Žižek

Abstract: In this essay, I use the works of Byung-Chul Han, Yanis Varoufakis and Zizek to discuss the ways in which power has shaped in our new era of 'cloud capitalism' such that the subjugated is not even aware of their own subjugation, thinking themselves free. I discuss the difference between negative and positive power and how ideology masks soft power as an illusory freedom of choice.

...the image of Donald Trump is the last thing a liberal sees before confronting class struggle. That’s why liberals are so fascinated and horrified by Trump: to avoid the class topic. Hegel’s motto “evil resides in the gaze which sees evil everywhere” fully applies here: the very liberal gaze which demonizes Trump is also evil because it ignores how its own failures opened up the space for Trump’s type of patriotic populism.

Paywall can be side-stepped with free trial :(

Z's 4th appearance on the podcast I believe

This is a completely uncut unexpurgated interview done by comedian and screenwrite Larry Charles with arguably the most important philosopher of our time, Slavoj Zizek conducted at Tatiana's on the boardwalk in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

Much has been written lately about the crisis of authority, as well as the different figures that are supplanting its failure: pseudoneutral experts, populist demagogues, obscene clowns, and murderous fundamentalist dictators. However, in her book Disavowal, Zupančič rejects the commonplace notion that we live in an era where all forms of authority are disintegrating. Instead, she focuses on two forms of authority that are stronger than ever: science and money.

Regarding science, she begins by pointing out that its authority operates at two levels. Immanently, within the scientific discourse itself, a scientific endeavor gains its authority by surviving the test of refutability as defined by Karl Popper: if it survives this test, it is (for the time being) confirmed as true. Externally, science functions as an authority in social space: even those who do not understand a complex theory acknowledge it as true and relevant, i.e., as something that can be evoked as a justification for certain measures (“science has proved that we, humans, are also responsible for global warming”). At this level, however, critiques of science intervene with claims that scientific research was influenced or even controlled by the interests of capital, which pushed scientists to ignore the ecological impact of human activity (or to exaggerate it), and to serve as an instrument of social domination.

Zupančič convincingly demonstrates that such a critique of science relies on a short-circuit between the two levels: it pretends to undermine science from within while it only brings out its social status. It is not enough to say that scientists acted under the influence of the interests of capital; even if they did, their conclusions can still be true if we apply to them the immanent criteria of scientific procedures. (Conversely, a science can advocate authentic emancipatory interests while being scientifically worthless.) Furthermore, such a direct reference to the subjective corruption of scientists is too lenient towards capitalism: it reduces to psychological conditions of contingent individuals what is a feature of capitalism as a system, what belongs to its very notion (as Hegel would have put it).

To these two levels, one should add a third: what if scientific discourse (in the sense of modern science) is limited or constrained not just due to the external influence of social interests, but also because this limitation is inscribed into its very form? As Lacan put it, the scientific discourse forecloses (excludes) the subject; it adopts a disinterested panoramic view on reality, posing as “objective science” while ignoring its own social mediation. The Frankfurt School Marxists endeavored to prove that the basic procedure of “objective science,” its alleged social neutrality, practices what they called “instrumental reason,” reducing reality to an external object to be manipulated. Such an approach is possible only within a modern capitalist society. Marxism and psychoanalysis practice a totally different approach: they target a truth that can emerge only through radical subjective engagement. Subjective engagement is not an obstacle to objective truth but its condition because the scientist is part of the object, not its external observer. In Marxism, a theory mobilizes its object, transforming it into a revolutionary subject, while in psychoanalysis, interpretation affects the object (the patient) if it is done at the right moment.

As for the authority of money, Zupančič points out that it is not enough to say that money brings power. As Lacan put it regarding Adam Smith, wealth is a property of the wealthy and appears as a feature that characterizes their personalities. Think of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos: in our neofeudal system, the fact that they are enormously wealthy elevates them into charismatic personalities regarded as sources of general wisdom. Gates and Musk regularly give their opinions about the ecological crisis, the Ukraine war, etc. – opinions that have nothing to do with the domain of their business activities. Or, as Zupančič puts it, while an ordinary person employed by them can be accused of “doing just for money” what he does, it is perceived as absurd to say that Gates is doing what he is doing “just for money.” Although they truly are “doing it just for money,” this fact has to be disavowed so that the wealthy retain their charismatic authority.

Authority thus reveals itself to be a much more complex notion than it may appear, as something very difficult or even impossible to get rid of. The first thing to add to the commonplace about authority in crisis is that it is nothing new: from the beginning of modernity, authority has been in crisis because a new authority grounded in competences and/or enlightened popular will never quite worked. Although conservative critics – from Edmund Burke on – who were warning that the disintegration of traditional authorities would give birth to new, much more brutal forms of oppression were wrong, their objections often hit the mark. This is why the second step should be to analyze the multiple facets and inner tensions already at work in the traditional forms of authority for which many people long. And what better starting point for this analysis than Søren Kierkegaard with his sensitive remarks on the forms and justifications of authority?

Kierkegaard's aim was to reaffirm the Christian attitude in its "scandalous" original form, before it settled into a force of law and order, i.e., to reaffirm it as an act, as was the very appearance of Christ in the eyes of the keepers of the old law, before Christ was "Christianized," made part of the new law of Christian tradition. This scandalous "suspension of the Ethical" (of the old Jewish law) inherent in the Christian attitude is what Kierkegaard wants to resuscitate in his furious polemics against institutionalized Christianity ("Christendom") that occupied the last years of his life. One is here tempted to reread Kierkegaard's insistence that every believer must "repeat" Christ's scandal, i.e., Christianity in its "becoming," before it turned into an established necessity. Recall G. K. Chesterton's perspicacious remark about how the detective story "keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions." To paraphrase Chesterton, when a true Christian believer stands alone, fearless amid the knives and fists of the servants of established necessity, it certainly serves to remind us that it is the agent of belief who is the original and subversive figure, while the aesthetic footpads yielding to pleasures are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. Or, to paraphrase Brecht from his ThreePenny Opera: we enter the religious when we say to ourselves, "What is a transgression of the law against the transgression that pertains to the law itself? What are the petty human crimes against the voice of God ordering Abraham the senseless sacrifice of his son? Which human crime can approach the cruelty of God's trifling with human destiny?"

