Love Thy Neighbour? No, Thanks! (From Žižek’s The Plague of Fantasies)

Lacan developed a distinction between “knave” and “fool” as two kinds of modern intellectuals:

“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 left-wing 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 [sociopolitical efficacy] of his speech. Today, after the fall of Socialism, the knave is a conservative 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.” (PF: 45-46)

In reality, the knaves and fools are more the reversal of the standard figures of Rightist knave and Leftist fool (TS: 355-356; CHU: 325). After the demise of Socialist regimes, the Left is reduced between two choices: either to stick to the old Communist or Social Democratic formulas or to accept global capitalism as the “only game in town” (TS: 353). Today’s “Leftist knaves” (CHU: 325) are more the latter (e.g. Tony Blair of New Labour party who has moved to a more conservative wing) – particularly referring to the “kynical” (those who take advantage of the immediate condition) Third Way theoreticians who insist that we should leave the old ideological division between Socialism and Liberalism, that we have approached the “end of history and ideology,” hence, the end of class struggle, and that the socialist imaginaries can no longer be pushed forward.

In this post-political era of society, the economic sphere is depoliticized, naturalizing class antagonism, and translating it to recognition of differences instead. Hence, the emergence of identity politics – gender, race, ethnicity, ecology, etc. Rather than the political subject “working class” claiming its universal rights, we now have partisans (homosexuals, non-whites, women, environmentalists) advancing these postmodern politics. The latter are the “cynical conservative fools” of today. They resist the existing order in a way that bears no threat to the global capitalist system. Their critique of the system only serves as a supplement to the discourse of the knave.

The knave-fool roles are not contradicting. Both are created by the system and both exist for the system. What sustains each of the two positions is the kind of jouissance they obtain from the Master: they both have the illusion of “freedom.” The fools enjoy the reflexive freedom of lifestyles not constrained by Nature and Tradition.

The jouissance pertaining to the form that the fool and the knave receive as a payment for serving the Master is surplus-enjoyment or surplus-jouissance, which always appear as partial and incomplete, keeping them attached to the Master for “something more.” If the individual reaches the point of complete and full jouissance, the individual would be traumatized and crushed, since this absolute jouissance or the Thing only exists in the Real.

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Recall Žižek’s notion of pre-Oedipal (Imaginary) and Oedipal (Symbolic) stages. In the pre-language Imaginary phase, the individual is “complete” (desire does not exist here), fused to its mother, and “narcissistic” in the sense that the individual feels the world revolves around this being. This narcissism becomes latent in adult life when it is falsely identified with the Other. In the Symbolic phase, the Father (big Other) intervenes prohibiting the incestuous (Oedipal) relationship between the child and the mother. This is the point of the subject’s castration, the formation of “lack/void/hole,” and the development of desire to close this “hole.” The Father (e.g. the Church) is the paternal symbolic authority of the pre-capitalist era which prohibits subject’s incestuous access to the Thing or the impossible object of jouissance.

The decline of paternal symbolic authority (“decline of the Oedipus”) is being decried in the capitalist era. The “dead” father now returns as his Name (Name-of-the-Father) as the embodiment of the symbolic Law/Prohibition. His annihilation presents an illusion that subjects now have free access to the Thing, giving rise to modern individualism.

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The Thing in the fields of the Imaginary and the Real is traumatic and formless. Individual’s existence is pre-ontological and can never be fully assumed (PF: 48). Žižek defines jouissance in the Symbolic stage as the “disturbed balance [or clinamen] which accounts for the passage from Nothing to Something... which provides the density of the subject’s reality... when he is deprived of it, the universe is empty” (PF: 49). The Thing can only take its form as a surplus in the Symbolic frame. Surplus-jouissance is described as “non-historical,” “neutral,” “free-floating,” “remains the same in all possible symbolic universes” (PF: 50), and always situated in a particular ideological field. The enjoyment the fans have for their favorite rock artist and the enjoyment the priest has in the presence of the Pope are the same; they differ only in their specific phantasmic fields.

Subjects are always-already displaced and decentered (PF: 49), because desire is not autonomous but constituted in relation to the Other. Since the Thing, the ultimate object of jouissance, is impossible to obtain, fantasies are constructed bringing the subjects into contact with “partial” and “incomplete” objects of desire, to make an attempt to close the “hole,” which always fails. So what the subjects receive is surplus-jouissance only, keeping them attached to the Other for “more” jouissance. Ideological fantasy serves as a screen to make the relationship of domination acceptable for the subjects. By “traversing the fantasy,” by recognizing that desires are the desires of the Other, subjects can break the chains of servitude.

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“Traversing the fundamental fantasy” can be in two gestures: it can be an “empty gesture” or an “authentic Act” (TS: 265-268). The latter is more radical.

