration of an authentic pre-alienated state, or any other process which would allow one to create something on the basis of a project and praxis. The Act is radically nihilistic (see below). For Zizek, the subject can change nothing - all it can do is add itself to reality by an act of claiming responsibility for the given (SOI 221). Zizek is a little inconsistent on the relationship between the Act and the existing system, but on the whole, he seems to see Acts as occurring for the system, against imaginaries and especially the extimate kernel of fantasy. Christianity did not so much suspend the law, says Zizek, as suspend its obscene supplement (FA 130) (i.e. extimate kernel). Zizek thinks fantasy is fundamentally inconsistent, so it is an "ethical duty" to put this on display, in order to disrupt fantasy (PF 74; see CONSERVATISM on Zizek's tendency to conflate 'displaying' with 'doing', so that the boundary between being a sexist or a fascist and displaying sexism or fascism to disrupt it is unclear). Zizek is inconsistent, however, since there are also occasions when he seems to want to encourage fantasies (TS 51). Crucially, the Act is also a form of decisiveness. Zizek wants to pin down vacillating signifiers without using a Master-Signifier or quilting-point, he says on one occasion (FA 139-40). Elsewhere (eg. on Chavez and Lenin), he seems to rather like the Master or "One" whose Act 'quilts' the field. Either way, the Act seems to give a certain focus to discourse, acting as a centre. As his discussions of the vanishing mediator show, he sees the Act establishing a new set of symbolic and imaginary discourses which restore the role of the master-signifier, by directly adopting the position of the extimate kernel. Zizek also sees the Act as a resolution of a dilemma. According to Zizek, Good assumes (and therefore produces) Evil, and the Act escapes the resulting dilemma by breaking with Good (TS 382; this is also what distinguishes the Act as diabolical Evil from everyday evil - crime, the Holocaust and so on). For Zizek, denial of the possibility of the Act is the root of evil (TS 376). What seems completely missing here is any case for the Act that in any way justifies ethically the terrible nature of the Act, both for its perpetrator and for others; one can only really accept Zizek's Act if one places at the core of one's belief-system the importance of resolving dilemmas in some supposed deep structure of existence, so what matters is not human or social consequences or any specific beliefs, but merely the adoption of a structural position which solves contradictions in and thereby overcomes the problems of a structure. Despite Zizek's repeated use of the term "ethics", therefore, this is in many ways not an ethical system at all, but a kind of model of structural problemsolving - a "therapy" for society, passed off as ethics. The alternatives disavowal of progressive movements dooms it to failure Tormey and Robinson, 5 teaches in the School of Politics and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham; doctoral student in the School of Politics at the University of Nottingham (Simon; Andrew, SAGE Publications, A Ticklish Subject? Zizek and the Future of Left Radicalism) In our view, Zizek is justied in advocating a transformative stance given the structural causes of many of the issues he confronts, but he is wrong to posit such a stance as a radical break constituted ex nihilo. Far from being the disavowed supplement of capitalism, the space for thinking the not-real which is opened by imaginaries and petty resistances is, we think, a prerequisite to building a more active resistance and, ultimately, any substantial social transformation. As the cultural anthropologist James Scott shows in a series of case studies, political revolutions tend to emerge through the radicalization of existing demands and resistances not as pure Acts occurring out of nothing. Even when they are incomprehensible from the standpoint of normal, conformist bystanders, they are a product of the development of subterranean resistances and counter hegemonies among subaltern groups (see, for example, Scott, 1990: 17982). This is to say that social change does not come from nothing, but rather requires the pre-existence of a counter-culture involving nonconformist ideas and practices. As Gramsci puts it, before coming into existence a new society must be ideally active in the minds of those struggling for change (Gramsci, 1985: 39). The history of resistance thus 89

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Updated Lacan K 90 gives little reason to support Zizeks politics of the Act. The ability to Act in the manner described by Zizek is largely absent from the subaltern strata. Mary Kay Letourneau (let us recall) did not transform society; rather, her Act was repressed and she was jailed. In another case discussed by Zizek (2001b: 745), a group of Siberian miners is said to accomplish an Act by getting massacred. Since Acts are not even on Zizeks terms socially effective, they cannot help the worst-off, let alone transform society. Zizeks assumption of the effectiveness of Acts thus rests on a confusion between individual and social levels of analysis and between clinical therapy and political action. Vaneigem eerily foresees Zizeks Act when he argues against active nihilism. The transition from this wasteland of the suicide and the
solitary killer to revolutionary politics requires the repetition of negation in a different register, connected to a positive project to change the world and relying on the imaginaries Zizek denounces, the

Zizeks politics are not merely impossible but, as we have shown, potentially despotic, and also between support for a Master, acceptance of pain and alienation, militarism and the restoration of order tendentially conservative. Such a politics, if adopted in practice, could only discredit progressive movements and further alienate those they seek to mobilize. We would argue that a transformative politics should be theorized instead as a process of transformation, an a-linear, rhizomatic, multiform plurality of resistances, initiatives and, indeed, acts which are sometimes spectacular and carnivalesque, sometimes pregurative, sometimes subterranean, sometimes rooted in institutional change and reform and, under certain circumstances, directly transformative.
carnival spirit and the ability to dream (Vaneigem, 1967 [1994]: 111).

Zizeks alternative is so radically negative that it is unable to formulate new politics. Robinson 04 (Andrew, PhD, political theory, University of Nottingham, Introduction: The Basic Zizekian Model, Theory Blog, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/zizek-notes-and-work-inprogress_15.html) Because of his extreme methodological individualism, Zizek ends up with a highly intentionalist, leader-fixated model of politics which is authoritarian and also exaggerates the role of leaders both in practice and potentially.
Stalinism, for instance, was not a result of an Act by Stalin and Lenin; it was a social-structural phenomenon involving the actions of many individuals, with a "history of everyday life" and structural dynamics such as intrabureaucratic competition, resulting from the mode (or modes) of thought and action it involved. The extension of clinical categories into society requires the reduction of concepts which are usually diverse to singularity: one unconscious, symptom, fundamental fantasy, etc. for entire societies or even the whole of humanity. This is in contradiction with psychoanalytic practice and also is implausible.

Zizek's politics are "a prescription for political quietism and sterility" (Laclau, CHU 293). I disagree with Laclau's reasons for claiming this, but the conclusion is valid: the Act has little practical political relevance, and Zizek's sectarianism (see RESISTANCE) leaves him aloof from actual political struggles. Zizek seems to
have no real sense of what is important in politics. For Zizek, the main issue is reviving the category of the Act, to fill a supposed structural void. But there are many concrete issues which are many times more important: closing down the WTO, fighting back against the wave of police repression, stopping the wholesale commodification of society, stopping environmental destruction, stopping Bush's racist war, smashing capitalism, etc. 'Restoring the properly ethical dimension of the act' only matters to someone who is so trapped in his own theory that he thinks the whole world revolves around it. (What did Wittgenstein say about philosophy and masturbation?). Zizek should let the fly out the jar! The abstract and essentialist pursuit of the "act proper" is a distraction from contingent political struggles

Zizek lacks, and is presumably unable on principle to formulate, a positive conception of what should replace the present system. His suggestions are either vague and naive (socialising cyberspace, for instance), reproduce capitalism (the necessity of betrayal), or set up something worse (terror). Zizek's endorsement of "absolute negativity" is a barrier to his developing actual alternatives.

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Zizeks alternative is impossible to judgeit is so open ended that it denies all rational assessment. Robinson, 04 (Andrew, PhD, political theory, University of Nottingham, Introduction: The Basic Zizekian Model, Theory Blog, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/zizek-notes-and-work-inprogress_15.html) Not surprisingly given that he sees the Act as shattering meaning, Zizek wants a commitment which is "dogmatic", "cannot be refuted by any 'argumentation' " and "does not ask for good reasons", and which is "indifferent" to the truth-status of the Event it refers to (TS ****; find reference). A Decision (Act) is circular, a shibboleth, and a creative act which nevertheless reveals a constitutive void which is invisible (TS 138; NB the slippage between epistemology and ontology here: how do we know the Act is revealing rather than creating the void?). Law is legitimated by transference: it is only convincing to those who already believe (SOI 38). The Act subverts a given field as such and achieves the apparently 'impossible' by retroactively creating the conditions of its possibility by changing its conditions (CHU 121). It has its own inherent normativity, lacking any simple external standards (TS 388) As well as being problematic in itself, this kind of open advocation of irrationalism and dogmatism would seem to rule out the possibility of empirically or rationally assessing the validity of a particular Act: by definition an Act is not open to such assessment, so one cannot judge between a false (eg. Nazi) and a true Act, since this would involve precisely such a rational and empirical process of assessment ("good reasons" and truth-status). This raises problems for Zizek's attempts to distance himself from Nazism (see below, on false acts). Also, Zizek is being inconsistent in trying to defend such an attack on communication by communicative means (can one make a rational case against rationality?).