What one should not miss here is the inherent link between this suspension of the Ethical and Kierkegaard's notion of authority: by means of his readiness to sacrifice his beloved son, Abraham attests to his unconditional submission to God's authority; if he were to judge God's demand as to its content ("How can He demand of me something so atrocious?"), God's authority would be subjected to his human judgment and thereby devalorized. In other words, God's proper authority is experienced only in the religious suspension of the Ethical: if God were to be reduced to a power which only confers supplementary authority on ethical commands, he would lose his proper authority and function as an aesthetic supplement to ethics, i.e., a kind of imaginary creature procuring ordinary people, enslaved to imagination, to obey the abstract ethical imperatives. The religious suspension of the Ethical is not its simple external abolition but its inherent condition of possibility, i.e., precisely that which confers on the Ethical its identity. The same point can be rendered also in terms of the universal and its constitutive exception: the religious suspension of the Ethical refers to an exception which does not relate to the universal as its external transgression but, precisely qua exception, founds it: “The rigorous and determinate exception who, although he is in conflict with the universal, still is an offshoot of it, sustains himself. The exception who thinks the universal in that he thinks himself through; he explains the universal in that he explains himself. Consequently, the exception explains the universal and himself, and if one really wants to study the universal, one only needs to look around for a legitimate exception. The legitimate exception is reconciled in the universal.”

At the very point where Kierkegaard most violently opposes the alleged Hegelian "tyranny of the Universal," he is, of course, closest to Hegel: what is the Hegelian "concrete Universal" if not the "exception reconciled in the Universal," i.e., the unity of the abstract Universal with its constitutive exception? The most infamous Hegelian example here is the state as a rational totality of individuals who "made" themselves through their labor: the State achieves its actuality in the person of the monarch, who is, by his very nature, what he is in his symbolic determination (one becomes King by birth, not by merit). The King's exception is, therefore, an exception "reconciled in the Universal" since it founds it. The abstract, pre-religious ethical republicanism à la Fichte would, of course, protest against this royal exception, condemning it as an unbearable affront to republican principles, calling for us to treat the King the same way we treat other citizens. However, Hegelian speculation demonstrates that ethical universality, to sustain itself, requires an exception—a point at which it is suspended.

To avoid reiterating such commonplaces, let us refer to an entirely different domain: the peculiar style of Theodor W. Adorno. As Fredric Jameson pointed out, the rhythm of Adorno's essays always includes a sudden halt; the refined dialectical analysis is abruptly cut off with a proposition reminiscent of good old Marxist invectives ("ideology of late capitalism," "expression of the class position of big capital," etc.). Where does the necessity of such repeated lapses into "vulgar sociologism" come from? Far from attesting to Adorno's theoretical weakness, they represent the way a thought's constitutive limit is inscribed within the thought itself.

The crucial point here is that these "vulgar-sociological" references concern the level of content; they point toward the "social content" of the interpreted phenomena. Dialectical analysis is ultimately an analysis of form; it endeavors to dissolve the positivity of its object in the totality of its formal mediations. Within the standard "poststructuralist" perspective, it would seem that such "vulgar" references denote the moment of "closure," when the given field is "sutured" and blinds itself to its constitutive outside. On the contrary, Jameson's point is that it is precisely such "vulgar-sociological" references that keep the field of the analysis of form open, preventing thought from falling into the trap of identity and mistaking its limited form of reflection for the unattainable form of thought as such. In other words, the function of the "vulgar-sociological" reference is to represent within the notional content what eludes the notion as such, namely the totality of its own form: in it, that which escapes reflection, the form of its own totality, acquires positive existence under the guise of its opposite. Is it necessary to point out that it is precisely here, where Adorno purports to break the closed circle of Hegelian self-transparency of the notion, that he remains thoroughly Hegelian? More precisely, it is only here that he attains the proper level of Hegelian speculative identity: what Hegel calls "speculative identity" is precisely the identity of the form, of the totality of dialectical mediation that eludes thought's grasp, with some unmediated bit of content referred to in the "vulgar-sociological" gesture (or, in the case of the state, the identity of the state as a rational totality with the "irrational," biological positivity of the King's body). The proper dialectical approach, therefore, includes its own suspension, a point of exception that is constitutive of the dialectical analysis.

We must be attentive to the inherently authoritarian character of this feature, that is to say, the inherent link of identity with authority: the monarch performs his role as a figure of pure authority, as the one who, by means of his "Such is my will!"—i.e., his abysmal decision—cuts through the endless series of pro et contra. And does not the same hold for Adorno's "vulgar-sociological" outbursts? Do they not perform the same authoritarian gesture of reference to the Marxist dogma that breaks the endless thread of dialectical argumentation? It is by no means accidental that tautologies—statements that purport the identity of the subject with itself—are the clearest examples of asserting authority: "Law is law!" "It is so because I say so!" etc. Identity becomes "authoritarian" the moment we overlook, in a kind of illusory perspective, that it is nothing but the inscription of pure difference, of a lack. In this sense, authority is far from being a kind of leftover of the pre-Enlightenment: it is inscribed into the very heart of the Enlightenment project. It was not until the Enlightenment that the structure of authority came into sight as such, against the background of rational argumentation as the foundation of enlightened knowledge. It is symptomatic that the first to render visible the outlines of "pure" authority was precisely Kierkegaard, one of the great critics of Hegel.

