Event and Ideology

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Event and IdeologyAndrew Stein

Published online: 13 Sep 2012.

To cite this article:Andrew Stein (2012) Event and Ideology, Culture, Theory and Critique, 53:3,

287-303, DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2012.721627

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Event and Ideology

Andrew Stein

Abstract This paper explores how Zizek uses the concepts of ideology and eventto explain what the revolutionary desires and how the revolutionary mightprepare for a revolutionary cut within Capitalism based on a Lacanian-Hegeliandiscourse.

In this article, I explore how Zizek breathes new life into an old dialogue

between psychoanalysis and radical politics. Figures in this tradition haveincluded the idiosyncratic Wilhelm Reich, classical Freudians such as OttoFenichel, Marxist neo-Freudians like Erich Fromm, Frankfurt School figuressuch as Herbert Marcuse, the French structuralist and Marxist Louis Althusser,and more recently Alain Badiou and others. Zizek, of course, fits within thislineage; although in the past he was more associated with Badiou and

J.-A. Miller. His particular expertise lies in Hegelian philosophy and Lacanianpsychoanalysis. His politics, though on the Left, remains idiosyncratic, and heis difficult to place in any traditional political position. He is a radical whoseradicalism is not steeped in a particular utopian ideology, but in a Hegelian-

Lacanian discourse. An avowed Communist, he is an enemy of postmodernand liberal cultural politics, which he finds complicit with the ideology ofglobal Capitalism, and he also is an enemy of the new East European Commu-nists who have embraced ultra-nationalism. Although having a worldwidefollowing, Zizek has often been dismissed in academia as a showmanlacking substance. I suggest why this is not the case. After an initial sectionexploring the link between Lacanian psychoanalysis and radical politics, Iexamine Zizeks concepts ofideology and event. I discuss how ideology has aperverse structure for Zizek and why that structure maintains the consumerwithin a deadlocked dialectic that is only overcome by the formation of revo-

lutionary desire during an event.

Look at them enjoy

I suggest that Zizek borrowed Lacans question what is the desire of theanalyst? and applied it to radical politics; in this way he arrived at the ques-tion of the desire of the revolutionary. His attempt to answer this question runsthroughout his entireoeuvreand boils down to a very Lacanian paradox: What

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does the revolutionary desire? She desires to give to the world a signifier ofuniversal social justice. But this signifier of universal social justice is only apossible reality that, like all possible past and future realities, has a symbolic fic-tional structure. It, therefore, is not equivalent to objective reality. Neverthe-less, the revolutionary works to bring such a universal fictional structure

into the world even though she does not know where, when, and for howlong it may next appear. To prepare for its next appearance, however, is thething she desires more than life; it is her ethics and being.

Although this is a Lacanian position, Lacan actually said very little aboutthe desire of the revolutionary (Lacan 1990: 117 28; Turkle 1990: 8; Roudinesco1990: 34142). What he did say about the desire of the May 68ers, however,closely foreshadowed things Zizek would later say to the Occupy WallStreet protesters in 2011. In essence, while Lacan sympathised with thestudent and worker revolts against the institutions of power, work, and bour-geois morality, he also saw another side one that turned revolt into an

unconscious affirmation of the Others desire.While rebelling against authority at the conscious level, Lacan suggested,the protesters unconsciously turned their revolt against authority on its head,so that it became a desire to go on affirming the Others desire. In this respect,the insistence by the May 68ers on self-actualisation and enjoyment, in fact,was a narcissistic and voyeuristic display, offered for the enjoyment of a sym-

bolic-imaginary Other who perversely directed them not to work, but toenjoy themselves in the act of transgressing the Law.

Thus, when the May 68ers proclaimed that the beach lay beneath the pave-ment, they often did so at the behest of a new symbolic Other (Capitalism)which turned the object of the Other into an object of perverse jouissancerather than an object of repression. The self-actualising playfulness of theMay 68ers, therefore, did more than just break with the old Law; it also was acollective affirmation of the new face of the Law. Therefore, protesters who

believed that they were transgressing the Law in any sort of straightforwardway were fooling themselves. In fact, Lacan had shown that only psychoticssuccessfully disavow the Others symbolic function by foreclosing the symbolicdimensions of reality, whereas the neurotic and the pervert each make the Faus-tian bargain by accepting the Others symbolic role (Lacan 1993: 32). Studentswere presumably not all psychotics but they were people whose subject pos-ition in the social symbolic chain of meanings was being (or already had been)

radically rewritten, where the dilemma faced by the protesters was that theirrevolt against inauthenticity was structurally compatible with an unconsciousdesire to meet the new demands of the Other to produce (here by enjoying)surplus enjoyment (plus-de jouir) for the Other. This was the pound offlesh that the Other still demanded. Thus, Lacan saw the protestors as subjectsstanding at a crossroads, unaware of the stakes involved in deciding to go in onedirection or another. And it was to convey some of the gravitas of themoment that Lacan said of the May 68ers: Look at them enjoy! and, onanother occasion, Lacan said the aspirations to revolution has but one concei-vable issue, always, the discourse of the master. That is what experience has

proved. What you, as revolutionaries, aspire to is a Master. You will haveone (Lacan 1990: 111, 124, 126).