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alt fails ethics

Zizeks alternative requires an abandonment of ethics and accepting an obliteration of the self. Robinson 04 (Andrew, PhD, political theory, University of Nottingham, Introduction: The Basic Zizekian Model, Theory Blog, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/zizek-notes-and-work-inprogress_15.html) Zizek's theory of the Act presupposes a belief that we are all basically worthless. "The ultimate level of the ethical experience" is found in the utterly broken victim of the Nazi or Stalinist camps (DSST 86), which means one "will be surprised to learn how even the darkest Stalinism harbours a redemptive dimension" (DSST 88). Humanity

per se is reducible to the most broken concentration camp inmates (i.e. the ones who have gone beyond trying o reconstruct meaning through petty resistances; referred to in the camps as "Muslims" or "Musselmen" because of their resemblance to famine victims); these people were not dehumanised by the Nazis, but rather, express an inhuman kernel of humanity (DSST 76-7). This kind of person is the " 'zero-level' of humanity" which makes human symbolic engagement possible by wiping the slate of animal instincts (DSST 77; NB the strong binary operative here, which is totally flawed: dogs show similar modes of action when exposed to similar situations, such as Seligman's dogs in the 'learned helplessness' experiments). Zizek thinks we all have had to go through this experience (DSST 77-8). This experience also negates the concept of authenticity (though not enough to stop Zizek using it elsewhere): one can't say such victims are involved in an authentic existential project, but it would be cynical to say they are living an inauthentic existence since it is others, not themselves, who degrade them (DSST 78-9; I don't actually see why an external basis for subordination would affect the concept of authenticity in the slightest; perhaps it would affect the strongest versions which assume pure freedom, but it would not undermine, for instance, the later Sartre, since in this case the authenticity of the project has been defeated by the practico-inert, leading to a state of existence he terms "exis": a degraded existence without project). I think a Deleuzian analysis would be more appropriate here: the dehumanisation of these victims results from the (temporary) total victory of the Oedipal/authoritarian cage: flows and breaks are cut off or utterly contained within an order of power/knowledge, with the political conclusion being that freedom exists in a struggle with domination and that the struggle for freedom is necessary to prevent us being reduced to this level. But this would be partly a causal

; Zizek cannot in all seriousness criticise the inhumanity of the concentration camps if they simply reveal our essence, and it is hard to see how one could oppose the Nazis if they did not dehumanise their victims or treat them inhumanely. Indeed, such an excremental reduction is something Zizek elsewhere praises, and his attempts to distance himself from Nazism have nothing to do with the inhumanity of the camps; rather, they revolve around nit-picking over whether the Nazis really traversed the fantasy or stopped short at a false act (see below). The Act is a submission: revolutionaries should become "followers" of the truth-event and its call (TS 227; this reproduces with a reversed sign Vaneigem's concept of the Cause as a form of alienation. cf. Donald Rooum's cartoon Wildcat: "I don't just want freedom from the capitalists, I also want freedom from people fit to take over"). Love is "nothing but" an act of self-erasure which breaks the chain of justice (DSST 49-50). Zizek demands submission to radically exterior, meaningless injunctions, "experienced as a radically traumatic intrusion", which "a renewed Left should aim at fully endorsing"; "something violently imposed on me from the Outside through a traumatic encounter that shatters the very foundations of my being" (TS 212). It also involves the negation of dignity: Zizek refers to "heroically renouncing the last vestiges of narcissistic dignity and accomplishing the act for which one is grotesquely inadequate" (TS 352). The heroism of the act is to openly endorse a transition "from Bad to Worse", and for this reason, a true act, which redefines the 'rules of the game', is "inherently 'terroristic' " (TS 377). Thus, instead of the "liberal trap" of respecting some rights and rejecting obligatory Party lines, one should seek the "good terror", i.e. choosing what one has to do (TS 378). Any qualms are dismissed by Zizek as "humanist hysterical shirking the act" (TS 380; NB this misuse of clinical categories in socio-ideological analysis quickly leads Zizek into problems: the Lacanian categories obsessional/hysterical/psychotic/perverse are strictly incompatible, whereas it is quite clear that a theorist who 'hysterically' rejects terror may easily also 'psychotically' believe in literality and 'perversely' believe in decoded flows). The Act involves accepting utter self-obliteration, and rejecting all compassion (TS 378).
account, whereas Zizek seems to want a pure ethics. Where Zizek's account leads politically is far more sinister

Zizeks act erases all compassion for others. Robinson 04 (Andrew, PhD, political theory, University of Nottingham, Introduction: The Basic Zizekian Model, Theory Blog, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/zizek-notes-and-work-inprogress_15.html) Assuming an Act means rejecting all concern for others and making oneself, to all intents and purposes, a rock. In the Act, one "assumes... the full burden of freedom impervious to any call of the Other" (DSST 175). Whereas in Derrida and other postmodernists, argues Zizek, ethics is a response to the call of the Other, either abyssal or actual, in Zizek's Lacan the ethical act proper suspends both of these along with the rest of the 'big Other' (DSST 161). Zizek loathes 'soft-heartedness' because it "blurs the subject's pure ethical stance". In this passage, he is referring to Stalinist views; but his criticism of them is not of this loathing; rather, he thinks "that they were not 'pure' enough" because they got caught in an emotional sense of duty (DSST 111). This according to Zizek is the difference between Lenin and Stalin: Zizek's Lenin did not become emotionally attached to his Act 92

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Updated Lacan K 93 (DSST 113). Zizek's ethical anti-humanism goes so far that he advocates hating the beloved out of love (FA 126), because what one should love is not their human person. Zizek also endorses Kant's attempt to purge ethics of historical contents, including compassion and concern for others (PF 232-3).

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alt fails cant change existing order

Zizeks alternative fails to transform the existing orderit is a shot in the dark. Robinson 04 (Andrew, PhD, political theory, University of Nottingham, Introduction: The Basic Zizekian Model, Theory Blog, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/zizek-notes-and-work-inprogress_15.html) How one locates the Act in relation to revolution depends just how fundamentally the change involved in a revolution is conceived. The Act according to Zizek disrupts/overthrows the existing order of Imaginary and Symbolic alignments (though this does not of course make it revolutionary in practice); however, his account seems to involve the restoration of the basic structure of the social system subsequently, so there is no possibility of meaningful change in terms of overcoming social oppression and exclusion or the irrationalities of ideology. (This also leaves the question of why an Act would lead to anything better; indeed, Zizek denies that it would. So why opt for an Act?). In a sense, the Act is conservative. Traversing the fantasy involves the act of 'accepting' there is no way one can ever be satisfied: a

direct relation to the objet petit a (i.e. desired object) minus the screen of fantasy, involving "a full acceptance of the pain... as inherent to the excess of pleasure which is jouissance" (PF 30). This means accepting "radical ontological closure" - i.e. 'accepting' that there is no radical difference - and also that "we renounce every opening, every belief in the messianic Otherness", including, for instance, Derridean and Levinasian concepts of being 'out-of-joint' (PF 31), especially the idea of jouissance being amassed elsewhere. This leads one into the realm of drive; one becomes "eternal-'undead' " (PF 31). (Zizek is here replacing an irrational belief that jouissance is amassed elsewhere with an irrational belief that it isn't; the existence or non-existence of difference and Otherness is an empirical question,

Crucially, the Act does not involve overcoming Law and the system. It involves suspending them, so they can be resurrected or resuscitated on a new basis. Although the Act is a 'shot in the dark' (preventing voluntary reconstruction/transformation of society), nevertheless it always involves a necessary betrayal (see TS) which reproduces the Oedipal/authoritarian structure of the world; the vanishing mediator always vanishes so as to restore the system. It is interesting to note Zizek's insistence on using
and Zizek's refusal to accept that radical Otherness could exist renders his theory potentially extremely normalist and ethnocentric).

the word "suspension" (St Paul's suspension of the law, the leftist suspension of the ethics, and so on). The suspension of the Law, as shown in Zizek's quote from St Paul (TS 150-1), is clearly in fact something more: it is in a sense psychotic, breaking with both Law and desire. But it is a suspension because it resurrects Law in the more total form of the Cause. It is interesting that Zizek chooses the word "suspension". If Zizek has in mind a destruction or fundamental transformation of the Law or ethics, there are so many better terms he could have chosen: abolition, destruction, smashing, overcoming, transcending, sublating, surpassing and so on. That he (more-or-less consistently) uses the term "suspension" is therefore probably significant. This term implies a temporary absence of the

what is suspended (Law, ethics, etc.) nevertheless returns in the same basic form as before (which presumably means its structural nature is basically the same).
phenomenon in question, as opposed to its permanent destruction, replacement, or even transformation. In other words:

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alt fails violence

Zizeks political stance is violent and feeds into power. His alternative has so few limits that there is nothing to prevent elites from deploying it to violently maintain power. Robinson (PhD Political Theory, University of Nottingham) 05 (Theory and Event, Andrew, 8:1, The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique). On a political level, this kind of stance leads to an acceptance of social exclusion which negates compassion for its victims. The resultant inhumanity finds its most extreme expression in iek's work, where 'today's "mad dance", the dynamic proliferation of multiple shifting identities... awaits its resolution in a new form of Terror'.