The crucial text in which Kierkegaard delineates the break between the traditional and the "modern" (i.e., for him, Christian) status of knowledge is his Philosophical Fragments. At first sight, this text does not belong to philosophy but rather to an intermediate domain between philosophy proper and theology: it endeavors to delimitate the Christian religious position from the Socratic philosophical one. Yet its externality to philosophy is of the same kind as that of Plato's Symposium: it circumscribes the discourse's frame, i.e., the intersubjective constellation, the relationship toward the teacher, toward authority, which renders possible the philosophical (or Christian) discourse. In this sense, the Fragments are to be read as the repetition of Plato's Symposium (repetition in the precise meaning this term receives with Kierkegaard): their aim is to perform Plato's gesture in new circumstances, within the new status that knowledge acquired with the advent of Christianity.

Both texts, "Symposion" and "Philosophical Fragments," discuss love and transference, forming the basis of every relationship with the teacher qua "subject supposed to know." Kierkegaard's starting point is that all of philosophy, from Plato to Hegel, is "pagan," i.e., embedded in the pagan (pre-Christian) logic of knowledge and remembrance: our lives as finite individuals, by definition, take place in an aftermath, since all that really matters has always already happened. Up until Hegelian Er-Innerung, knowledge is therefore always conceived as retrospective remembrance or internalization, a return to the "timelessly past being" ("das zeitlos gewesene Sein," Hegel's determination of essence). True, transient finite subjects attain eternal truth at some determinate instant in their lives; however, once the subject enters the truth, this instant is abrogated, cast away like a useless ladder. This is why Socrates is quite justified in comparing himself to a midwife: his job is just to enable the subject to give birth to the knowledge already present in him. The supreme recognition one can grant to Socrates is to say he was forgotten the moment we found ourselves face to face with truth.

With Christ, it is just the opposite: the Christian truth, no less eternal than the Socratic one, is indelibly branded with a historical event, the moment of God's incarnation. Consequently, the object of Christian faith is not the teaching but the teacher: a Christian believes in Christ as a person, not immediately in the content of His statements. Christ is not divine because He uttered such deep truths; His words are true because they were spoken by Him. The paradox of Christianity consists in this bond linking eternal truth to a historical event: I can know eternal truth only insofar as I believe that the miserable creature who walked around Palestine two thousand years ago was God.

Motifs that, according to philosophical common knowledge, define the post-Hegelian reversal—the affirmation of the event, of the instant, as opposed to the timeless, immovable truth; the priority of existence (the fact that a thing exists) over essence (what this thing is), etc.—acquire their ultimate background here. That which is "eternal" in a statement is its meaning, abstracted from the event of its enunciation, from its enunciation qua event: within the Socratic perspective, the truth of a statement resides in its universal meaning; as such, it is in no way affected by its position of enunciation, by the place from which it was enunciated. The Christian perspective, on the other hand, makes the truth of a statement dependent on the event of its enunciation: the ultimate guarantee of the truth of Christ's words is their utterer's authority, i.e., the fact that they were uttered by Christ, not the profundity of their content, i.e., what they say:

“When Christ says, ‘There is an eternal life,’ and when a theological student says, ‘There is an eternal life,’ both say the same thing, and there is no more deduction, development, profundity, or thoughtfulness in the first expression than in the second; both statements are, judged aesthetically, equally good. And yet there is an eternal qualitative difference between them! Christ, as GodMan, is in possession of the specific quality of authority.”

Kierkegaard develops this "qualitative difference" apropos of the abyss that separates a "genius" from an "apostle": "genius" represents the highest intensification of the immanent human capacities (wisdom, creativity, and so forth), whereas an "apostle" is sustained by a transcendent authority that a genius lacks. This abyss is best exemplified by the very case where it seems to disappear, namely the poetic exploitation of religious motifs. Richard Wagner, for example, in his "Parsifal," used Christian motifs as means to invigorate his artistic vision; he thereby aestheticized them in the strict Kierkegaardian sense of the term, i.e., he made use of them with their "artistic efficacy" in mind. Religious rituals like the uncovering of the Grail fascinate us with their breathtaking beauty, yet their religious authority is suspended, bracketed.

If, however, the truth claim of a statement cannot be authorized by means of its inherent content, what then is the foundation of its authority? Kierkegaard is quite outspoken on this point: the ultimate and only support for a statement of authority is its own act of enunciation: "But now how can an Apostle prove that he has authority? If he could prove it physically, then he would not be an Apostle. He has no other proof than his own statement. That has to be so; for otherwise the believer's relationship to him would be direct instead of paradoxical."

When authority is backed up by an immediate physical compulsion, what we are dealing with is not proper authority (i.e., symbolic authority), but simply an agency of brute force: proper authority, at its most radical level, is always powerless. It is a certain "call" that "cannot effectively force us into anything," and yet, by a kind of inner compulsion, we feel obliged to follow it unconditionally. As such, authority is inherently paradoxical. First, as we have just seen, authority is vested in a certain statement insofar as the immanent value of its content is suspended—we obey a statement of authority because it has authority, not because its content is wise, profound, etc.:

“Authority is a specific quality which, coming from elsewhere, becomes qualitatively apparent when the content of the message or of the action is posited as indifferent. To be prepared to obey a government department if it can be clever is really to make a fool of it. To honor one's father because he is intelligent is impiety.”

Yet at the same time, Kierkegaard seems to purport the exact opposite of this priority of the teacher over the teaching: an apostle—a person in whom God's authority is vested—is reduced to his role as a carrier of some foreign message. He is totally abrogated as a person; all that matters is the content of the message:

“Just as a man, sent into the town with a letter, has nothing to do with its contents, but has only to deliver it; just as a minister who is sent to a foreign court is not responsible for the content of the message, but has only to convey it correctly: so, too, an Apostle has really only to be faithful in his service, and to carry out his task. Therein lies the essence of an Apostle's life of self-sacrifice, even if he were never persecuted, in the fact that he is ‘poor, yet making many rich.’"

