Zizek The Rhetorics of Power.pdf

RESPONSES

THE RHETORICS OF POWER

SLAVOJ Z ∨ IZ ∨ EK

Claudia Breger. THE LEADER’S TWO BODIES: SLAVOJ Z ∨ IZ ∨ EK’S POSTMODERN

POLITICAL THEOLOGY. Diacritics 31.1 (2001): 73-90.

The first problem I have is: to what should I effectively respond? I find it difficult to

recognize the theory I developed in the text, so often is my position distorted by means

of an entire bag of rhetorical tricks:

—thoroughly distorting paraphrases of my line of argumentation (for example,

“Thus, resistance to the ‘formal’ law of Judaism works as the enactment of the divine

Law constituted by the ‘real’ content of Christianity” [85]— where do I speak of the

“divine Law constituted by the ‘real’ content of Christianity”?), up to simple inventions

inserted to render the critique more piquant by making me appear antifeminist, and so

forth (for example, “At the same time, ‘woman’s’ ‘naked’ body functions as a spectacle

doubtlessly deserving the philosopher’s lust” [88]— where do I claim anything resem-

bling this?).

—the artifice of rendering my position in a falsified way, which makes it an easy

target of criticism, and then dismissing the fact that this is NOT my position either as

secondary attempts to answer (Judith Butler’s) criticism or as its inconsistency . Perhaps

the best example of this procedure is the short footnote 9:

As a response to Butler’s criticism, ∨ i ∨ ek stresses today that this Real is none-

theless “a symbolic determination” [ FA 121], but he keeps insisting on its

(retroactively installed) foundational status as a traumatic “ahistorical” ker-

nel [112; ∨ i ∨ ek’s quotation marks]. [78, my emphasis—SZ ∨ ]

Unfortunately, the features that I allegedly stress as a response to Butler’s criticism (the

Real, far from being a substantial starting point and reference/guarantee, emerges as the

retroactive effect of the failure of the symbolic process itself, and so forth) are system-

atically developed in my Sublime Object of Ideology, which, published in 1989, pre-

cedes Butler’s criticism [see 169–73]. (Incidentally, Butler herself accuses me of incon-

sistency when I characterize the Capital as the Real of our epoch, claiming that I thereby

contradict my own definition of the Real—surely the easiest way to avoid confronting

the inadequacy of her own notion of the Real: “I claim the notion of the Real in the

criticized author means X—the criticized author says things that do not fit X—no prob-

lem, it is not my notion that is wrong, he is inconsistent with himself . . .”).

—finally, attributions of theoretical propositions that directly contradict my theses:

diacritics / spring 2001

diacritics 31.1: 91–104

for example, the claim that my “epistemology collapses historical difference, and the

contemporary leader is modeled on the image of the ‘premodern’ king” [82]. Really?

Do I not, again, already in Sublime Object of Ideology , develop in detail the difference

between the traditional Master and the modern Leader [see 145–47]? Furthermore, when

my critic comments on the thesis that “the emperor cannot simply be undressed,” she

again imputes the very opposite of what I claim: the undressing of the king does not

work not because his charisma is indestructible, but because it only destroys his per-

sonal charisma, not the power of the symbolic place of the King —when we undress him,

we realize that “he is not truly a king” . . . and engage in the search for a true one .

(Incidentally, Marx makes a homologous point apropos of commodity fetishism: in or-

der to escape its grasp, it is not enough to realize that “commodity is just an object like

all others.”)

Once we discard these distortions, my critic’s basic line of argumentation is simple and

clear enough: my theory “does not allow for more optimistic scenarios of democratiza-

tion and the diminution of nationalism in society” [73], that is, I “outline a world eter-

nally ruled by a monstrous, earthbound Lord, a world not open to human agency and

political change. Because the authoritarian shape of his [Z ∨ i ∨ ek’s] vision is constitutively

tied up with anti-Semitic and antifeminist phantasms, it is especially problematic” [75].