It is also present, however, in the toned-down exclusionism of authors such as Mouffe. Hence, democracy depends on 'the possibility of drawing a frontier between "us" and "them"', and 'always entails relations of inclusion-exclusion'28. 'No state or political order... can exist without some form of exclusion' experienced by its victims as coercion and violence29, and, since Mouffe assumes a state to be necessary, this means that one must endorse exclusion and violence. (The supposed necessity of the state is derived from the supposed need for a master-signifier or nodal point to stabilize identity and avoid psychosis, either for individuals or for societies). What is at stake in the division between these two trends in Lacanian political theory is akin to the distinction Vaneigem draws between "active" and "passive" nihilism30. The Laclauian trend involves an implied ironic distance from any specific project, which maintains awareness of its contingency; overall, however, it reinforces conformity by

iekian version is committed to a more violent and passionate affirmation of negativity, but one which ultimately changes very little. The function of the iekian "Act" is to dissolve the self, producing a historical event. "After the revolution", however, everything stays much the same. For all its radical pretensions, iek's politics can be summed up in his attitude to neo-liberalism: 'If it works, why not try a dose of it?'31. The phenomena which are denounced in Lacanian theory are invariably readmitted in its "small print", and this leads to a theory which renounces both effectiveness and political radicalism. It is in this pragmatism that the ambiguity of Lacanian political theory resides, for, while on a theoretical level it is based on an almost sectarian "radicalism", denouncing everything that exists for its complicity in illusions and guilt for the present, its "alternative" is little different from what it condemns (the assumption apparently being that the "symbolic" change in the psychological coordinates of attachments in reality is directly effective, a claim assumed wrongly to follow from the claim that social reality is constructed discursively). Just like in the process of psychoanalytic cure, nothing actually changes on the level of specific characteristics. The only change is in how one relates to the characteristics, a process iek terms 'dotting the "i's"' in
insisting on an institutional mediation which overcodes all the "articulations". The

reality, recognizing and thereby installing necessity32. All that changes, in other words, is the interpretation: as long as they are reconceived as expressions of constitutive lack, the old politics are acceptable. Thus, iek claims that de Gaulle's "Act" succeeded by allowing him 'effectively to realize the necessary pragmatic measures' which others pursued unsuccessfully33. More recent examples of iek's pragmatism include that his alternative to the U.S. war in Afghanistan is only that 'the punishment of those responsible' should be done in a spirit of 'sad duty', not 'exhilarating retaliation'34, and his "solution" to the Palestine-Israel crisis, which is NATO control of the occupied territories35. If this is the case for iek, the ultra-"radical" "Marxist-Leninist" Lacanian, it is so much the more so for his more moderate adversaries. Jason Glynos, for instance, offers an uncompromizing critique of the construction of guilt and innocence in anti-"crime" rhetoric, demanding that demonization of deviants be abandoned, only to insist as an afterthought that, 'of course, this... does not mean that their offences should go unpunished'36. Lacanian theory tends, therefore, to produce an "anything goes" attitude to state action: because everything else is contingent

, nothing is to limit the practical consideration of tactics by dominant elites.

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Zizeks philosophy is contradictory and lacks a concrete alternative. Tormey and Robinson, 05 teaches in the School of Politics and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham; doctoral student in the School of Politics at the University of Nottingham (Simon; Andrew, SAGE Publications, A Ticklish Subject? Zizek and the Future of Left Radicalism) Zizeks popularity results largely from the apparent way out that he provides from the cul-de-sac in which radical theory, and in particular radical postmodern theory, has found itself. Zizek is of course not the rst author to attack postmodernists, post-structuralists and post-Marxists on grounds of their lack of radical ambition on the terrain of politics. However, left activists interested in confronting the liberal capitalist status quo nd themselves trapped between politically radical but theoretically awed leftist orthodoxies, and theoretically innovative but politically moderate post-theories. Enter Zizek. Zizek offers an alternative to traditional left radicalisms and postmodern anti-essentialist approaches, especially identity politics. For Zizek, radical democracy accepts the liberal-capitalist horizon, and so is never radical enough. Against this alleged pseudo-radicalism, Zizek revives traditional leftist concepts such as class struggle. He ignores, however, the orthodox left meaning of such terms, rearticulating them in a sophisticated Hegelian and Lacanian vocabulary. Yet problems remain: Zizeks version of class struggle does not map on to traditional conceptions of an empirical working class, and Zizeks proletariat is avowedly mythical. He also rejects newer forms of struggle such as the anti-capitalist movement and the 1968 uprisings, thereby reproducing a problem common in radical theory: his theory has no link to radical politics in an immediate sense.6 Nevertheless, he has a theory of how such a politics shouldlook, which he uses to judge existing political radicalisms. So how does Zizek see radical politics emerging? Zizek does not offer much by way of a positive social agenda. He does not have anything approximating to a programme, nor a model of the kind of society he seeks, nor a theory of the construction of alternatives in the present. Indeed, the more one looks at the matter, the more difcult it becomes to pin Zizek down to any line or position. He seems at rst sight to regard social transformation not as something possible to be theorized and advanced, but as a fundamental impossibility because the inuence of the dominant symbolic system is so great that it makes alternatives unthinkable.7 A fundamental transformation, however, is clearly the only answer to the otherwise compelling vision of contemporary crisis Zizek offers. Can he escape this contradiction? His attempt to do so revolves around a reclassication of impossibility as an active element in generating action. The Act creates no political change and results in suicide Tormey and Robinson, 5 teaches in the School of Politics and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham; doctoral student in the School of Politics at the University of Nottingham (Simon; Andrew, SAGE Publications, A Ticklish Subject? Zizek and the Future of Left Radicalism)
So the Act is a rebirth but a rebirth as what? The parallel with Lacans concept of traversing the fantasy is crucial because, for Lacan, there is no escape from the symbolic order or the Law of the Master. We are trapped in the existing world, complete with its dislocation, lack, alienation antagonism, and no transcendence can overcome the deep structure of this world, which is fixed at the level of subject-

. In Zizeks politics, therefore, a fundamental social transformation is impossible. After the break initiated by an Act, a system similar to the present one is restored; the subject undergoes identification with a Cause, leading to a new proper symbolic Prohibition revitalized by the process of rebirth pragmatic measures (Zizek, 1997b: 723), which may be the same ones astoday. It is on this ground that Zizek is relaxed about supporting measures that, far from challenging or undermining the status quo, give added support to it as, for example, in his refusal to
formation. The most we can hope for is to go from incapable neurosis to mere alienated subjectivity Lacanian, Zizek is opposed to any idea of realizing utopian fullness and thus in escaping the vicissitudes of the political qua antagonism. Any change i

denounce structural adjustment policies (Zizek, 1996: 32). This is all because, in his view, it is possible to start a new life, but only by replacing one symbolic fiction with another (Zizek, 1999: 331). As a

n the basic structure of existence, whereby one may overcome dislocation and disorientation, is out of the question. However, he also rejects practical solutions to problems as a mere displacement (Zizek, 1999: 3834). So an Act neither solves concrete problems nor achieves drastic improvements; it merely removes blockages to existing modes of thought and action. It transforms the constellation which generates social symptoms (Butler et al., 2000: 124), shifting exclusion
from one group to another, but it does not achieve either drastic or moderate concrete changes. It means that we accept the vicious circle of revolving around the object [the Real] and find jouissance in it,

It also offers those who take part in it a dimension of Otherness, that moment when the absolute appears in all its fragility, a brief apparition of a future utopian Otherness to which every authentic revolutionary stance should cling (Zizek, 2000: 15960). This absolute, 96
renouncing the myth that jouissance is amassed somewhere else (Zizek, 1988: 10910).