An apostle, therefore, corresponds perfectly to the function of the signifying Repraesentanz; the invalidation of all "pathological" features (his psychological propensities, etc.) makes him a pure representative, whose clearest case is a diplomat:

“We mean by representatives what we understand when we use the phrase, for example, the representative of France. What do diplomats do when they address one another? They simply exercise, in relation to one another, that function of being pure representatives and, above all, their own signification must not intervene. When diplomats are addressing one another, they are supposed to represent something whose signification, while constantly changing, is beyond their own persons—France, Britain, etc. In the very exchange of views, each must record only what the other transmits in his pure function as signifier; he must not take into account what the other is, qua presence, as a man who is likable to a greater or lesser degree. Inter-psychology is an impurity in this exchange. The term Repraesentanz is to be taken in this sense. The signifier has to be understood in this way; it is at the opposite pole from signification.”

Therein lies the paradox of authority: we obey a person in whom authority is vested, irrespective of the content of their statements (authority ceases to be what it is the moment we make it dependent on the quality of its content), yet this person retains authority only insofar as they are reduced to a neutral carrier, a bearer of some transcendent message—in opposition to a genius, where the abundance of their work's content expresses the inner wealth of the creator's personality. The same double suspension defines the supreme case of authority, that of Christ: in his Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard points out that it is not enough to know all the details of the teacher's (Christ's) life, all he has done, and all his personal features, in order to be entitled to consider oneself his pupil. Such a description of Christ's features and deeds, even if truly complete, still misses what makes Him an authority. No better is the fate of those who leave out consideration of Christ as a person and concentrate on His teaching, endeavoring to grasp the meaning of every word he ever uttered. In this way, Christ is simply reduced to Socrates, to a simple middleman enabling us to access the eternal truth.

Such an assertion of authority seems to be the very opposite of the Enlightenment, whose fundamental aim is precisely to render truth independent of authority. Truth is arrived at by means of a critical procedure that questions the pro et contra of a proposition, irrespective of the authority that pertains to its place of enunciation. To undermine the false evidence of this incompatibility between authority and Enlightenment, it suffices to recall how the two supreme achievements of the unmasking of ideological prejudices that grew out of the project of the Enlightenment, Marxism and psychoanalysis, both refer to the authority of their respective founders (Marx and Freud). Their structure 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 in the same way one is allowed to question the statements of their followers. If there is something to be refuted in their texts, these are simply statements that precede the "epistemological break," i.e., which do not belong to the field opened up by the founder's discovery (Freud's writings prior to the discovery of the unconscious, for example). Their texts are thus to be read the way one should read the text of a dream, according to Lacan: as "sacred" texts which are, in a radical sense, "beyond criticism" since they constitute the very horizon of veracity.

For that reason, every "further development" of Marxism or psychoanalysis necessarily assumes the form of a "return" to Marx or Freud: the form of a (re)discovery of some hitherto overlooked layer of their work, i.e., of bringing to light what the founders "produced without knowing what they produced," to invoke Althusser's formula. In his article on Chaplin's Limelight, André Bazin recommends the same attitude as the only one which befits Chaplin's genius: even when some details in Limelight appear to us aborted and dull (the tedious first hour of the film; Calvero's pathetic vulgar-philosophical outbursts; etc.), we have to put the blame on ourselves and ask what was wrong with our approach to the film. Such an attitude clearly articulates the transferential relationship of the pupil to the teacher: the teacher is by definition "supposed to know," the fault is always ours. The disturbing scandal authenticated by the history of psychoanalysis and Marxism is that such a "dogmatic" approach proved far more productive than the "open," critical dealing with the founder's text. How much more fecund was Lacan's "dogmatic" return to Freud than the American academic machinery, which transformed Freud's oeuvre into a collection of positive scientific hypotheses to be tested, refuted, combined, developed, and so on!

Lacan's scandal, the dimension of his work which resists incorporation into the academic machinery, can ultimately be pinned down to the fact that he openly and shamelessly posited himself as such an authority, i.e., he repeated the Kierkegaardian gesture in relation to his followers: what he demanded of them was not fidelity to some general theoretical propositions, but precisely fidelity to his person—which is why, in the circular letter announcing the foundation of La Cause freudienne, he addresses them as "those who love me." This unbreakable link connecting the doctrine to the contingent person of the teacher, i.e., to the teacher as a material surplus that sticks out from the neutral edifice of knowledge, is the scandal everybody who considers themselves Lacanian has to assume. Lacan was not a Socratic master obliterating himself in front of the attained knowledge; his theory sustains itself only through the transferential relationship to its founder. In this precise sense, Marx, Freud, and Lacan are not "geniuses," but "apostles": when somebody says "I follow Lacan because his reading of Freud is the most intelligent and persuasive," they immediately expose themselves as non-Lacanian.

This "scandal" of the spot of contingent individuality that smears over the neutral field of knowledge points towards what we could designate as Kierkegaard's "materialist reversal of Hegel." Hegel ultimately stays within the boundary of the "Socratic" universe: in his Phenomenology of Spirit, consciousness arrives at the Truth, recollects it, and internalizes it via its own effort, by comparing itself with its own immanent Notion, by confronting the positive content of its statements with its own place of enunciation, and by working through its own split without any external support or point of reference. The standpoint of dialectical truth (the "for us") is not added to the consciousness as an external standard by which the consciousness's progress is measured. "We," the dialecticians, are nothing but passive observers who retroactively reconstruct the way consciousness itself arrived at the Truth (i.e., the "absolute" standpoint without presuppositions). When, at some point in the consciousness's journey, Truth effectively appears as a positive entity possessing an independent existence, as an "in itself" assuming the role of the external measure of the consciousness's "working through," this is simply a necessary self-deception "sublated" in the further succession of the "experiences of consciousness." In other words, in the context of the relationship between belief and knowledge, the subject's belief in an (external) authority that is to be accepted unconditionally and "irrationally" is nothing but a transitional stage "sublated" by the passage into reflected knowledge. For Kierkegaard, on the contrary, our belief in the person of the Savior is the absolute, nonabolishable condition of our access to truth: eternal truth itself clings to this contingent material externality. The moment we lose this "little piece of the real" (the historical fact of Incarnation), the moment we cut our link with this material fragment (reinterpreting it as a parable of man's affinity with God, for example), the entire edifice of Christian knowledge crumbles.