In the act of taking the empty gesture, the subject suspends the symbolic Law by choosing the impossible option – one that violates the symbolic Law. It appears first that the individual is free to choose, as if the superego tells: “You should do it if you really want to, if not, then don’t!” Between the lines, the superego further orders to “enjoy” what one has to do. Whatever the individual chooses, one basically is guilty of not taking the other choice. A double-bind actually takes place, which involves the “paradox of the superego” (TS: 268): in following the demands of the ego ideal (offered by the symbolic framework, which retains one’s symbolic identity), the individual is in effect guilty of rejecting his/her (from Butler’s concept) “passionate attachment” to the Thing; the same goes when one follows the fundamental desire (“passionate attachment”), as a consequence, one’s socio-symbolic existence is shattered.

In psychoanalysis, the goal is for the subject to reverse his/her “passionate attachment,” and thus to undergo what Lacan calls “subjective destitution” (TS: 266), because it will always lead to psychosis. Freeing oneself from the constraints of ideology is impossible because nobody can escape from the symbolic order. The desire for a sense of “wholeness” is an illusion to satiate either because as long as one is in the symbolic order, the “hole” can never be closed, it can only be “sutured” by “partial” objects of jouissance. Subjective destitution involves reconstructing the fantasy to give it a more acceptable sense. The problem here is that the same fundamental fantasy remains in effect, the phantasmic core is not really disrupted.

The more radical gesture of “traversing the fantasy” which disturbs the phantasmic core (the doxa of the existing social order) is the authentic Act (e.g. violent revolution, the political act par excellence). The subject to the Act is not the subject of subjectivization (TS: 374). The subject identifies with the symptoms and challenges the existing social relations. The Act always involves the choice of the Worse, something catastrophic to the existing discourse of the universe (TS: 377).

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In connection to the “decline of the Oedipus,” the fall of the paternal symbolic authority implies the decline of the “ancien régime” – the death of the authoritarian Father which defines the subjects’ desires. The transition from feudalism to capitalism gives rise to a new regime. What the society now has is the “regime of the Little Brother” which supports modern individualism. In this regime, subjects define their desires. No Father-Master imposes what the subjects should do. The problem is that a system exists that has its own logic, so how can the subjects define their desires in this context? Since the Master does not tell the subjects what to do, everybody is hystericized.

In reality, today’s society is being manipulated by an Evil Master which appears in two figures (PF: 63-64; TS: 347-350): on one hand, a “visible” public Master reified by the “big Other” or symbolic institution; on the other, an “invisible” Little Brother who manages himself to appear as being one of us, a secret Master who actually pulls the strings of social life. The latter, “the Other of the Other,” is the one that hystericizes the subjects. This type of Master presents himself as an ordinary person with imperfections and weaknesses, making him appear more like a common peer to his subjects (thus, making it hardly perceptible for the subjects when they are being oppressed), and further supporting his symbolic authority. Žižek describes this as the dialectic of fetishization (TS: 349-350): commodity fetishism (relations between people that assume the form of relation between things) is in fact replaced by its opposite – i.e. it now assumes the phantasmic form of pseudo-personalized “relations between people.”

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This “self-distance” is the very process – the condition of possibility (PF: 73) – how the ideological edifice effectively works. It always consists of two dimensions: an “obvious” surface (fantasy frame) which serves as an obscene supplement and a screen to conceal the “true” underlying dimension. Ideology sustains itself as long the latter remains hidden; without the phantasmic support, ideology itself will disintegrate. To maintain its control on subjects, they must experience it as not fully in its hold. The fantasy that constitutes reality is what the subjects need to make the Real bearable. (Thus the title, “Love thy neighbour? No, thanks!” For example, in the courtly love tradition, man’s desire for the lady is only sustained if she is observed from a distance, because encountering the horrifying Real of her presence will be traumatic for him).

Ideology discloses its inconsistencies when a subject no longer identifies with the symbolic order and when symptoms start to manifest. To reproduce itself, ideology needs to be supported by an obscene supplement; without the latter, ideology is “sexualized,” it “gets stuck” in a repetitive vicious cycle (PF: 71) of attempting to be consistent.

To understand the structural inconsistency of ideology, one has to do “anamorphic reading” which precisely involves the dialectical reversal of common perceptions (PF: 75-80). For example:
· Instead of perceiving Law as the agency which represses desire, one must perceive it as that which sustains desire.
· Deviance is not something that undermines the Law, it in fact further strengthens it, that when deviance is suspended, the Law itself disintegrates.
· Christ came down to earth not to deliver people from sin; Adam had to fall to allow Christ to come down to earth and save the people.
· Lacan’s reversal of Dostoevsky: Instead of “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted” to “If God doesn’t exist then nothing at all is permitted any longer.”