We are thus back to the old criticism elaborated by Butler, according to which the Real

I evoke “remains . . . grounding a realm beyond discourse” [78]: the real kernel, that

which is “in X more than X,” more than a combination of contingent symbolic determi-

nations and, as such, exempted from any transformative grasp of a human agency. Al-

though fantasmatic, this Real is irreducible, unshakable, charismatic, a traumatic point

of reference that assumes in my work different forms (king, woman, Jew, capital). In

sexual economy, this gives us Woman as Real, the ahistoric traumatic Thing; in racism,

this gives us the (anti-Semitic figure of the) Jew as the traumatic point of reference of

the racial imaginary; in politics proper, this gives us the King as the excess of the Real

which limits the open process of democratic reinscriptions and redefinitions. . . . Again,

the trouble with this line of criticism is that I find it difficult to recognize in the criti-

cized position my own theory, in which I repeatedly claim that symbolic practice can

transform the Real:

Precisely because of this internality of the Real to the Symbolic, it is possible

to touch the Real through the Symbolic—that is the whole point of Lacan’s

notion of psychoanalytic treatment; this is what the Lacanian notion of the

psychoanalytic act is about—the act as a gesture which, by definition, touches

the dimension of some impossible Real. [“Class Struggle” 121]

And, as if answering in advance my critic’s claim that my world is “eternally ruled by a

monstrous, earthbound Lord” and, as such, not “open to human agency and political

change,” I emphasize that

[a]n act does not merely redraw the contours of our public symbolic identity, it

also transforms the spectral dimension that sustains this identity, the undead

ghosts that haunt the living subject, the secret history of traumatic fantasies

transmitted “between the lines,” through the lacks and distortions of the ex-

plicit symbolic texture of his or her identity. [“Class Struggle” 124]

Is it possible to put it in clearer terms? An act intervenes in and changes precisely that

which, according to my critic, I elevate into a firm ground outside the scope of human

diacritics / spring 2001

agency, the fantasmatic-real support of the symbolic process. So my proposal to the

reader of these lines is the following one: she should read the last paragraph of my

critic’s essay, and then read these lines from my contribution to Contingency, Hege-

mony, Universality :

In what, then, does our difference consist? Let me approach this key point via

another key criticism from Butler: her point that I describe only the paradoxi-

cal mechanisms of ideology, the way an ideological edifice reproduces itself

(the reversal that characterizes the effect of point de capiton, the “inherent

transgression,” etc.), without elaborating how one can “disturb” (resignify,

displace, turn against themselves) these mechanisms; I show:

how power compels us to consent to that which constrains us, and

how our very sense of freedom or resistance can be the dissimulated

instrument of dominance. But what remains less clear to me is how

one moves beyond such a dialectical reversal or impasse to some-

thing new. How would the new be produced from an analysis of the

social field that remains restricted to inversions, aporias, and rever-

sals that work regardless of time and place? (JB, p. 29)

In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler makes the same point apropos of Lacan

himself:

The [Lacanian] imaginary [resistance] thwarts the efficacy of the sym-

bolic law but cannot turn back upon the law, demanding or effecting

its reformulation. In this sense, psychic resistance thwarts the law in

its effects, but cannot redirect the law or its effects. Resistance is thus

located in a domain that is virtually powerless to alter the law that it

opposes. Hence, psychic resistance presumes the continuation of the

law in its anterior, symbolic form and, in that sense, contributes to its

status quo. In such a view, resistance appears doomed to perpetual

defeat.