On another level, the same goes for psychoanalysis: in the psychoanalytic cure, there is no knowledge without the "presence of the analyst," without the impact of his dumb material weight. Here we encounter the inherent limitation of all attempts to conceive of psychoanalytic cure on the model of the Hegelian reflective movement, in the course of which the subject becomes conscious of his own "substantial" content, i.e., arrives at the repressed truth which dwells deep within him. If such were the case, psychoanalysis would be the ultimate stage of the Socratic "Know thyself!" and the psychoanalyst's role would be that of an accoucheur, a kind of "vanishing mediator" enabling the subject to achieve communication with himself by finding access to its repressed traumas.

This dilemma comes forth most clearly in the context of the role of transference in psychoanalytic cure. Insofar as we remain within the domain of the Socratic logic of remembrance, transference is not an "effective" repetition but rather a means of recollection: the analysand "projects" past traumas which unconsciously determine his present behavior (the repressed and unresolved conflicts with his father, for example) onto his relationship with the analyst. By means of deft manipulation of the transferential situation, the analyst then enables the analysand to recall the traumas which were hitherto "acted out" blindly. In other words, the task of the analyst is to make evident to the analysand how "he (the analyst) is not really the father," i.e., how the analysand, caught in the transference, used his relationship with the analyst to stage the past traumas. Lacan's emphasis, on the contrary, is throughout Kierkegaardian: transferential repetition cannot be reduced to remembrance. Transference is not a kind of "theater of shadows" where we settle past traumas in effigia; it is repetition in the full meaning of the term. In it, the past trauma is literally repeated, "actualized." The analyst is not the father's "shadow"; he is a presence in front of which the past battle has to be fought out "for real."

The point of the preceding argumentation, of course, is not to defend blind submission to authority but to highlight the fact that discourse itself is fundamentally "authoritarian" in its structure (for that reason, the "discourse of the Master" is the first, "founding" discourse in the Lacanian matrix of the four discourses; or, as Derrida would say in his writings of recent years, every discursive field is founded on some "violent" ethico-political decision). Out of the free-floating dispersion of signifiers, a consistent field of meaning emerges through the intervention of a Master Signifier—why? The answer is contained in the paradox of the "finite infinity/totality" which, as one knows from Claude Levi-Strauss onward, pertains to the very notion of the signifier: the symbolic order in which the subject is embedded is simultaneously "finite" (it consists of a limited and ultimately contingent network that never overlaps with the Real) and "infinite," or, to use a Sartrean term, "totalizing" (in any given language, "everything can be told," and there is no external standpoint from which one can judge its limitations). Because of this inherent tension, every language contains a paradoxical element which, within its field, stands in for what eludes it. In Lacanese, in every set of signifiers, there is always "at least one" which functions as the signifier of the very lack of the signifier. This signifier is the Master Signifier: the "empty" signifier which totalizes ("quilts") the dispersed field. In it, the infinite chain of causes ("knowledge") is interrupted with an abyssal founding act of violence.

The philosophical term for this inversion of impotence into a constitutive power is, of course, the notion of the transcendental with all its inherent paradoxes: the subject experiences as his constitutive power the very horizon that frames his vision due to his finitude. For that reason, it is precisely the notion of the transcendental that enables us to distinguish Lacan from, say, Habermas. With Habermas, the status of the "disturbances" which vitiate the course of "rational argumentation" by way of a non-reflected constraint is ultimately contingent/empirical. These "disturbances" emerge as empirical impediments on the path of the gradual realization of the transcendental regulative Idea. Whereas with Lacan, the status of the Master Signifier, the signifier of the symbolic authority founded only in itself (in its own act of enunciation), is strictly transcendental: the gesture that "distorts" a symbolic field, which "curves" its space by introducing into it an unfounded violence, is stricto sensu correlative to its very establishment—in other words, the moment we subtract from a discursive field its "distortion," the field itself disintegrates ("dequilts"). Lacan's position is therefore the very opposite of that of Habermas, according to whom the inherent pragmatic presuppositions of a discourse are "nonauthoritarian" (the notion of discourse implies the idea of a communication free of constraint where only rational argumentation counts, etc.).

Lacan's fundamental thesis is that the Master is by definition an impostor. The Master is somebody who, upon finding himself at the place of the constitutive lack in the structure, acts as if he holds the reins of that surplus, of the mysterious X which eludes the grasp of the structure. This accounts for the difference between Habermas and Lacan regarding the role of the Master: with Lacan, the Master is an impostor, yet the place occupied by him—the place of the lack in the structure—cannot be abolished, since the very finitude of every discursive field imposes its structural necessity. The unmasking of the Master's imposture does not abolish the place he occupies; it just renders it visible in its original emptiness, i.e., as preceding the element that fills it out. Hence the Lacanian notion of the analyst as the obverse (l’envers) of the Master: of somebody who holds the place of the Master, yet who, by means of his (non)activity, undermines the Master's charisma, suspends the effect of "quilting," and thus renders visible the distance that separates the Master from the place he occupies, i.e., the radical contingency of the subject who occupies this place.