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Updated Lacan K 97 however, can only be glimpsed. The leader, Act and Cause must be betrayed so the social order can be refounded. The leader, or mediator, must erase himself [sic] from the picture (Zizek, 2001b: 50), retreating to the horizon of the social to haunt history as spectre or phantasy (Zizek, 2000: 64). Every Great Man must be betrayed so he can assume his fame and thereby become compatible with the status quo (Zizek, 1999: 901, 316); once one glimpses the sublime Universal, therefore, one must commit suicide as Zizek claims the Bolshevik Party did, via the Stalinist purges (1997c). Zizek offers no clear alternativecapitalism is inevitable. Robinson 04 (Andrew, PhD, political theory, University of Nottingham, Introduction: The Basic Zizekian Model, Theory Blog, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/zizek-notes-and-work-inprogress_15.html) It is by no means clear that Zizek thinks alternatives to capitalism are possible, or that he wants them. He seems to want to destroy capitalism, on his definition of it (see CAPITALISM, CONSERVATISM), which sets up a rather conservative target (liberalism, permissiveness, decadence, 'flabbiness', etc.). It is less clear that he wants to destroy it by any other criterion: he endorses work ethics and authoritarianism, and he has posited so much of the deep structure of society as unchangeable as to render the space for change highly limited. Laclau attacks Zizek on this subject. Despite "r-r-revolutionary zeal", Zizek is no more proposing a thoroughly different economic and political regime than Laclau. Zizek lets us know nothing about his alternative, Laclau says (actually, this is not strictly true, though he does tell us very little); he only tells us that it isn't liberal democracy or capitalism. Laclau is concerned it could mean Stalinism, despite Zizek's earlier resistance against this (NB Zizek dislikes late, post-Stalin Stalinism with a human face, but distinguishes this from the earlier Stalinism - what he resisted was the former); Laclau suspects Zizek simply doesn't know what his alternative is (CHU 289). How does Zizek respond to this? He uses it to pathologise Laclau, claiming he cannot imagine an alternative and so thinks there isn't one (which Laclau actually never states).

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Zizeks alternative failshe claims that capitalism must be over thrown but has no means of accomplishing this goal. Boynton, 98 (Director of NYU's Graduate Magazine Journalism Program, Robert, "Enjoy Your iek!" Lingua Franca, October, http://www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_id=43) "Authentic politics is the art of the impossible," he writes. "It changes the very parameters of what is considered "possible' in the existing constellation." This is a noble vision, but when Zizek turns to history, he finds only fleeting examples of genuine politics in action: in ancient Athens; in the proclamations of the Third Estate during the French Revolution; in the Polish Solidarity movement; and in the last, heady days of the East German Republic before the Wall came down and the crowds stopped chanting "Wir sind das Volk" ("We are the people!") and began chanting "Wir sind ein Volk" ("We are a/one people!"). The shift from definite to indefinite article, writes Zizek, marked "the closure of the momentary authentic political opening, the reappropriation of the democratic impetus by the thrust towards reunification of Germany, which meant rejoining Western Germany's liberal-capitalist police/political order." In articulating his political credo, Zizek attempts to synthesize three unlikelyperhaps incompatiblesources: Lacan's notion of the subject as a "pure void" that is "radically out of joint" with the world, Marx's political economy, and St. Paul's conviction that universal truth is the only force capable of recognizing the needs of the particular. Zizek is fond of calling himself a "Pauline materialist," and he admires St. Paul's muscular vision. He believes that the post-political deadlock can be broken only by a gesture that undermines "capitalist globalization from the standpoint of universal truth in the same way that Pauline Christianity did to the Roman global empire." He adds: "My dream is to combine an extremely dark, pessimistic belief that life is basically horrible and contingent, with a revolutionary social attitude. AS PHILOSOPHY, Zizek's argument is breathtaking, but as social prescription, "dream" may be an apt word. The only way to combat the dominance of global capitalism, he argues, is through a "direct socialization of the productive process"an agenda that is unlikely to play well in Slovenia, which is now enjoying many of the fruits of Western consumer capitalism. When pressed to specify what controlling the productive process might look like, Zizek admits he doesn't know, although he feels certain that an alternative to capitalism will emerge and that the public debate must be opened up to include subjects like control over genetic engineering. Like many who call for a return to the primacy of economics, Zizek has only the most tenuous grasp of the subject. Zizeks alternative is political nihilism he supplies no method for over throwing capitalism. Laclau 04 Ernesto Laclau, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Essex and Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at SUNY-Buffalo, 2004, Umbr(a): War, p. 33-34
Here we reach the crux of the difficulties to be found in Zizek. On the one hand, he is committed to a theory of the full revolutionary act that would operate in its own name, without being invested in any object outside itself. On the other hand, the capitalist system, as the dominating, underlying mechanism, is the reality with which the emancipatory act has to break. The conclusion from both premises is that there is no valid emancipatory struggle except one that is fully and directly anti-capitalist. In his words: I believe in the central structuring role of the anti-capitalist struggle. The problem, however, is this: he gives no indication of what an anti-capitalist struggle might be. Zizek quickly dismisses multicultural, anti-sexist, and anti-racist struggles as not being directly anti-capitalist. Nor does he sanction the traditional aims of the Left, linked more directly to the economy: the demands for higher wages, for industrial democracy, for control of the labor process, for a progressive distribution of income, are not proposed as anti-capitalist either. Does he imagine that the Luddites proposal to destroy all the machines would bring an end to capitalism? Not a single line in Zizeks work gives an example of what he considers an anti-capitalist struggle. One is left wondering whether he is anticipating an invasion of beings from another planet, or as he once suggested, some kind of ecological catastrophe that would not transform the world but cause it to fall apart. So where has the whole argument gone wrong? In its very premises. Since Zizek refuses to apply the hegemonic logic to strategico-political thought, he is stranded in a blind alley. He has to dismiss all partial struggles as internal to the system (whatever that means), and the Thing being unachievable, he is left without any concrete historical actor for his anti-capitalist struggle. Conclusion: Zizek cannot provide any theory of the emancipatory subject. At the same time, since his systemic totality, being a ground, is regulated exclusively by its own internal laws, the only option is to wait for these laws to produce the totality of its effects. Ergo: political nihilism.

revolution fails

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is only strategic because it is so ridiculous Kirsch, 8 senior editor of The New Republic (Adam, The New Republic, The Deadly Jester, http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=097a31f3-c4404b10-8894-14197d7a6eef)
Zizek is a believer in the Revolution at a time when almost nobody, not even on the left, thinks that such a cataclysm is any longer possible or even desirable. This is his big problem, and also his big opportunity.

While "socialism" remains a favorite hate-word for the Republican right, the prospect of communism overthrowing capitalism is now so remote, so fantastic, that nobody feels strongly moved to oppose it, as conservatives and liberal anticommunists opposed it in the 1930s, the 1950s, and even the 1980s. When Zizek turns up speaking the classical language of Marxism-Leninism, he profits from the assumption that the return of ideas that were once the cause of tragedy can now occur only in the form of farce. In the visual arts, the denaturing of what were once passionate and dangerous icons has become commonplace, so that emblems of evil are transformed into perverse fun, harmless but very profitable statements of post-ideological camp; and there is a kind of intellectual equivalent of this development in Zizek's work. The cover of his book The Parallax View reproduces a Socialist Realist portrait of "Lenin at the Smolny Institute," in the ironically unironic fashion made familiar by the pseudo-iconoclastic work of Komar and Melamid, Cai Guo-Jiang, and other post-Soviet, post-Mao artists. He, too, expects you to be in on the joke. But there is a difference between Zizek and the other jokesters. It is that he is not really joking.