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In a manner of speaking, Lacan gave back to the protesters their ownmessage in an inverted form when he asked whether the protests woulddescend into narcissistic enjoyment carried on beneath the gaze of the Otheror give rise to a new desire for an Other whose cuts and holes would not beveiled by an idealisation. The protesters call for a holistic society beyond

repression, warned Lacan, did not prefigure a new naturalism. Rather, itmarked an ideological repositioning of the subject in the field of the Other a point Zizek would later highlight by saying that the perverse structuredoes not rely on repression to guard the subject against abjection. Instead itsafeguards against lack (which might carry the subject beyond the pleasureprinciple) by veiling it behind an idealisation acceptable to the ego whichin the case of the protesters took the form of an ideal fantasy of a desublima-tion capable of suspending alienation and guilt.

Lacan had been discussing a transformation in the fantasy of the Othersince the 1950s. He had shown in numerous ways that modernity is marked

by the fantasy that the place of master in the master discourses is occupiedby dupes whose authority rests on the connivance and opposition of a seriesof hysteric, perverse, and obsessive characters (Lacan 2007). Moreover,Lacan had discussed how a socially disruptive desire in this case thedesire of the fictional house of Labdacus can alter the subjects relation tothe Other when an ethical subject appears on the scene willingly to sacrificeher happiness and her life to her desire (in a sense, to take the fantasy of themasters desire seriously again). But Lacan also showed how Antigones actlures the perverse gaze of the audience (I am referring to the gaze beingdrawn to the purity and dazzling beauty of her act while veiling the obscenityof a girl hanging from a rope with a broken neck). Similarly, Lacan warned theprotesters against falling in love with the beautiful image of happiness beyondguilt, so near to the American disease Freud condemned; and Zizek will laterwarn against a subjective attitude at work whenever Capitalism drawspeoples gaze away from its obscenities to an ideal imaginary happiness:One should simply not be dazzled by the beauty of the machinery of Capital-ism. Consequently, when Zizek states that the revolutionarys desire liesbeyond the pleasure principle of perversion, he is adding his voice to atradition reaching back to Freud and Lacan.

The Lacanian field and revolutionary desireJust as Claude Levi-Strauss wrote that one comes upon a myth at the pointwhere there is the effect of an irresolvable social conflict from the past thatstill divides and binds a society, Lacan believed that one comes upon a linguis-tic displacement (metonym) or condensation (metaphor), a place of repression,a gap, etc. at a point of a trauma or irresolvable psychic conflict. The psycho-analyst pays special attention to these linguistic and imaginary slips, mistakes,gafs and gaps that regularly befuddle and stymie the ego. It is only by being adupe, said Lacan, that a subject can know something of its own unconsciousdesire. In other words, it is only by following the ways that the unconscious

subject dupes the ego (the ego which asks itself is this it? is this how it is?is this what the Other desires?) that the subject reaches its own desire,starts accepting a lack exists in the Other, and the law of castration that it

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implies. Consequently, it is through the gaps that the subject eventually is con-fronted with the primary signifier, and the subject is, for the first time, in aposition to subject himself to it (Lacan 1977: loc. 479294).

But how a Lacanian passes from the field of desire to the field of politicsmay seem baffling. For the political consequences of psychoanalysis are ones

that are not normally considered to be part of the classical realm of politics (yetmany analysts combine revolutionary desire with their analytic desire). ALacanian politics begins with helping analysands read the signifiers emergingin their speech and dreams; doing so already places analysis beyond the con-ventional structures of modern science and Capitalism, which convert humanrelations into commodity relations and forms of university discourse. Beyondthis, Lacan said that psychoanalysis safeguards the subject against its owndesire to sacrifice itself to the dark god of fascism (Lacan 1977) and otherparanoid desires that destroy the subjects ability to distinguish between sig-nifiers (that is, to read desire).

Being a Lacanian and a revolutionary therefore only poses a problem forthose who see clinical work as the alpha and omega of psychoanalysis. Lacanhimself said as much in Television to Jacques Alain-Miller (Lacan 1990), so thereis no reason one cant derive bothan analytic practice and a theory of revolu-tionary desire from his teachings, provided they do not confuse the one andthe other. Lacanian politics even extends into the most remote areas of Laca-nian knots theory. Consider, for example, the uses of the Lacanian sinthome.Sinthome is a neologism condensing the symptom with the name of SaintThomas Aquinas. The sinthome hooks or rings a broken Borromean knot,holding the three rings together and keeping the subject (symptom) fromcoming apart. By analogy, sinthomes hold the rings of the Borromean knottogether like Saint Thomas held Christian and Pagan thought together. Butthere is a vital difference. Thomas could link Aristotle and Christianity

because both exist sub species aeternitas in Gods Absolute gaze: because Godknows how it all fits together. The sinthome, on the other hand, holds the indi-vidual subject (symptom) together in full knowledge that the gaze of the Otherno longer is Absolute; that it is full of holes. A sinthome then operates within astructure where the Other lacks, where the Others gaze does not see andknow all, and where the Absolute exists only as a fantasy in the imaginaryregister.