For that reason, their strategies of subverting symbolic authority are fundamentally different. Habermas simply relies on the gradual reflective elucidation of the implicit prejudices that distort communication, i.e., on the asymptotic approach to the regulative ideal of free, unconstrained communication. Lacan is also "antiauthoritarian"; he is as far as possible from any kind of obscurantism of the "ineffable." He too remains thoroughly attached to the space of "public communication." This unexpected proximity of Lacan to Habermas is corroborated by a procedure, proposed by Lacan, which caused a great amount of resistance even among some of his closest followers: la passe, the "passage" of an analysand into the place of the analyst. Its crux is the intermediate role of the socalled passeurs: the analysand (the passant) narrates the results of his analysis, the insights he arrived at, to the two passeurs, his peers, who report on it to the committee (comité de la passe) - the committee then decides on the analysand's "passage" to the place of the analyst. The idea of these two middlemen who channel every contact between the passant and the committee is very "Habermasian" indeed: they are here to prevent any kind of initiatic relationship between the passant and the committee, i.e., to prevent la passe from functioning as the transmission of initiatic knowledge, after the model of secret cults. The analysand must be able to formulate the results of his analysis in such a way that the two passeurs, these two average men who stand in for common knowledge, are able to transmit it integrally to the committee—in other words, the detour through the field of public knowledge must not affect the "message" in any way.

However, the contrast between Habermas and Lacan finds its clearest expression apropos of the notion of the "ideal speech situation": Habermas conceives it as the asymptotic ideal of intersubjective communication free of constraint, where the participants arrive at consensus by means of rational argumentation. Contrary to common opinion, Lacan also knows of an "ideal speech situation" that undermines the imposture of the Master Signifier: it is none other than the analytic situation itself. Here, the abyss that separates Lacan from Habermas becomes evident. In the process of psychoanalysis, we also have two subjects speaking to each other; yet instead of facing each other and exchanging arguments, one of them lies on the couch, stares into thin air, and throws out disconnected prattle, whereas the other mostly stays silent and terrorizes the first by the weight of his oppressive mute presence. This situation is "free of constraint" in the precise sense of suspending the structural role of the Master Signifier: the analytic discourse as the obverse (l’envers, the other side) of the discourse of the Master transposes us into a state of undecidability which precedes the "quilting" of the discursive field by a Master Signifier, i.e., into the state of the "free floating" of signifiers - what is "repeated" in it is ultimately the very contingency which engendered the analysand's symbolic space.

Although all of Kierkegaard’s work seems to move in this direction, his actual statements are more refined - recall his claim about the futility of philosophical systems (his target here is, of course, Hegel):

“In relation to their systems most systematizers are like a man who builds an enormous castle and lives in a shack close by; they do not live in their own enormous systematic buildings.”

As is often the case in Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel, he misses the point here and ignores his own proximity to Hegel: the final result of the Hegelian movement is precisely that enormous castles are only finished when they are accompanied/supplemented by a small shack in which the subject who built them has to dwell. In short, to paraphrase Hegel’s well-known programmatic slogan from his Phenomenology: one should conceive the Absolute not only as a magnificent castle but also as a small shack attached to it. Or the Christian version: one should conceive God not only as the majestic creator of everything but also as a miserable individual walking around Palestine 2000 years ago. In his Castle, Kafka himself has a clear premonition of this paradox: the novel’s hero decides to climb up the hill and approaches the majestic castle on the top of it; however, the closer he gets to the castle, the more he notices that the castle is composed of dirty small shacks, not majestic buildings.

And exactly the same holds for language: there is no great castle of Language with all its noble poetic or scientific statements without what amounts to the linguistic version of small dirty shacks. As Lacan repeatedly points out, “primordial” speech acts are single exclamations, as a rule curses or vulgar words (“Shit”, “Wow!”), which play a very specific role: they are neither statements about things and processes that are going on in reality (like “a storm is coming from the north”), nor are they expressions of our inner reaction to external events (fear, anger, joy). At their most basic, they express our lack of a proper place in the symbolic order in which we dwell. We enter the symbolic order first as its objects: we somehow grasp that others are talking about us, that we are within the scope of their interest, but we don’t clearly understand what they are saying, what they want from us, what they see in us. Language as a medium is a big Other: it connects us with others and simultaneously functions as a wall separating us from others. It is in this sense that, for Lacan (who often evokes his dog Justine), dogs speak but they don’t really inhabit language, i.e., they are unable to subjectivize themselves in it, to assume a stance towards others in it. They are perplexed by human language and get frustrated by their inability to participate in linguistic exchanges – as Lacan put it, dogs are neurotic, hystericized by language, without being its subjects. So they are not simply outside language: what they can experience is a frustration by the fact they cannot find their place within language, that they cannot inscribe their subjective position into it. And here human curses and exclamations enter: they don’t simply express our fear, anger, or joy. What they express is a much more basic frustration at the impossibility of saying in clear language what we want to say, to “find the right word”:

“If a dog could speak, would he not bellow a curse? Perhaps that’s what Sartre’s dog was meaning to say all along without knowing it. The true word lying just beyond his grasp is not the word that would unlock the universe of language, allowing him to fully enter into the community of speaking beings and thereby put an end to his obscure frustration. It is rather the word by which he could name his unspeakable frustration about missing the word, and thus release this frustration into language itself. To speak is to tarry with the impossibility of speaking, to give voice to and do something with the bewilderment, lassitude, and rage—the abject objecthood—in which Sartre’s dog can only helplessly languish. To enter the symbolic order doesn’t mean to simply leave behind the pet animal’s proto-symbolic confusion and take up one’s place behind the pet animal’s culture. Rather it is to raise this impasse to the level of the word, and thereby subjectivize it. What Sartre describes as canine ennui ought to be understood as an essential moment in the becoming of the speaking being. One first enters language as something spoken about, as an object caught in the Other’s discourse, without grasping what is being said or knowing how to respond. It’s not simply by overcoming this passivity that one becomes a subject; rather, it’s only from this mute objecthood that the subject can emerge. What is needed is a word to name this anterior impossibility or original exclusion, so that the subject can inscribe itself into the symbolic order as that which falls out of it.”