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Lacans explanation of the Real requires a leap of faith similar to religion. You are asked to believe in it because it is beyond our understanding. Robinson (PhD Political Theory, University of Nottingham) 05 (Theory and Event, Andrew, 8:1, The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique). This passage could almost have been written with the "Lacanian Real" in mind. The characteristic of the Real is precisely that one can invoke it without defining it (since it is "beyond symbolization"), and that the accidental failure of language, or indeed a contingent failure in social praxis, is identified with an ontological resistance to symbolization projected into Being itself. For instance, iek's classification of the Nation as a Thing rests on the claim that 'the only way we can determine it is by... empty tautology', and that it is a 'semantic void'63. Similarly, he claims that 'the tautological gesture of the Master-Signifier', an empty performative which retroactively turns presuppositions into conclusions, is necessary, and also that tautology is the only way historical change can occur64. He even declares constitutive lack (in this case, termed the "death drive") to be a tautology. Lacanian references to "the Real" or "antagonism" as the cause of a contingent failure are reminiscent of Robert Teflon's definition of God: 'an explanation which means "I have no explanation"'. An "ethics of the Real" is a minor ethical salvation which says very little in positive terms, but which can pose in macho terms as a "hard" acceptance of terrifying realities. It authorizes truth-claims - in Laclau's language, a 'reality' which is 'before our eyes67', or in Newman's, a 'harsh reality' hidden beneath a protective veil68 without the attendant risks. Some Lacanian theorists also show indications of a commitment based on the particular kind of "euphoric" enjoyment Barthes associates with myths. Laclau in particular emphasizes his belief in the 'exhilarating' significance of the present69, hinting that he is committed to euphoric investments generated through the repetition of the same. Their vision of politics is a non-falsifiable myth: The root of the Lacanian subject is structured around the lack. The problem is that there is nothing to support this idea of a missing reality. Robinson (PhD Political Theory, University of Nottingham) 05 (Theory and Event, Andrew, 8:1, The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique). More precisely, I would maintain that "constitutive lack" is an instance of a Barthesian myth. It is, after all, the function of myth to do exactly what this concept does: to assert the empty facticity of a particular ideological schema while rejecting any need to argue for its assumptions. 'Myth does not deny things; on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it is a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact'. This is precisely the status of "constitutive lack": a supposed fact which is supposed to operate above and beyond explanation, on an ontological level instantly accessible to those with the courage to accept it. Myths operate to construct euphoric enjoyment for those who use them, but their operation is in conflict with the social context with which they interact. This is because their operation is connotative: they are "received" rather than "read" and open only to a "readerly" and not a "writerly" interpretation. A myth is a second-order signification attached to an already-constructed denotative sign, and the ideological message projected into this sign is constructed outside the context of the signified. A myth is therefore, in Alfred Korzybski's sense, intensional: its meaning derives from a prior linguistic schema, not from interaction with the world in its complexity. Furthermore, myths have a repressive social function, carrying in Barthes's words an 'order not to think'. They are necessarily projected onto or imposed on actual people and events, under the cover of this order. The "triumph of literature" in the Dominici trial consists precisely in this projection of an externally-constructed mythical schema as a way of avoiding engagement with something one does not understand. Lacanian theory, like Barthesian myths, involves a prior idea of a structural matrix which is not open to change in the light of the instances to which it is applied. iek's writes of a 'pre-ontological dimension which precedes and eludes the construction of reality'42, while Laclau suggests there is a formal structure of any chain of equivalences which necessitates the logic of hegemony43. Specific analyses are referred back to this underlying structure as its necessary expressions, without apparently being able to alter it; for instance, 'those who triggered the process of democratization in eastern Europe... are not those who today enjoy its fruits, not because of a simple usurpation... but because of a deeper structural logic'44. In most instances, the mythical operation of the idea of "constitutive lack" is implicit, revealed only by a rhetoric of denunciation. For instance, Mouffe accuses 100

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Updated Lacan K 101 liberalism of an 'incapacity... to grasp... the irreducible character of antagonism'45, while iek claims that a 'dimension' is 'lost' in Butler's work because of her failure to conceive of "trouble" as constitutive of "gender"46. This language of "denial" which is invoked to silence critics is a clear example of Barthes's "order not to think": one is not to think about the idea of "constitutive lack", one is simply to "accept" it, under pain of invalidation. If someone else disagrees, s/he can simply be told that there is something crucial missing from her/his theory. Indeed, critics are as likely to be accused of being "dangerous" as to be accused of being wrong.

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Lacanian criticism is analytically radical but breaks down into very conservative politics. Robinson (PhD Political Theory, University of Nottingham) 05 (Theory and Event, Andrew, 8:1, The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique). There is more than an accidental relationship between the mythical operation of the concept of "constitutive lack" and Lacanians' conservative and pragmatist politics. Myth is a way of reducing thought to the present: the isolated signs which are included in the mythical gesture are thereby attached to extra-historical abstractions. On an analytical level, Lacanian theory can be very "radical", unscrupulously exposing the underlying relations and assumptions concealed beneath officially-sanctioned discourse. This radicalism, however, never translates into political conclusions: as shown above, a radical rejection of anti-"crime" rhetoric turns into an endorsement of punishment, and a radical critique of neo-liberalism turns into a pragmatist endorsement of structural adjustment. It is as if there is a magical barrier between theory and politics which insulates the latter from the former. One should recall a remark once made by Wilhelm Reich: 'You plead for happiness in life, but security means more to you'133. Lacanians have a "radical" theory oriented towards happiness, but politically, their primary concern is security. As long as they are engaged in politically ineffectual critique, Lacanians will denounce and criticize the social system, but once it comes to practical problems, the "order not to think" becomes operative. This "magic" barrier is the alibi function of myth. The short-circuit between specific instances and high-level abstractions is politically consequential. The deep negativity toward politics makes Lacanian analysis collapse into reactionary politics. Robinson (PhD Political Theory, University of Nottingham) 05 (Theory and Event, Andrew, 8:1, The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique). The political function of Lacanian theory is to preclude critique by encoding the present as myth. There is a danger of a stultifying conservatism arising from within Lacanian political theory, echoing the 'terrifying conservatism' Deleuze suggests is active in any reduction of history to negativity136. The addition of an "always" to contemporary evils amounts to a "pessimism of the will", or a "repressive reduction of thought to the present". Stavrakakis, for instance, claims that attempts to find causes and thereby to solve problems are always fantasmatic137, while iek states that an object which is perceived as blocking something does nothing but materialize the already-operative constitutive lack138. While this does not strictly entail the necessity of a conservative attitude to the possibility of any specific reform, it creates a danger of discursive slippage and hostility to "utopianism" which could have conservative consequences. Even if Lacanians believe in surplus/contingent as well as constitutive lack, there are no standards for distinguishing the two. If one cannot tell which social blockages result from constitutive lack and which are contingent, how can one know they are not all of the latter type? And even if constitutive lack exists, Lacanian theory runs a risk of "misdiagnoses" which have a neophobe or even reactionary effect. To take an imagined example, a Lacanian living in France in 1788 would probably conclude that democracy is a utopian fantasmatic ideal and would settle for a pragmatic reinterpretation of the ancin regime. Laclau and Mouffe's hostility to workers' councils and iek's insistence on the need for a state and a Party139 exemplify this neophobe tendency. The pervasive negativity and cynicism of Lacanian theory offers little basis for constructive activity. Instead of radical transformation, one is left with a pragmatics of "containment" which involves a conservative de-problematization of the worst aspects of the status quo. The inactivity it counsels would make its claims a self-fulfilling prophecy by acting as a barrier to transformative activity. The alternative encourages oppressive social relationsthe idea we are driven by joussiance is essentially a justification for sadomasochismincluding accepting totalitarianism. Robinson (PhD Political Theory, University of Nottingham) 05 (Theory and Event, Andrew, 8:1, The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique). The "death instinct" is connected to an idea of primordial masochism which, in the form of "aphanisis" or "subjective destitution", recurs throughout Lacanian political theory. iek in particular advocates masochism, in the guise of "shooting at" or "beating" oneself, as a radical gesture which reveals the essence of the self and breaks the constraints of an oppressive reality, although the masochistic gesture is present in all Lacanian 102