How ideology supports the desire of the Other and thwarts the desireof the revolutionary

Fast forward to Zizeks speech on October 9, 2011 during an Occupy WallStreet rally where he sounded a very Lacanian note by saying to the protestersthat he supported them but they should not love themselves too much thatis, that they should not get carried away by their imaginary, narcissistic fanta-sies of speaking truth to power and transgressing the Law, because to do sowould be to betray the revolutionary moment by turning their rebellion

against the egoism and greed of Wall Street and the financial institutionsback onto themselves. Do not, he implied, simply give the message of theOther back to it in an inverted form. Instead, find your own desires and

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build new communal institutions that sustain them against the desire of theOther of global consumer Capitalism.

What lies behind this warning is Zizeks concern that a perverse ideologyshapes these fantasies. This perverse ideology relies on a series of obscene con-tradictions, gaps, lapses, holes, and distortions of jouissance veiled by an

idealisation so that the subject is asked to assume with enjoyment the veryinjustice of which they are horrified (Zizek 2005: 206). In fact, for Zizek ideol-ogy resembles Kafkas lower and higher courts in The Trial, which are alsoriddled by real and metaphorical holes, self-contradictions, and abjectobjects. In both cases, desires circulate around abject objects that arepapered over by pompous, irrational, and often comically distorted,obscene representatives of the superego Law, which can destroy anyoneunlucky enough to get caught in its web. The whole apparatus is deadlydespite its rather shoddy slapped-together appearance. Consequently, the per-verse structure of ideologyincitesanxiety in people: for both the pervert and

ideology, anxiety is a necessary effect of the production of obscene superegofantasies, barely veiled behind idealised objects, of the perverse structure.Nothing works without it.

Ideology has the quality of being like the air we breathe. We both knowabout it and take it for granted (dont think about it much). As such, it islike a social phantasm that contains the logic of our relation to the Otherand the object a (the source of anxiety). The semblant par excellence of thisdialectic structure in the Western imagination is the Jew who, in the mind ofthe anti-Semite, possesses this double structure of being an idealised andabject other. For the Jew seems to have escaped castration and to haveaccess to some unfathomable je ne sais quoi, to forbidden enjoyments thatmakes them not quite human (aliens in the precise sense this termacquired in the science-fiction films of the 1950s) for the anti-Semite (Z izek2005: 236). Because the Jew occupies the logical place of the object cause ofdesire, the Jew appears to the anti-Semites gaze as a stain disturbing theirfantasm of an imaginary whole, harmonious world. The anti-Semite, therefore,resents the Jew for having access to secret jouissancethat the anti-Semite wantsfor himself. As a result, the anti-Semite creates fantasies in which the Jew iseliminated and the world is no longer uncanny, which the anti-Semite

blames on the proximity of the Jew. By erasing the stain caused by the Jew(quaplace holder of an enjoyment that is denied to the anti-Semite), the anti-

Semite also tries to satisfy its own Other and thereby gain access to a bit ofthe secret treasure, the surplus jouissance, that the Jew is believed to possess.

Logically, however, the hatred of the Jew or any other group whichoccupies this place in the matheme of the fantasm ($ , .a) is not limitedto the actual properties of the Jew but targets its real kernel, objet a, whatis in the object more than itself (Zizek 2005: 236). What the anti-Semite ulti-mately longs for and hates is not the empirical Jew, but an empty place of inac-cessible surplusjouissance(death) that the Jew represents in the anti-Semitesfantasy. That is, the anti-Semite does not react to the real Jew. He reacts to hisown fantasms. Central to these fantasms is the subjects fascination with abjec-

tion (represented by the Jew). None of this makes much sense, however, unlesspeople see that ideology and here Zizek stretches the idea to include anti-Semitism structurally depends on this dialectic combination of an ideal



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and abject object and that it works best when it puts people as close to theobject a as possible. The reverse side of the Others demand to enjoy, there-fore, is anxiety about jouissance, both a performance anxiety am I enjoyingenough? and an anxiety that the other is enjoyingmore. Such anxiety breedsaddiction and depression, as the subject increasingly wants more and increas-

ingly resents other people as well. But it also generates a fear of getting toonear the real.

This same fantasm, based on combining an ideal and abject (anxiety-provoking) object, also exists in the relation between the Law and crime. Forthe Law, Zizek argues, does not squelch crime so much as it allows peopleto satisfy partial drives (crimes and transgressions) in ways that have the sanc-tion of the symbolic order. The Law, in other words, succeeds best when itlooks away and permits subjects nothomo sacers to enjoy what is officiallyunlawful. For Zizek, the beauty of Kafka lies in the way that his stories revealthis obscene, superegoic side of the Law lurking behind the made in

Germany stamp of approval. Kafka lets the screen drop, Z

izek writes, sothat his readers see the fantasm working. That is, they are shown the Lawoperating as an obscene object of desire (much as Freud did when he con-structed the myth of the primal father). Literally, in Zizeks words, whereGod is too present, under the shape of course, which is not at all comforting of obscene, disgusting phenomena (2005: 138). This materialisation of God this image that brings God down to the level of the obscene object cause ofdesire (A .a), may be the necessary step in the transformation from a Chris-tian world, such as we had for two thousand years, into a more thoroughlyCapitalist one compatible with the fetish and with the perversion of finance,as is seen, for example, in Capitalisms idealisation of individual greed andacquisitiveness.