In contrast, Foucault formulates resistance as an effect of the very

power that it is said to oppose. [. . .] For Foucault, the symbolic pro-

duces the possibility of its own subversions, and these subversions

are unanticipated effects of symbolic interpellations. [98–99]

My response to this is triple. First, on the level of exegesis, Foucault is much

more ambivalent on this point: his thesis on the immanence of resistance to

power can also be read as asserting that every resistance is caught in advance

in the game of the power it opposes. Second, my notion of “inherent transgres-

sion,” far from playing another variation on this theme (resistance reproduces

that to which it resists), makes the power edifice even more vulnerable: inso-

far as power relies on its “inherent transgression,” then—sometimes, at least—

overidentifying with the explicit power discourse— ignoring this inherent ob-

scene underside and simply taking the power discourse at its (public) word,

acting as if it really means what it explicitly says (and promises)—can be the

most effective way of disturbing its smooth functioning. Third, and most im-

portant: far from constraining the subject to a resistance doomed to perpetual

defeat, Lacan allows for a much more radical subjective intervention than

Butler: what the Lacanian notion of “act” aims at is not a mere displacement/

resignification of the symbolic coordinates that confer on the subject his or

her identity, but the radical transformation of the very universal structuring

“principle” of the existing symbolic order. Or—to put it in more psychoana-

lytic terms—the Lacanian act, in its dimension of “traversing the fundamental

fantasy” aims radically to disturb the very “passionate attachment” that forms,

for Butler, the ultimately ineluctable background of the process of

resignification. So, far from being more “radical” in the sense of thorough

historicization, Butler is in fact very close to the Lacan of the early 1950s, who

found his ultimate expression in the rapport de Rome on “The Function and

the Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (1953)—to the Lacan

of the permanent process of retroactive historicization or resymbolization of

social reality, to the Lacan who emphasized again and again how there is no

directly accessible “raw” reality, how what we perceive as “reality” is

overdetermined by the symbolic texture within which it appears.

Along these lines, Lacan triumphantly rewrites the Freudian “stages” (oral,

anal, phallic . . .) not as biologically determined stages in libidinal evolution,

but as different modes of the dialectical subjectivization of the child’s position

within the network of his or her family: what matters in, say, the anal stage is

not the function of defecation as such, but the subjective stance it involves

(complying with the Other’s demand to do it in an orderly way, asserting one’s

defiance and/or self-control . . .). What is crucial here is that it is this Lacan of

radical and unlimited resignification who is at the same time the Lacan of the

paternal Law (Name-of-the-Father) as the unquestionable horizon of the

subject’s integration into the symbolic order. Consequently, the shift from this

early “Lacan of unlimited resignification” to the later “Lacan of the Real” is

not the shift from the unconstrained play of resignification towards the asser-

tion of some ahistorical limit of the process of symbolization: it is the very

focus on the notion of Real as impossible that reveals the ultimate contin-

gency, fragility (and thus changeability) of every symbolic constellation that

pretends to serve as the a priori horizon of the process of symbolization.

No wonder Lacan’s shift of focus towards the Real is strictly correlative to

the devaluation of the paternal function (and of the central place of the Oedi-

pus complex itself)—to the introduction of the notion that paternal authority is

ultimately an imposture, one among the possible “sinthoms,” which allow us

temporarily to stabilize and coordinate the inconsistent/nonexistent “big Other.”

So Lacan’s point in unearthing the “ahistorical” limit of historicization/

resignification is thus not that we have to accept this limit in a resigned way,

but that every historical figuration of this limit is itself contingent and, as

such, susceptible to a radical overhaul. So my basic answer to Butler—no

doubt paradoxical for those who have been fully involved in recent debates—

is that, with all the talk about Lacan’s clinging to an ahistorical bar, and so on,

it is Butler herself who, on a more radical level, is not historicist enough: it is

Butler who limits the subject’s intervention to multiple resignifications/dis-

placements of the basic “passionate attachment,” which therefore persists as

the very limit/condition of subjectivity. Consequently, I am tempted to supple-

ment Butler’s series in her rhetorical question quoted above: “How would the

new be produced from an analysis of the social field that remains restricted to

inversions, aporias, reversals, and performative displacements or

resignifications . . . ?” [“ Da Capo senza Fine ” 219–21]

Enough of self-quoting, since, I hope, I have made my point: after reading these lines

diacritics / spring 2001

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