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Updated Lacan K 103 theorists. The death instinct is typified by iek as a pathological (in the Kantian sense), contingent attitude which finds satisfaction in the process of self-blockage109. It is identical with the Lacanian concept of jouissance or enjoyment. For him, 'enjoyment (jouissance) is not to be equated with pleasure: enjoyment is precisely "pleasure in unpleasure"; it designates the paradoxical satisfaction procured by a painful encounter with a Thing that perturbs the equilibrium of the pleasure principle. In other words, enjoyment is located "beyond the pleasure principle"'110. It is also the core of the self, since enjoyment is 'the only "substance" acknowledged by psychoanalysis', and 'the subject fully "exists" only through enjoyment'111. Primordial masochism is therefore central to the Lacanian concept of the Real, which depends on there being a universal moment at which active desire - sometimes given the slightly misleading name of the "pleasure principle" - is suspended, not for a greater or delayed pleasure, but out of a direct desire for unpleasure (i.e. a primary reactive desire). Furthermore, this reactive desire is supposed to be ontologically prior to active desire. Dominick LaCapra offers a similar but distinct critique to my own, claiming that Lacanian and similar theories induce a post-traumatic compulsion repetition or an 'endless, quasi-transcendental grieving that may be indistinguishable from interminable melancholy'. Reich has already provided a rebuttal of "primordial masochism", which, paradoxically given iek's claims to radicalism, was denounced by orthodox Freudians as communist propaganda. In Reich's view, masochism operates as a relief at a lesser pain which operates as armouring against anxiety about an underlying trauma113. Regardless of what one thinks of Reich's specific account of the origins of masochism, what is crucial is his critique of the idea of a death drive. 'Such hypotheses as are criticised here are often only a sign of therapeutic failure. For if one explains masochism by a death instinct, one confirms to the patient his [sic] alleged will to suffer'. Thus, Lacanian metaphysics conceal Lacanians' encouragement of a variety of neurosis complicit with oppressive social realities. Politically, the thesis of primordial masochism provides a mystifying cover for the social forces which cause and benefit from the contingent emergence of masochistic attachments (i.e. sadistic power apparatuses). One could compare this remark to Butler's claim that iek 'defends the trauma of the real... over and against a different kind of threat'115 Zizeks alternative is pessimistic and authoritarian his theory precludes democratic politics. Breger, 01 Assistant Professor of Germanic Studies at Indiana, 2001 (Claudia, Diacritics 31.1 (2001) 73-90, "The Leader's Two Bodies: Slavoj Zizek's Postmodern Political Theology," project muse) More than ten years laterafter a decade of authoritarian rule, war, and genocide in former Yugoslaviarecent revolutionary events in Serbia once more allow one to hope for a thorough democratization of the region. In a newspaper article evaluating the uprising, however, Zizek warned that these hopes might be premature: while Milosevic could find his new role as "a Serbian Jesus Christ," taking upon him all the "sins" committed by his people, Kostunica and his "democratic" nationalism might represent "nothing but Milosevic in the 'normal' version, without the excess" [Zizek, "Gewalt"]. Zizek was not alone in warning that the new government in Yugoslavia might not bring an end to Serbian nationalist politics. The pessimistic scenario Zizek evoked on this occasion, however, was not simply the result of his evaluation of the current political constellation in Serbia. Rather, the fantasy of the necessary return of the leader is connected to his political theorya theory that does not allow for more optimistic scenarios of democratization and the diminution of nationalism in society. My reading of Zizek's work thus argues for a reevaluation of his theory in terms of its implicit authoritarian politics. The need for such a reevaluation is also suggested by Laclau toward the end of his recent exchange with Judith Butler and Zizek when he admits that "the more our discussions progressed, the more I realized that my sympathy for Zizek's politics was largely the result of a mirage" [Laclau, "Constructing Universality" 292]. Laclau now criticizes Zizek's radical Marxist rhetoric by suggesting that he "wants to do away with liberal democratic regimes" without specifying a political alternative [289], and describes Zizek's discourse as "schizophrenically split between a highly sophisticated Lacanian analysis and an insufficiently deconstructed traditional Marxism" [205]. On [End Page 73] the other hand, he also problematizes Zizek's "psychoanalytic discourse" as "not truly political" [289]. My argument primarily starts from this latter point: the antidemocraticand, as I will argue, both antifeminist and anti-Semiticmoment of Zizek's theory is to be located not only in the way he performs Marxism, but also in the way he performs Lacanian psychoanalysis. While, in other words, Zizek's skepticism vis--vis democracy is obviously informed by, and inseparable from, Marxist critiques of "liberal," "representative" democracy, his failure to elaborate alternative visions of political change towards egalitarian and/or plural scenarios of society cannot be explained solely by his Marxist 103

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The alternative links to the critique: the Lacanian notion of a constitutive element that is at the root of all political fantasy is just as essentialist as they claim the affirmative to be. Robinson (PhD Political Theory, University of Nottingham) 05 (Theory and Event, Andrew, 8:1, The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique). Lacanians assume that the idea of a founding negativity is not essentialist, whereas any idea of an autonomous positive or affirmative force, even if constructed as active, undefinable, changing and/or incomplete, is essentialist. The reason Lacanians can claim to be "anti-essentialist" is that there is a radical rupture between the form and content of Lacanian theory. The "acceptance of contingency" constructed around the idea of "constitutive lack" is a closing, not an opening, gesture, and is itself "essentialist" and non-contingent. Many Lacanian claims are not at all contingent, but are posited as ahistorical absolutes. To take an instance from Mouffe's work, 'power and antagonism' are supposed to have an 'ineradicable character' so that 'any social objectivity is constituted through acts of power' and will show traces of exclusions. One could hardly find a clearer example anywhere of a claim about a fixed basic structure of Being. One could also note again the frequency of words such as "all" and "always" in the Lacanian vocabulary. Ludwig Wittgenstein argues that 'if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions - namely the disjunction of all their common properties" - I should reply: Now you are only playing with words'77. Lacanian theory seems, indeed, to be treating disjunction as a basis for similarity, thus simply "playing with words"."contingency" embraced in Lacanian theory is not an openness which exceeds specifiable positivities, but a positivity posing as negativity. The relationship between contingency and "constitutive lack" is like the relationship between Germans and "Germanness", or tables and "tableness", in the work of Barthes. One could speak, therefore, of a "lack-ness" or a "contingency-ness" or an "antagonism-ness" in Lacanian political theory, and of this theory as a claim to fullness with this reified "lack-ness" as one of the positive elements within the fullness. One sometimes finds direct instances of such mythical vocabulary, as for instance when Stavrakakis demands acknowledgement of 'event-ness and negativity'78. Indeed, it is an especially closed variety of fullness, with core ideas posited as unquestionable dogmas and the entire structure virtually immune to falsification. Their alternative links to the critique. Their claim is that the aff is a quest for a new-master signifier that will fail because of the inevitable re-emergence of the Real. However, that statement is itself, a new master-signifier. Robinson (PhD Political Theory, University of Nottingham) 05 (Theory and Event, Andrew, 8:1, The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique). The gap between the two kinds of contingency is also suggested by the Lacanian insistence on the "need" for a master-signifier (or "nodal point"), i.e. a particular signifier which fills the position of universality, a 'symbolic injunction which relies only on its own act of enunciation'116. It is through such a gesture that one establishes a logic of sameness, and such a logic seems to be desired by Lacanians. Butler remarks that iek's text is a 'project of mastery' and a discourse of the law in which 'the "contingency" of language is mastered in and by a textual practice which speaks as the law'. He demands a '"New Harmony", sustained by a newly emerged Master-Signifier'. This insistence on a master-signifier is an anti-contingent gesture, especially in its rejection of the multiordinality of language. It is, after all, this multiordinality (the possibility of making a statement about any other statement) which renders language an open rather than a closed system. The "need" for a master-signifier seems to be a "need" to restore an illusion of closure, the "need" for metacommunication to operate in a repressive rather than an open way. This "need" arises because the mythical concept of "constitutive lack" is located in an entire mythical narrative in which it relates to other abstractions. In the work of Laclau and Mouffe, this expresses itself in the demand for a "hegemonic" agent who contingently expresses the idea of social order "as such". One should recall that such an order is impossible, since antagonism is constitutive of social relations, and that the hegemonic gesture therefore requires an exclusion. Thus, the establishment of a hegemonic master-signifier is merely a useful illusion. The alternative to demanding a master-signifier - an illusion of order where there is none - would be to reject the pursuit of the ordering function itself, and to embrace a "rhizomatic" politics which goes beyond this pursuit. In Laclau and Mouffe's work, however, the "need" for a social order, and a state to embody it, is never questioned, and, even 105

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Updated Lacan K 106 in Zizek's texts, the "Act" which smashes the social order is to be followed by a necessary restoration of order118. This necessity is derived ontologically: people are, says iek, 'in need of firm roots'119. The tautological gesture of establishing a master-signifier by restrospectively positing conditions of an object as its components, thereby 'blocking any further inquiry into the social meaning' of what it quilts (i.e. repressive metacommunication), is a structural necessity120. This is because 'discourse itself is in its fundamental structure "authoritarian"'. The role of the analyst is not to challenge the place of the master, but to occupy it in such a way as to expose its underlying contingency121. The master-signifier, also termed the One, demonstrates the centrality of a logic of place in Lacanian theory. Lacanians assume that constitutive lack necessitates the construction of a positive space which a particular agent can fill (albeit contingently), which embodies the emptiness/negativity as such. Therefore, the commitment to master-signifiers and the state involves a continuation of an essentialist image of positivity, with "lack" operating structurally as the mastersignifier of Lacanian theory itself (not as a subversion of positivity, but as a particular positive element). The idea of "constitutive lack" is supposed to entail a rejection of neutral and universal standpoints, and it is this rejection which constructs it as an "anti-essentialist" position. In practice, however, Lacanians restore the idea of a universal framework through the backdoor. Beneath the idea that "there is no neutral universality" lurks a claim to know precisely such a "neutral universality" and to claim a privileged position on this basis. A consistent belief in contingency and "anti-essentialism" entails scepticism about the idea of constitutive lack. After all, how does one know that the appearance that 'experience' shows lack to be constitutive reflects an underlying universality, as opposed to the contingent or even simulated effects of a particular discourse or episteme? Alongside its opponents, shouldn't Lacanian theory also be haunted by its own fallibility and incompletion? There is a paradox in the idea of radical choice, for it is unclear whether Lacanians believe this should be applied reflexively. Is the choice of Lacanian theory itself an ungrounded Decision? If so, the theory loses the universalist status it implicitly claims. If not, it would seem to be the kind of structural theory it attacks. A complete structural theory would seem to assume an extra-contingent standpoint, even if the structure includes a reference to constitutive lack. Such a theory would seem to be a radical negation of the incompletion of "I don't know".