Similarly, Zizek depicts the historic-figure Bligh, the captain of the Bounty,as a character who does not know how the Law functions: Bligh, who occupiesthe place of Law, metes out the Law as if it is a Kantian universal that must beapplied, without exception, to everyone in the same way (2005: 23134, 26970). Bligh is so fair and upright that he runs afoul of all the unofficial rules thatallow more senior sailors to abuse their juniors, etc., and as such he earns theuniversal hatred of everyone on board and is twice mutinied once aboardthe Bounty and again in the colonies. He thus repeats Joseph K.s mistake inThe Trial: standing before the court he cannot see that people cant disentangle

the Law from its obscene, erotic, farcical, and mean other side. In Zizekswords (discussing Orson Wells film The Trial): The error of JosephK. consists in overlooking the solidarity between this obscene perturbationand the court. He thinks that everybody would be anxious to have orderrestored and the offending couple at least ejected from the meeting, butwhen he tries to rush across the room the crowd obstructs him, someoneseizes him from behind by the collar (Zizek 2005: 258). Thus, neither JosephK. nor Bligh understands that what matters is not that the Law is followedto the letter, but that it fails in a regulated way because it is only throughfailing that the Law affirms the exception (the ideal-abject object a) that

defines the limits of legality (Zizek 2010: loc. 653, loc. 1897). In other words,they cannot understand that, in the perverse fantasm, eroticism and anxiety

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function as the glue that binds people to each other and that the Law demandsa pound of flesh from the subject for society to function.

Structural deadlock and the ideological function

Ideology (without people noticing it) binds people to what Lacan called aforced choice your money or your life. The point of such a choice, in part,is its speciousness: the terms present no choice at all since the subject musteither acquiesce to the muggers demand or lose his life. But, if he acceptsthe muggers demand he also loses the money he needs to live. This sort ofchoice does not follow classical logic, which proposes that if A is true thannot-A is false. Instead, it follows a logic where A and not-A are both true atthe same time, as also can be true for an identification. Thus, a subjectis freeto choose. But that choice is not free.

Capitalism, writes Z

izek, offers people a similar unfree choice. Subjectsare presented with an excess of choice. A person can make a purchase aftercomparing cars; he can even buy the same car in a variety of different colorsand so on; he can select from shelves of sodas, each one of which comes inits own flavors just so long as he does not opt out of the system and solong as his desire does not become too revolutionary; freedom to choose,then, is freedom managed by an Other. According to Zizek, this is how Capit-alism imposes its own forced choice on people and keeps them stuck in a dead-lock where Capitalism remains the impassable limit to everything.

There are other forced choices too. Zizek also believes that a forced choicelogic lies behind Liberalisms appeal to free choice, be it freedom of the press,freedom to choose your own beliefs, etc. According to this definition, freedomto choose remains purely formal in Liberal society. Multiculturalism and otherforms of postmodernism also rely on logics of forced choices: people can be asdifferent as they like, provided that they are not free to opt out. Therein reststhe forced choice for Zizek.

All these forced choices are effects of the alienating structure of languagewhich, Lacan said, occurs each time the subject appears in the field of theOther as a signifier (in what Freud had called subjects discontent within civi-lisation). The most basic structures of language necessitates that the subjectpulses between states of meaning (when it appears through a signifier that

represents it to other signifiers) and aphanisis (or fading). Alienation, saidLacan, consists in this vel, which . . . condemns the subject to appearing inthat division which, it seems to me, if it appears on one side meaning, pro-duced by signifiers, it appears on the other as aphanisis (the fading of thesubject) (Lacan 1977: loc. 36664944). This is the most basic structure support-ing the barred or divided subject. But Capitalism is alienating in another sense:on the level of ideology. Ideology, like any symptom, represents a second ordertype alienation that presupposes the alienation of the subject in language, butgoes beyond it.

This means that while the subjectmustpass through the vel of alienation,

it need not accept the terms offered by Capitalism. Capitalism, as ideology,shares the characteristics of a Freudian screen memory. It is a simplificationwe accept so that we do not have to face the real trauma of the barred and



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divided nature of the subject and the Other. In this sense, Capitalism is a bluffthat the subject can refuse.

Another way to imagine this problem is to say that Capitalism diverts thesubjects gaze onto a fantasy of a perverse broken master (the Other); thisOther requires the Capitalist to make it whole again by fulfilling their

natures as greedy acquisitive individuals. But this other version of theTikun olam(repairing the world) is nothing but a perverse imaginary fantasythe subject posits to justify its own desires and whose main purpose is toscreen lack so we can act as if the place of the master (the One) in ourfantasy is occupied now by a totality of the greedy and acquisitive individualscompeting to satisfy their desires.

According to Jean-Michel Vappereau, in one of his final (still unpub-lished) seminars Lacan discussed how modern children learn to separate theOne and the many by observing their parents. Lacan thought, according toVappereau, that this posed a real paradox for children who wonder: who is

this being the parental couple, are they one or two? At times the parentalcouple appears as one to the child, as what Lacan referred to (alluding to Aris-tophanes) as a double-backed being. At other times, the being separated intotwo, especially during moments of passion (love making) and violence(arguing). Eventually, Lacan taught according to Vappereau that the childlearns to decern a relation between One and the many which often is symp-tomatic leading the subject to react to truama by repositing a fictional (lost)totality.