What this anamorphic reading uncovers is the role of “negative magnitudes” ((PF: 81-82). In ideology, these refer to “obscene supplements” to conceal its Real (the positive dimension) and make it consistent. In subjectivation, these refer to objet petit a or objects of desire which “suture” the lack (the positive dimension) of the subject.

References

The Plague of Fantasies (PF)
The Ticklish Subject (TS)
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (CHU)

On Max Horkheimer's "Egoism and Freedom Movements"

This essay provides a theoretical foundation on the social psychological roots of authoritarian character traits produced by capitalist societies, which have remained consistent up to the present day and which have created the conditions necessary for modern forms of oppression and cruelty.

In the early modern period, the bourgeoisie was defined in terms of its struggle to emancipate itself from the shackles of feudal society and absolute monarchy. The bourgeoisie, weak to win this struggle on its own, was often forced to form an alliance with the lower classes, which also had an interest in overthrowing feudalism and absolute monarchy. The alliance between the bourgeoisie and the lower classes was not an easy one, in that the historical experiences of these groups on the new social order basically differ from the very beginning. The historical development of the bourgeoisie, on the one hand, was characterized as a process of unrestrained pursuit of their self-interest (egoism); the lower classes, on the other hand, experienced the development of capitalism passively and had fewer opportunities to satisfy their material and psychological needs.

In bourgeois anthropology, man by nature is egoistic. In the context of heightened economic and social contradictions, free competition was seen as leading to a state of war between individuals. Morality, then, was promoted and imposed officially by the Church ideally to restrict the ever-increasing free competition. Bourgeois concept of virtues such as self-discipline, self-denial, obedience, and submission were instilled in the masses by coercion and persuasion in favor of the “common good”. The contradictions contained in this bourgeois morality was that it served as a means of domination and a mechanism to further suppress the material interest of the masses, i.e. collective action.

Horkheimer expounds the concept of bourgeois anthropology by providing a genealogy of bourgeois freedom movements – particularly, bourgeois leaders in the medieval Italy (Cola di Rienzo; Savanarola), religious leaders (Luther; Calvin) of the Reformation movement, and the bourgeois leader (Robespierre) of the French Revolution. Each case has a particular dynamic developing between the charismatic leaders of these movements and their mass followers. The intense repression imposed upon the masses in the feudal order produced deep discontent, which was manipulated by bourgeois leaders to further their own ends. Leaders of bourgeois pseudo-revolutions magnified themselves as the “redeemer” of the people. While promising freedom, equality, and justice to the masses whose support they depended, they actually represented the interests of the ruling strata and served to perpetuate injustice. Though leaders were capable of inciting the people to rebel against the prevailing conditioned, they never intended to destroy the masses’ disposition toward blind faith in authority. Their appeals to the masses always stopped short of showing them how they might truly realize their own interests, their class consciousness, since from the very beginning, the bourgeois interests were not identical with those of the lower classes.

The historical situation determines the character of the bourgeois leader. Covertly, his actions correspond to the interests of the ruling sectors; overtly, he presents himself as “one of the masses”. The less his policies coincide with the immediate interests of the latter, the more the leader’s character is magnified into “charisma”. Contradictions contained in the character of a bourgeois leader are inherent for their achievement and historical function in the bourgeois world.

Horkheimer takes Freud’s concepts to show how high levels of repression reinforce certain psychological mechanisms among the masses. The egoism of the bourgeois, the unrestricted utilitarian drive, is the real “destructive drive”; the egoism of the masses for collective action is the universally denounced and disavowed one, manipulated by ideological practices.* Although the masses are prohibited from realizing their own consciousness, they nevertheless are capable to function as a motor to drive the process forward. The masses in the pseudo-revolution are set in motion by the more conscious and alert bourgeois wing. The repressed libidinal energy (repressed aggression for collective action) of the masses does not simply disappear, but is pushed into the unconscious, where its strength grows and develops. This surplus aggression is appropriated by the leaders to strengthen their dominion over the masses. Not only do the leaders encourage the masses to sacrifice themselves for the common good, and to identify with the leaders as the representatives of that community, they also provide the masses with objects for their surplus aggression. Directing their aggression against the “enemies of the people” (e.g. perceived tyrants, dictators) not only provides the masses with targets of their unconscious resentment, it also reinforces their sense of belonging in the community of followers. This sense of belonging, including the illusory “love” of the leaders for the people, provides psychological compensation for the material sacrifices of the masses.

Horkheimer’s concept of the bourgeois mechanisms of domination can be connected to Zizek’s concept of Master: its condition of possibility always depends on its obscene Other. In the context of today’s capitalism, domination is concealed by the superficial independence of subjects. No visible authoritarian Master imposes what the subjects should do. What the subjects now have is an invisible obscene Master which appears as one of its subjects. This Master sustains itself as long as its subjects do not experience as not fully in its grasp, as long as its real dimension remains hidden. The Master will only disintegrate when its phantasmic support breaks.