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Zizeks arguments about 9/11 fail to recognize that the shock of the attack was not in its simulated nature but in its impact on real people. We need to focus on the actual effects of violence. Crosswhite, 01 (Associate Professor of English at University of Oregon, 2001 Jim, A Response to Slavoj Zizek's "Welcome to the Desert of the Real!", September 25, http://www.uoregon.edu/~jcross/response_to_zizek.htm) But to say that what happened on September 11 is like the scene in the Matrix where Morpheus introduces the Keanu Reeves character to the "desert of the real" is to say something that belongs on a Fox Network talk show.

9/11 arguments bad

For what Americans is it true that the events of September 11 broke into an "insulated artificial universe" that generated an image of a diabolical outsider? Let's not consider the 5,000 incinerated and dismembered men and women and children who suffered from disease and injury like all people, who cleaned toilets and coughed up phlegm and changed diapers and actually occupied with what was once their real bodies those towers which, for Zizek, stand for virtual capitalism. They can't be the ones whose delusions generated the fantasy of a diabolical outsider. None of them, none of their surviving children, none of their fellow citizens fantasized Bin Laden's ruling that it is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, to kill the Americans, military and civilians. So for whom has the fantastic "outside" broken in and smashed, with "shattering impact," an immaterial world of delusion? For whom does Osama Bin Laden appear as a character from a James Bond film? For whom did the events of September 11 arrive with the painful awareness that we were living in an artificial insulated reality? For whom do the people and events in this massacre of innocents appear solely in the shapes of film and television? Perhaps, perhaps the Americans living in an insulated, artificial reality are the characters in American television shows and in increasingly

Perhaps these are the Americans Zizek is listening to, watching, imagining. But here is the true "shattering impact:" that 5,000 innocent people who lived real lives in real, vulnerable human bodies, who bore real children, suffered real disease and injury and pain, bled real blood; 5,000 real people who helped to sustain a cosmopolitan city of millions and millions of other real people of different ethnic groups and religions and languages, real citizens who had achieved a great measure of peace and hope, who had been slowly and successfully bringing down the New York City crime rate; that 5,000 of these people would have their real bodies and lives erased in a matter of minutes, and that only body parts, the vapors of the incinerated, and the grieving and the sorrowful and the orphans would remain. This is the shock. This is the disbelief. Not the shattering of an illusion but the shattering of those real people and their real bodies. Not the shattering of a virtual reality, but the
intertextual American films. erasing of what was real. This is why the people of New York wept in the streets, why the tears and grief will continue. And this is why, in their grief, the survivors will struggle to preserve a memory of what was real, and to keep this memory of what was real from evanescing into someone else's symbol, or fantasy, or tool. Were the real lives they led less real for any happiness or peace they achieved? Are the unfathomable sufferings of Rwanda and what happened in Sarajevo to be the measure of what is most real? And yet in Zizek's writing, what happened on September 11 is not real but symbolic, as it seems to have been for the murderers, too: "the actual effect of these bombings is much more symbolic than real." We are just "getting a taste of" what goes on around the world "on a daily basis." OK, perhaps we are insulated and ignorant. But where are 5,000 innocents being incinerated by murderers on a daily basis? If Zizek is saying that Americans should be more knowledgeable about the lives and sufferings of other peoples whose lives and sufferings are entangled with America's own history, then who would disagree? If Zizek is saying that American power and its direct involvement in international affairs create a special responsibility for our educational systems and our media to provide us with a knowledge of global matters that we have not yet achieved, then who would disagree? If he is saying that Americans should comprehend more deeply how people in other parts of the world comprehend us, once more, who would disagree? If he is saying that real understanding of geographically distant others is endangered and distorted by the fantasies of film and television, are there educated Americans who have not heard this? Is the struggle to educate a democratic citizenship adequate to our time and the realities of globalization unique to the United States? That would be hard to believe. However, it must be conceded by all that the U.S. faces one special difficulty and so a special but obligatory struggle here. Many of its citizens will never have a first hand experience of Europe or the Middle East or Africa or Asia or even South America. I can drive or fly 3,000 miles and never leave my country. At best, I can get to Mexico or Canada. This would take someone living in France through all of Europe and into central Asia, or into the center of Africa. The problems of truly comprehending these others whose languages are rarely spoken anywhere near you and into whose actual presence you will never come are not trivial. But Zizek seems to be saying something more than all of this.

He seems to know more than most of us know. He knows that "the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian de-spiritualized universe is the de-materialization of the 'real life' itself, its reversal into a spectral show." This is difficult to comprehend. Is this the "ultimate truth" about a real nation, about real people, about a real, existing economic system, about an ethical theory, about a fantasy of real people, or about movies or television or what? The problem may be that many of us cannot imagine that "capitalism" (is it one thing?), which is after all something historical, has an "ultimate truth." And it is difficult to understand what he is asking at the end: "Or will America finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen separating it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival into the Real world, making the long-overdue move from 'A thing like this should not happen HERE!' to 'A thing like this should not happen ANYWHERE!'." Of course, to abandon the "here" for the "anywhere" would be foolish. We are in real bodies in real places with real limitations and with real work to do. It is not simply a "fantasmatic screen" that deeply attaches people in a unique way to the sufferings of their neighbors and their fellow citizens. But the demand that Zizek makes is neither unfamiliar nor inappropriate. It is more than worth pursuing. What can we do to work to see that what the people of New York City suffered on September 11 does not happen anywhere, neither in the U.S. nor anywhere else? The reactions of the American government now threaten regions all over the world and seriously threaten liberty and privacy and tolerance in the United States. The American past carries humanitarian successes and catastrophic failures and genocide. Perhaps fantastic critique has a role to play. Certainly we must struggle to sustain serious social criticism through threatening times, but unless we are simply displaying critical virtuosity, we must achieve a kind of criticism that is reasonably concrete, less pretending to ultimate truths of history, more capable of acknowledging the real suffering of real people, criticism that is not too proud to descend to the practicable. What do we seek now? First, to avert a catastrophe. We must undo the terrorist networks and prevent American anger and power from leading us into the catastrophic roles that seem to have been scripted for us. Five thousand innocents are murdered in New York City. That is more than enough. Every dead innocent fuels 107