In these teachings by Lacan, the mystery of the One and the many beginsin violence and passion just like the image of a mugging in the example ofthe forced choice. Both examples suggest the importance fantasms of violence,terror, and being in a state of emergency (as well as enjoyment) play in thehistory of the subject. This intimate connection between security, a state ofemergency, forced choices, lost jouissance, and global Consumer Capitalismwas recently explained to us by George W. Bush, when he told Americansafter 9/11 that it is their patriotic duty to go on consuming: to do otherwise,he said, would be to concede defeat to the terrorists. The overt message(go on enjoying like before while your government engages Terror for you),however, hid a more truthful one. Namely, the terrorists are our benefactors

because consumerism works best when it is combined to an obscene state ofemergency. The real message was: make Terror work for Capitalism.

A related perverse fantasm, Zizek writes, appears when communities par-tition people into groups of whole and not-whole people. This notion that theworld can be partitioned into whole and partial beings broadens the classconcept found in classical Marxism into a vision of society riven by multiple,competing apartheid communities in which each community maintains a safedistance between whole and partial damaged others. The underlying injunc-tion of liberal tolerance is (not) monocultural Be like us! Become British!On the contrary,. . .the injunction is one of cultural apartheid: others shouldnot come too close to us, we should protect our way of life (Zizek 2010:loc. 122325). The State of Israel is one example Zizek often cites about a

society that has adopted this apartheid logic in its policies towards the Pales-tinians on the West Bank and Gaza, not only by erecting the Wall but also by

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placing an untold number of rules and regulations between themselves andtheir Palestinian neighbors.

The fantasm operating here is not that the ideal object can veil obscenitybut it is a related fantasm that dirty, obscene, abjection can be isolated andquarantined in the other. Sometimes this logic of separation becomes explicit

(as in the Palestinian case). At other times, the logic of separation operateswithout its reasons being made explicit anymore. Zizek alludes to this latersituation whenever he referred to Levi-Strauss discussion in Tristes Tropiquesof a village where a gap separated the villagers into two groups. Each grouphad a different mental map of how the village was laid out because both com-munities processed in different ways a common historic trauma that occurredlong ago (Zizek 2010: 24243). This is not the same thing as the division ofpeople into whole and partial or damaged people, but Zizeks point is thatthese two communities were defined by a parallax logic, becauseallparallaxes(the gaps in a symbolic whole) are rooted in the way the libidinal economies of

different communities respond to a shared trauma the site of an unbearableantagonism, self-contradiction (Zizek and Milibank 2009: 49) and thisincludes the villagers discussed by Levi-Strauss, the Capitalist and thefactory worker living under conditions of 19th century industrial Capitalism,and the Israeli and Palestinian communities in the 21st century.

In a similar vein, Zizek refers to Confucius as the first proto-ideologistwho articulated what one is tempted to call the elementary scene (one isreminded of the primal scene in The Wolf Man) of ideology, its zero-level,which consists in asserting the (nameless) authority of some substantialTradition (2010: loc. 500) against abject hidden signifiers. Confucius, inother words, produced a set of rules and concepts that allowed subjects

be they peasants, mandarins, or Emperors to feel that they were fulfillingthe desire of the Other when they followed the Confucian obligations codifiedin a mythological past (Tradition). In this way, Confucius codified a belief thatan imaginary Order, discernible as the order of the universe, could be themodel for terrestrial relations, as well. For Zizek it is a small step from thisproto-ideological world to the Wild West of postmodern consumer Capital-ism where the goal is not to replace disharmony with harmony but to makedisharmony pay. The ethic of responsibility and shame discernible in Confu-cianism is replaced in the structures of global Capitalism by an oral fantasythat guiltless consumption is possible: even though the world may be full

of corruption and alienation, and even if people are often disingenuous, ideol-ogy whispers, an idealized object, when purchased and consumed, can raisean abject object out of the muck of social reality (Zizek 2010: loc. 111). One seesthis developed most fully, according to Zizek, in the appeals of companies likeStarbucks who sell indulgences with a double espresso latte to people whofeel guilty about their social privileges. What companies like Starbucksreally sell is an identification with an ideal fantasy object which the subjectconsumes. But, no matter what one consumes, one never gets it; and, conse-quently, one never gets free of guilt or dangerous jouissance no matter howhard one tries. The oral fantasy continues to function as a lure that keeps

the subject hooked to a changing flux of faux satisfactions.This displacement of guilt resembles the displacement of responsibility

by Hegels beautiful soul (in whom the superego seems to be absent). The



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beautiful soul is the subject who raises himself up out of the corruption of theworld, which he always attributes to others. Lacan famously called the beau-tiful soul the only truly mad person today because such a subject cant read hisown divided subject. In opposition to the beautiful soul, Lacan affirmed thatwe all are monsters we are abject beings who, having been born prematurely,

begin life defective. That makes everyone damaged goods. But like all defec-tive organisms, we still want to live. We are monsters, said Lacan, according toVappereau in a recent seminar, not machines. Machines break down and donot work while humans seek to live, despite being defective. In this respect,we resemble the Monster in Frankenstein. We are monsters who speak language being the iron lungs that surround us and keep us going. Butthese iron lungs are also a poultice of shit surrounding us, wrote Lacan: abjec-tion being what ultimately keeps us going.