As a further illustration, Schuster mentions the famous "all-fuck" investigation scene in The Wire I/4, a scene that I analyzed in detail in an old book of mine. In an empty ground floor apartment where a murder took place six months ago, McNulty and Bunk, witnessed by a sole silent housekeeper, try to reconstruct how it happened. The only word they pronounce during their work is variations of "fuck" - they say it 38 times in a row, in so many different ways. It comes to mean anything, from annoyed boredom to elated triumph, from pain or disappointment or shock at the horror of a gruesome murder to pleasant surprise, and it reaches its climax in the self-reflexive reduplication of "Fuckin' fuck!". To prove it, one can easily imagine the same scene in which each "fuck" is replaced by a more "normal" phrase ("Again, just another photo!", "Ouch, it hurts!", "Now I got it!", etc.).

This scene works at multiple levels, but at its most basic, it is a curse in the multitude of its uses: the same word can function in a multitude of ways precisely because this multitude is sustained by the frustrating impossibility of expressing one’s subjective stance clearly. So, this scene does not enact a metaphoric or reflective game adding a level to the “realist” functioning of language – on the contrary, it enacts the basic gesture of language, that of bringing out the crack, the impossibility, on which language is based: we use words in a language because the “true” word is missing, and this word is missing because I – the speaking subject – don’t have a proper place within the symbolic space, because I am a crack in its edifice. Curses and exclamations are words which register the lack of a proper word, a word that would adequately represent the subject for other words, and since the subject is a lack in the symbolic space, a curse reflectively registers this lack.

We can – should, even – imagine an ideal analytic session in which the analyst reenacts the scene from The Wire and from time to time just interrupts the patient’s flow of words with a curse, maybe even with a simple “Fuck!”. It is also in this sense that the analyst is the obverse of the master. The (wrongly) so-called “pansexualism” of Freud (“behind everything there is sex”) would acquire in this way an unexpected meaning: yes, the analyst’s reply to everything is “Fuck!”, but this "fuck" has nothing to do with sexuality; it can refer to anything and nothing.

And let’s go to the end here: does the exclamation “Christ!” not work in a similar way to “Fuck!”? We can easily imagine the scene from The Wire with “Christ!” instead of “Fuck!”, where the curse would express the same frustrating inability to subjec tivize our position in the big Other. In Mel Brooks’s History of the World: Part I, there is a scene in which the hero (played by Brooks himself), a waiter in Jerusalem in the year 33, is asked to serve at an important dinner. When, in the middle of dinner, one of his plates slips out of his hands and falls down, he exclaims, “Oh, Christ!”, and gets a gentle answer from one of the guests: “Yes, please?” What we should advocate is the move in the opposite direction, from the actual dialogue to a pure exclamation.

And why should we not bring the two dimensions – sex and God’s name – together? Recall (trigger warning!) a dirty joke: in an elementary school class, the teacher is asking boys how we go to heaven when we are dying, and one of them replies: “First with our legs.” Surprised, the teacher says, “Why?”, and the boy replies: “A week ago, when my father was on a business trip, I entered my parents’ bedroom and I saw someone lying on my mother making strange movements; my mother’s legs were raised high up and she was shouting, “Oh Christ, I’m coming!” This mention of Christ is not simply a blasphemy, it just gives words to the mother’s frustrating inability to find the right word for the intense pleasure she is experiencing. So, let’s imagine that if Kierkegaard were to consummate his love for Regine, she would be uttering the same phrase when approaching orgasm. Even more, if Christ were not Christ, would he not also be justified to utter a simple “Christ” or “Fuck!” instead of the well-known “Father, why have you abandoned me?” when dying on the cross? Only in Christianity can we imagine such an outcry.

References See Alenka Zupančič, Disavowal, Cambridge: Polity Press 2024. G.K. Chesterton, "A Defense of Detective Stories," in H. Haycraft, ed., The Art of the Mystery Story, New York: The Universal Library 1946, p. 6. Soren Kierkegaard, Repetition, Kierkegaard's Writings VI, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983, p. 227. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism. Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic, London: Verso Books 1990, p. 30. See Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992. Soren Kierkegaard, "Of the Difference between a Genius and an Apostle," in The Present Age, New York: Harper Torchbooks 1962, pp. 100-1. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, London: Tavistock Publications 1979), p. 220. The two most elaborate versions of this approach are to be found in Juergen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1971), and in Helmut Dahmer, Libido und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag 1972).

Unfortunate paywall is unfortunate - see comments section

Reading time: approx. 10 minutes Date: July 2, 2024

Donald Trump could end up in prison: He was found guilty on 34 counts by a Manhattan grand jury in May, and on July 11 it will be announced what sentence awaits the US presidential candidate. Trump doesn’t care: He announced that he is also willing to act as president from prison. Anyway, the Supreme Court has now ruled that as president – in “official acts” – he is immune from criminal prosecution.

The situation is crazy, even if we ignore such extreme possibilities. Donald Trump is the first former or incumbent US president to be found guilty of a crime, and also the first candidate of a major party to be a convicted criminal. Much more is at stake here than the question of who will win the next election. Since the USA is seen even by its critics as a model of a rich and free society that attracts millions of immigrants, the unrest surrounding the election between the aging Joe Biden and the convicted criminal not only brings the specter of a civil war closer, but also threatens massive changes in the global world order.

How can we grasp this danger?

I would like to approach this significant topic with a note on Alex Garland’s film Civil War, which has been out for a while – fiction often allows us to see social trends more clearly, which are blurred by the confusion of actual events such as absurd TV debates. Be patient, this short detour is worth it.

Civil War: Soldiers pose on the corpse of the US president

In the film, we are in the midst of a civil war between the US government, led by a president in his third term, and several independence movements, the strongest of which are the “Western Forces” led by Texas and California. A group of journalists travels from New York City to Washington during this war to interview the besieged president. Among them are experienced war photographer Lee Smith and Jessie Cullen, a young, aspiring photojournalist. Jessie struggles with herself because she is too scared to take photos; gradually her nerves and photographic skills improve as she slowly gets used to the violence.