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Perm The plan can be deployed as part of a universal strategy to restructure social space this isnt intrinsic because it is our particular demand that gives way to a universal politics. Zizek, 98 PhD, Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School (Slavoj, Journal of Political Ideologies, For a Leftist Appropriation of the European Legacy, http://www.lacan.com/zizek-leftist.htm) Are we then condemned to the debilitating alternative of choosing between a knave or a fool, or is there a tertium datur? Perhaps the contours of this tertium datur can be discerned via the reference to the fundamental European legacy. When one says `European legacy', every self-respectful Leftist intellectual has the same reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture as such-he reaches for his gun and starts to shoot out accusations of proto-Fascist Eurocentrist cultural imperialism. However, is it possible to imagine a Leftist appropriation of the European political tradition? Was it not politicization in a specific Greek sense which reemerged violently in the disintegration of Eastern European Socialism? From my own political past, I remember how, after four journalists were arrested and brought to trial by the Yugoslav Army in Slovenia in 1988, I participated in the `Committee for the protection of the human rights of the four accused'. Officially, the goal of the Committee was just to guarantee fair treatment for the four accused; however, the Committee turned into the major oppositional political force, practically the Slovene version of the Czech Civic Forum or East German Neues Forum, the body which coordinated democratic opposition, a de facto representative of civil society. The program of the Committee was set up in four items; the first three directly concerned the accused, while the devil which resides in the detail , of course, was the fourth item, which said that the Committee wanted to clarify the entire background of the arrest of the four accused and thus contribute to creating the circumstances in which such arrests would no longer be possible-a coded way to say that we wanted the abolishment of the existing Socialist regime. Our demand `Justice for the accused four!' started to function as the metaphoric condensation of the demand for the global overthrow of the Socialist regime. For that reason, in almost daily negotiations with the Committee, the Communist Party officials were always accusing us of a `hidden agenda', claiming that the liberation of the accused four was not our true goal, i.e. that we were `exploiting and manipulating the arrest and trial for other, darker political goals'. In short, the Communists wanted to play the 'rational' depoliticized game: they wanted to deprive the slogan `Justice for the accused four!' of its explosive general connotation, and to reduce it to its literal meaning which concerned just a minor legal matter; they cynically claimed that it was us, the Committee, who were behaving `nondemocratically' and manipulating the fate of the accused, coming up with global pressure and blackmailing strategies instead of focusing on the particular problem of the plight of the accused. This is politics proper: this moment in which a particular demand is not simply part of the negotiation of interests, but aims at something more, i.e. starts to function as the metaphoric condensation of the global restructuring of the entire social space. The contrast is clear between this subjectivization of a part of the social body which rejects its subordinated place in the social police edifice and demands to be heard at the level of egaliberte,
and today's proliferation of postmodern `identity-politics' whose goal is the exact opposite, i.e. precisely the assertion of one's particular identity, of one's proper place within the social structure. The postmodern identity-politics of particular (ethnic, sexual, etc.) life-styles fits perfectly the depoliticized notion of society in which every particular group is `accounted for', has its specific status (of a victim) acknowledged through affirmative action or other measures destined to guarantee social justice. The fact that this kind of justice rendered to victimized minorities requires an intricate police apparatus (for identifying the group in question, for punishing the offenders against its rights-how legally to define sexual harassment or racial injury, etc.-for providing the preferential treatment which should outweigh the wrong this group suffered) is deeply significant. The postmodern `identity politics' involves the logic of ressentiment, of proclaiming oneself a victim and expecting the social big Other to `pay for the damage', while egaliberte breaks out of the vicious cycle of ressentiment. What is usually praised as `postmodern politics' (the pursuit of particular issues whose resolution is to be negotiated within the 'rational' global order allocating to its particular component its proper place) is thus effectively the end of politics proper.

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Turn The permutation is more subversive because it makes demands on the system that the system expects will never be made. The alternatives radical attempt to impose something completely different is more easily defeated. Zizek, 98 Professor of Philosophy at Institute of Social Sciences at University of Ljubljana (Slavoj, Law and the Postmodern Mind, Why Does the Law need an Obscene Supplement? Pg 91-94)
Finally, the

point about inherent transgression is not that every opposition, every attempt at subversion, is automatically "coopted." On the contrary, the very fear of being coopted that makes us search for more and more "radical," "pure" attitudes, is the supreme strategy of suspension or marginalization. The point is rather that true subversion is not always where it seems to be. Sometimes, a small distance is much more explosive for the system than an ineffective radical rejection. In religion, a small heresy can be more threatening than an outright atheism or
passage to another religion; for a hard-line Stalinist, a Trotskyite is infinitely more threatening than a bourgeois liberal or social democrat. As le Carre put it, one true revisionist in the Central Committee is worth more than thousand dissidents outside it. It was easy to dismiss Gorbachev for aiming only at improving the system, making it more efficient-he nonetheless set in motion its disintegration. So one should also bear in mind the obverse of the inherent transgression: one is tempted to paraphrase Freud's claim from The Ego and the Id that man is not only much more immoral than he believes, but also much more moral than he knows-the System is not only infinitely more resistant and invulnerable than it may appear (it can coopt apparently subversive strategies, they can serve as its support), it is also infinitely more vulnerable (a small revision etc, can have large unforeseen catastrophic consequences). Or, to put it in another way: the paradoxical role of the unwritten superego injunction is that, with regard to the explicit, public Law, it is simultaneously transgressive (superego suspends, violates, the explicit social rules) and more coercive (superego consists of additional rules that restrain the field of choice by way of prohibiting the possibilities allowed for, guaranteed even, by the public Law). From my personal history, I recall the moment of the referendum for the independence of Slovenia as the exemplary case of such a forced choice: the whole point, of course, was to have a truly free choice-but nonetheless, in the pro-independence euphoria, every argumentation for remaining within Yugoslavia was immediately denounced as treacherous and disloyal. This example is especially suitable since Slovenes were deciding about a matter that was literally "transgressive" (to break from Yugoslavia with its constitutional order), which is why the Belgrade authorities denounced Slovene referendum as unconstitutional-one was thus ordered to transgress theLaw ... The

obverse of the omnipotence of the unwritten is thus that, if one ignores them, they simply cease to exist, in contrast to the written law that exists (functions) whether one is aware of it or not-or, as the priest in Kafka's The Trial put it, law does not want anything from you, it only bothers you if you yourself acknowledge it and address yourself to it with a demand ... When, in the late eighteenth century, universal
human rights were proclaimed, this universality, ofcourse, concealed the fact that they privilege white, men of property; however, this limitation was not openly admitted, it was coded in apparently tautological supplementary qualifications like "all humans have rights, insofar as they truly are. rational and free," " which then implicitly excludes the mentally ill, "savages," criminals, children, women.'. . So, if, in this situation, a poor black woman disregards this unwritten, implicit, qualification and demands human rights, also for herself, she just takes the letter ofthe discourse of rights "more literally than it was meant" (and thereby redefines its universality, inscribing it into a different hegemonic chain). "Fantasy" designates precisely this unwritten framework that tells us how are we to understand the letter of Law. The lesson of this is that-sometimes, at least-the truly subversive thing is not to disregard the explicit letter of Law on behalf of the underlying fantasies, but to stick to this letter against the fantasy that sustains it. Is-at a certain level, at least-this not the outcome of the long conversation between Josepf K. and the priest that follows the priest's narrative on the Door of the Law in The Trial?-the uncanny effect of this conversation does not reside in the fact that the reader is at a loss insofar as he lacks the unwritten interpretive code or frame ofreference that would enable him to discern the hidden Meaning, but, on the contrary, in that thepriest's interpretation of the parable on the Door of the Law disregards all standard frames of unwritten rules and reads the text in an "absolutely literal" way. One could also approach this deadlock via. Lacan's notion of the specifically symbolic mode of deception: ideology "cheats precisely by letting us know that its propositions (say, on universal human rights)' are not to be read a la lettre, but against thebackground of a set of unwritten rules. Sometimes, at least, the most effective anti-ideological subversion of the official discourse of human rights consists in reading it in an excessively "literal" way, disregarding the set of underlying unwritten rules. The need for unwritten rules thus bears witness to, confirms, this vulnerability: the

system is compelled to allow for possibilities of choices that must never actually take place since they would disintegrate thesystem, and the function of the unwritten rules is precisely to prevent the actualization of these choices formally allowed by the system. One can see how unwritten rules are correlative to, the obverseof, the empty symbolic gesture and/or the
forced choice: unwritten rules prevent the subject from effectively accepting what is offered in the empty gesture, from taking the choice literally and choosing the impossible, that the choice of which destroys the system. In the Soviet Union of the 1930s and 1940s, to take the most extreme example, it was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin, it was perhaps even more prohibited to enounce publicly this prohibition, i.e., too state that one is prohibited to criticize Stalin-the system needed to maintain the appearance that one is allowed to criticize Stalin, i.e., thatthe absence of this criticism (and the fact that there is no opposition party or movement, that theParty got 99.99% of the votes at elections) simply demonstrates that Stalin is effectively the best and (almost) always right. In Hegelese, this appearance qua appearance was essential. This dialectical tension between the vulnerability and invulnerability of the System also enables us to denounce the ultimate racist and/or sexist trick, that of "two birds in the bush instead of a bird in hand": when women demand' simple equality, quasi-"feminists" often pretend to offer them "much more" (the role of the warm and wise "conscience of society," elevated above the vulgar everyday competition and struggle for domination ...)-the only proper answer to this offer, of course, is "No, thanks! Better is the enemy of the Good! We do not want more, just equality!" Here, at least, the last lines in Now Voyager ("Why reach for the moon, when we can have the stars?") are wrong. It is homologous with the native American who wants to become integrated into the predominant "white" society, and a politically correct progressive liberal endeavors to convince him that, he is thereby renouncing his very unique prerogative, the authentic native culture and tradition-no thanks, simple equality is enough, I also wouldn't mind my part of consumerist alienation! ...

A modest demand of theexcluded group for the full participation at the society's universal rights is much more threatening forthe system than the apparently much more "radical" rejection of the predominant "social values" andthe assertion of the superiority of one's own culture. For a true feminist,
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Otto Weininger's assertion that, although women are "ontologically false," lacking the proper ethical stature, they should be acknowledged the same rights as men in public life, is infinitely more acceptable than the false elevationof women that makes them "too good" for the banality of men's rights.

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