To explain more about this deadlock requires an excursion into the logic ofstructures because Zizek says that the ideologically-driven subject is caught in

the logic of disavowal or verleugnung, or one of the logical forms of negationdiscussed by Freud and Lacan the others being repression or unterdruckungand foreclosure or verwerfung (Lacan 2006: 31833; Freud 1964, 1991). ForLacan, each of these three forms of negation also corresponds to a structureof the unconscious signifying chain: namely, repression appears with the neu-roses, foreclosure with the psychoses, and disavowal with the perversions.What Zizek adds is that, no matter which structure and logic of negationthis or that subject may have, ideology today is structured like a perversion,and consequently the typical form of negation within it is disavowal: Imyself do not believe but nevertheless I should act as if I do, so as not to offendsomeone who may believe; or,although its true that I do not believe, I will act as ifI do on behalf of someone else.

Thus, in a Pascalian style, the subject disavows belief while continuing toact as ifhe believes. For example, while modern subjects claim to no longer

believe in God, they still behave as if there is one (as if a master existedbehind the master discourse). Zizek relates this to the old joke about a manwho enters a hospital because he believes there is a big chicken who thinkshe is bird seed and wants to consume him; after being cured of this delusion,the man returns in terror to the hospital because, although he knows he is not

bird seed, he still is afraid the big chicken does not. Zizeks point here is thattoday ideology takes up this position towards disavowal of the Other. Even

though a person knows there is no Other, he still behaves as if there is anOther or he still believes unconsciously because he is under the sway ofhis identification. The difference with Pascal is that he subverts disbelief: ifI do not believe, I still act as if I do (and soon I will start believing) whilethe deluded man in Zizeks joke uses a different logic: namely, if I consciouslyprofess to disbelieve that there is an Other, it is because I unconsciously go on

believingsub rosa: thus, if I pretend not to believe, I can go believing just thesame. Once again, A and not-A are the same disbelieve so that I can

believe.It is Kafka who exposes the nature of the deadlock in works likeThe Trial

andMetamorphosis. For even as Kafkas texts illuminate the fusion of abjectionand ideal (and belief and disbelief) in the fantasm, he offers no way through itslogic (at least not in these texts). At the end ofThe Trial, for instance, Joseph

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K. lets himself be killed by the Other an act of paradoxical grace since he isalready an existential non-person erased from the world, transformed into ahomo sacer by the priest, the lawyers, the housekeeper, the painter, the

judges of the higher and lower Courts the comical dupes and fraudsrunning a bureaucratic nightmare where the official story does not work at

all. In Metamorphosis, too, Joseph K. finds no escape from the alienation hefeels towards his family, the renters, and his employer. He is consigned to

be a bug until his death, or as long as he goes on sacrificing himself and hishealth for the semblants of the Other (his family, employer, society); that is,so long as he behaves like a homo sacer or as a Hegelian slave who has forgottenhis cunning or who has had it stolen from him (Weiss 2005). And yet Zizekspoint is not that Kafkas stories reveal the malfunctioning of the Law, but thathis stories show how the perverse structure of the Law sustains a state of dead-lock where the Other is never more present then when it is absent and the Law(and Reason) is never more totalitarian and oppressive then when its rule is

most arbitrary (unlawful) (Z

izek 2006: 15859).This absence of change, or this dialectic deadlock, also can be connectedwith the pulsations of the unconscious and repetition. S1, S2, S3, S4 . . .: Eachsignifier is different but essentially repeats the same underlying structure.But, in another sense, structural deadlock doesnt fully capture what is occur-ring, as desire follows a moebius-like structure linking subject and Other,anxiety and enjoyment, drive and signifier, screen and obscene object ofdesire, etc. In this way, we are taken back to the matheme of the pervertwhere the perverse subject exists on the side of the object a ($ , .a), andso receives the surplus enjoyment from the other. To frame this as a Hegelianmaster and slave discourse, the pervert appropriates the enjoyment produced

by the slave. And yet the pervert envies the slave who is the source of enjoy-ment (jouissance) that the perverse subject wants to have (or be) just as theanti-Semite wants the unspeakable enjoyment that he either thinks the Jewpossesses or that he locates in the Jews being. This moebius passage

between signifiers of death, anxiety, enjoyment, and the Law, as we haveseen, allows ideology to keep the subject bound to the Others desire.