The two journalists now enter the half-abandoned White House, and Jessie gets caught in the crossfire while taking photos. It is her colleague Lee who wants to protect her – and is fatally hit. Jessie captures Lee’s death in a photo. Emotionlessly, she moves on to the Oval Office, where a group of independence fighters is preparing to kill the president. Jessie photographs the president’s assassination, then captures the soldiers posing with their feet on his corpse.

We must not become desensitized to violence

What does this film have to do with the political present? First, it is a double Bildungsroman: At the beginning, Lee is the insensitive reporter only interested in taking good photos, while Jessie feels too much compassion to take such a “neutral” stance; in the end, Lee is shot while trying to protect Jessie, while Jessie fully adopts the distance of an observer and even takes a photo of Lee dying while trying to protect Jessie. We can learn from this: In times like these, neutral reporting is a trap to be avoided at all costs.

Emotional engagement is more necessary today than ever, desensitization to violence means that we are already part of a violent system. This applies to the war in Ukraine as well as to the war in Gaza and the West Bank, but also to the impending fascism and dealing with criminals who want to become president. There is no neutral democratic process with fascist and criminal participants. Only an engaged, positioning view can find the truth we are looking for.

2. The front does not run between the liberal center and the populist right

We can learn something else from the film. The political divisions driving the civil war are completely confused. The military alliance between liberal California and conservative Texas is an obvious political absurdity; the authoritarian president in his third term combines traits of a liberal Joe Biden and a populist Donald Trump; apart from a few casual racist remarks, the soldiers the journalists encounter on their way to Washington do not make a single statement that would clearly explain what they are fighting for. However, it would be wrong to dismiss this phenomenon as part of a commercial film strategy that does not want to alienate any (right, left, or liberal) viewers. What remains and stands out when we ignore the concrete political struggles is the possibility of a civil war – a threat that has haunted public life in the USA for about ten years, given the increasing disintegration of a common social basis.

And this is more and more our reality, and not only in the USA – the elections in Europe and in France show us this. We not only have the big front between the liberal center and the populist right, plus some elements of a new left (such as the student protests), but a series of strange diagonal alliances (the extreme left and the extreme right both reject support for Ukraine), plus a series of new divisions (the pro-Palestinian left is divided into peace activists who are against terror and those who support Hamas as a resistance group that should be exempt from criticism). The conflicts during the corona pandemic were also harbingers of these diagonal alliances.

On the one hand, the liberal center is right – on the other hand, it is the root of our crises

I assume that all these conflicts are pseudo-conflicts, so we should refuse to simply take sides. Trump’s populism is a reaction to the failure of the liberal-democratic welfare state. While we might and should support some measures advocated by the liberal center (abortion laws, minority rights), we should always remember that the liberal center is the root of our crises in the long run. This brings us to Gramsci’s well-known remark from his prison notebooks, which has been quoted for years and still characterizes our era: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. The struggles we are fighting today, from the populist right to cancel culture, I classify as such morbid symptoms.

In a chaotic situation like we have, we can react in different ways. Many voters want to survive the political storm in their safe haven and continue their daily lives as if nothing major is happening.

“The real verdict will be delivered by the people on November 5”

But when the state itself and its organs are directly involved in crimes, such a strategy no longer works. Let’s remember the scandal involving Jacob Zuma, the former president of South Africa: After he was sentenced to prison, he simply ignored the order to go to prison, and the state authorities were not willing to send the police to arrest him. Our media were full of comments about the inefficiency of the rule of law in a third world country. But what do you call a country where there is a serious possibility that a president will do his job from prison? Or is simply declared immune from prosecution in view of his crimes?

The mere possibility that this happens already reveals the semi-hidden truth of our global neo-feudal system.

Immediately after leaving the courtroom in Manhattan, Trump said, “The real verdict will be delivered by the people on November 5.” It is clear what he meant – to quote pollster Doug Schoen: “It’s not a great thing to be convicted of a crime, but what voters will be thinking about in November is inflation, the southern border, the competition with China and Russia, and the money being spent on Israel and Ukraine.” It’s true, “it’s not a great thing to be convicted of a crime,” but such a conviction makes one a criminal, and it’s a big bad thing when a criminal can be elected president of the (still) most powerful state in the world. There is no middle ground, no compromise between the two options at hand – you can even doubt that the great war can be endlessly postponed.

If Biden wins, part of the population in the USA could push towards civil war

Schoen is of course concerned with how the conviction will affect Trump’s standing with voters, and in this regard, both options are catastrophic. If Trump wins, it means the end of the rule of law as we understand it, including the separation of powers. Trump has already announced what radical measures he will take in case of his victory – these measures will restrict our freedoms so much that our usual notion of democracy will be ridiculously inadequate to describe our social life, not to mention the international consequences: no support for Ukraine, but full support for Israel.

It will de facto result in the USA becoming another BRICS state. If Trump loses, it could be even worse: A large part of the population will feel excluded from the public sphere – they will push towards civil war, secessionist tendencies will spread, as the power of the federal government will not be accepted as legitimate by them (already more than half of Republicans do not consider Biden a legitimate president).

Nothing but despair can save us

So is there hope? Franz Kafka wrote in a letter to Max Brod: “There is infinite hope – but not for us.” An ambiguous statement that can also mean: not for us as we are now, so we must radically change, be reborn. Kafka noted in relation to the October Revolution, “The decisive moment in human development is eternal. Therefore, the revolutionary movements of the spirit, which declare everything that came before them null and void, are right, for nothing has happened yet.”

Today, the fact that nothing has happened yet means that all the main options – new right-wing populism, liberal center, old social-democratic welfare state, religious fundamentalism, and even the naive idea that the rise of the BRICS powers will usher in a new multicentric world – are stillborn. The true utopia is the idea that a new world order will gradually emerge from the options available today that will be able to address our crises, from the decaying environment to global war. What Theodor Adorno wrote decades ago – "Nothing but despair can save us" – is truer today than ever.

This does not mean that we should simply sit down and hope: We should act in every conceivable way, without hope.