Change, the Paul/Jesus event, and the desire of the revolutionary

Zizek proposes a possible way out of this deadlock if we supplant the struc-

ture supporting the deadlock (that is integral to perversion and ideology)with a different structure that he finds in the works of Hegel, Lacan, and afew others. At the center of this Hegelian-Lacanian dialectic is an operationthat Hegel called the negation of the negation whereby the deadlock is over-come by the creation of a third term. This shift from deadlock (this or that butnothing else) to the Hegelian-Lacanian dialectic (that introduces a third term)also marks a shift from an ideologically-driven subject to a revolutionarysubject who acts as the agent of the third term. Where ideology imposes aforced choice on people, according to Zizeks reading of Lenin, a revolutionarysubject wishes to BREAK this seductive power of the symbolic efficiency and,

act AS IF THE CHOICE IS NOT FORCED. Zizeks Leninist message then is toopt out: but not in the fashion of either 1960s style hippies or the withdrawingfrom the world practiced by some aesthetics. Zizeks revolutionary opts out so



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as to be able to act like a Lacanian Leninist (Zizek 2011b: 78) and break withthe seductiveness of the symbolic efficiency by no longer being satisfied byproducing surplus jouissance for the Other. Rather, the revolutionary takesup a collective desire for social justice.

The desire of the revolutionary is also connected to a desire for an event.

The event, Zizek says, occurs when a signifying chain no longer repeats thesame signifiers in the same order as before. The event therefore is linked tothe structures of human language and human history since it is only intosuch a distorted animal that an Event can inscribe itself (Zizek and Milibank2009: 93). It names the coming into the world of a new signifier (S1).

A subject in the midst of an event lives in a state of emergency, living in akind of permanent end times such as occurred in 1789, 1848, 1871, 1917,May 68, and perhaps in the Occupy Wall Street movement when the oldreality is suspended for some who are in the grip of a concrete universaldesire for justice. Moments like these, Zizek insists, cannot be scientifically

planned and prepared for. This is why Z

izek insists that revolutionarychange is never finished; nor is it inevitable; attempts to create a revolutionarysociety by fiat or rational planning like Stalinism are especially ill-conceived.As Goya understood already during the Napoleonic wars, imposing revolu-tionary justice through force and reason breeds monsters; it is, strictly speak-ing, a perversion of the ideal. Real eruptions of revolutionary desire arentrationally planned; they happen in unexpected places and times, when thedeadlock is suspended and overturned without warning, or at least in aform no one quite anticipated (Zizek 2005: 259). But while every event is sur-prising and unlike what existed before it, each event is also a new answer tothe fundamental social antagonisms and self-contradictions upon which allsocieties rest. In this respect, it is similar to the moment of affirmation in ananalysis when there is an upsurge of unconscious desire (more like a vastsociological slip or passage to the act) than a perfectly planned action. Asubject captured by an event, then, is possessed by a violent passion to intro-duce difference, a gap in the order of being, in order to elevate some object aat the expense of an other (Zizek 2010: loc. 2486).

But the really startling news is that Zizek thinks that today people inWestern civilisation (whatever that is) are living out the consequences of anevent associated with the teaching of Paul/Jesus.1 For Zizek, Paul/Jesusmarks a world historical event in Western civilisation, such that after its

inception the owl of Minerva has flown. People are now living in the after-math, in the end times, drawing out the (Hegelian and Lacanian) consequenceof that event it is just that ideology makes difficult work of actualizing it(Zizek 2003: 137).

1 I refer to Paul/Jesus, rather than to Paul and Jesus, because we know little aboutthe historic Jesus that is not filtered through the writings of the Gospels and thevarious interpretations and collations of the Gospels by the Church Fathers and by

others. Zizek, in any case, is interested in proclaiming, against the canonical readingsof the Crucifixion and Resurrection, that Paul/Jesus announced a cut in the divine and,as a consequence, in messianic time.

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This idea that the crucifixion of Jesus signals a revolutionary ontologicalcut in the life of the Spirit mirrors other pre-Christian, Christian, and post-Christian readings of the event. In each, a millennial-emancipatory eventoccurs in history that legitimates and unites people in emancipatory social

justice movements. In the post-event era, these revolutionary movements,

who do the hard work of actually changing reality and realising the eventspotential, usually posit their own justifications by building narratives of theemancipatory history of the Spirit, which (in its Christian and post-Christianforms) often start with the Hebrew prophets Daniel, Jeremiah, and Ezekieland the books of Acts and Revelations, reappear in the Jesus teachings, andthen enter a post-event phase, marked by explosive revolutionary movements(such as peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages and Reformation, and theDigger revolt during Cromwells ill-fated Puritan-bourgeois Republic). Wealso have to consider the numerous materialist, atheist, theosophist, anddeistic emancipatory movements of the modern era whose connections to

Christian messianism were largely wiped out by the participants. For Z

izek,the Paul/Jesus event fulfills the Judaic messianic tradition by revealing howa community of believers (revolutionary activists), bound to each other by aHoly Spirit (a libidinal drive), can turn the sort of justice that the world nor-mally only realises in an abstract or negative way into a concrete universal.Further, Zizek says that the desire of the revolutionary finds ontologicalsupport in the Paul/Jesus claim that ultimate reality sustains an irresolvableself-contradiction. He writes that Paul/Jesus have proclaimed an ontologicalcut in the Other; the message of Paul/Jesus being that the era of the undividedOne is now over. Paul/Jesus, says Zizek, brings the feminine principle into theworld. This is not the feminine principle popularised by Otto Weininger, butthe one that Lacan referred to as the feminine not-All principle on the graphof sexuation. For Zizek, the crucifixion is the event that introduces the internalfeminine not-All cut in the One (Lacan 2002).

This means that, while comparing the Jewish messianic tradition withPaul/Jesus (something he often does), Zizek proposes in The Puppet and theDwarfthat the Jewish paradox that the messiah is always on his way butis not yet here has been replaced by a far more uncanny Paul/Jesus messia-nic paradox, namely that The Messiah is here, he has arrived, the final Eventhas already taken place, yet the gap remains (2003: 14041). In effect, Zizeksposition is that Paul/Jesus told the Jews the event has already occurred. The

Jews, however, should not be disappointed, because they were right butnot in the way they thought. The problem is a paradoxical gap in messianic(universal) time, but not the gap the Jews imagined. The real paradox is notthat the Messiah tarries, but that a part of the universal is not-All and thereforethat one part of the divine remains incomprehensible to itself.2 In this way,Paul/Jesus gives the messianic tradition back to the Jews in an invertedform, saying that if the Jews and a few others hope that a just world is possible,

2 This dialectical response of Paul/Jesus also reversed the proposition that the

messiah by himself will heal the wound in the world and make it whole (One)again with the proposition that the coming of the messiah revealed that existence isnot-All.



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then they have to create it themselves, and only to uncertain and incompleteends.

Elsewhere, Zizek asserts that the failure of the divine to only be One didappear in Jewish texts. For example, this failure appeared in the strangest

book of the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Job, wherein Job realised that God

(quauniversal justice) did not know why he was suffering (Zizek 2008: 17980). In other words, Job stumbled against the paradox that God is a mysteryto himself, and therefore that God, too, suffers from his own lack of self-com-pletion and self-understanding. Zizek locates other Hebrew stories that heclaims allude to the same doctrine of Gods impotence, arguing for instancethat the murder of Moses presented by Freud in Moses and Monotheismreally repeats and distorts a traumatic recollection of the humiliation ofthe Pharaoh by Moses, thereby pushing back the rock to reveal that thatthe crypt is empty (Freud 1964). For Zizek, although Judaism prefigures thenotion of a paradoxical impossible mystery, only Christianity moves the

enigma in God himself. . .

That is to say: it is precisely because God is anenigma also in and forhimself, because he has an unfathomable Otherness inhimself, that Christ had to emerge (Zizek and Milibank 2009: 8082). There-fore only Christianity reveals the Others impotence. It is in this spirit thatZizek claims that Christianity is the first (and only) religion radically toleave behind the split between subject and the Other (Zizek and Milibank2009: 80 82). And this, Zizek concludes, has transformed the subjects relationto knowledge (including self-knowledge and knowledge of the Other) andtruth in ways that, at least potentially, liberates the subject from its depen-dency on the Other. After the Paul/Jesus event the subject has to acceptthat there is no Other to believe for me, in my place (Zizek 2010: loc. 3190).

Hence, to still believe in an Other that is only One after the Paul/Jesusevent is to remain the agent of the ego and some Other, as it were, thatspeaks through you (Zizek 2005: 79). In essence, Zizek turns the Paulinemessage of the crucified Jesus codified by the early Church Fathers on itshead to reveal that the supreme triumph of the Cross in fact exposes a cutin the divine that forever makes God All and not-All. The good news pro-claimed by Paul/Jesus is a Lacanian message: that the (Name of the) Father,or the place where the master signifier God had appeared, is now empty.According to Zizek, The symbolic is above all a place, a place that was orig-inally empty and subsequently filled with the bric-a-brac of the symbolic

order. The crucial dimension of the Lacanian concept of the symbolic is thislogical priority, the precedence of the (empty) place with respect to theelements that fill it (2005: 45). However, things are not so simple. Lacan alsoemphasized that the other side of the signifier is the drive and therefore thatlack is only a phenomenological lack. On the other side of a signifier is apartial drive (jouissance), so that the signifier (be it S1 or S2) dialectically func-tions as the other side of enjoyment (jouissance and death). Not surprisingly,Zizeks description of Christian love or agape resembles the Lacanianformula that love is giving what you do not have, because there is no sexualrelation. That is to say: there will be no harmonious rectification in the end

of time, no possibility that universal justice will usher in a world of absoluteharmony and fairness. All that exists is the little justice gained by the fruitsof political struggle. There is no ideal Other that will be fulfilled in the

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course of time, merely a desire to respond to the unbearable self-contradictionsin society (and in the divine) by bringing more social justice into existence.And with this message the whole messianic tradition isaufhebon sustained,negated, and overturned.

Thus the Paul/Jesus event signals a historic blueprint for a new sort of

subject position: one that moves from the ideological subject to a communityof revolutionary subjects whose collective desire is for social justice based onthe notion of there being a cut in the divine. But Zizeks dialectical gymnastics

become problematic when he places both Judaism and Christianity onthe masculine side of the graph of sexuation. But this must be a mistake

because Zizek consistently says that Paul/Jesus modify the Concept so thatit is thereafter both All (masculine) and not-All (feminine). His reasoning isthat both Judaism and Christianity presuppose an exception, an ontologicalgap in being and time. But Judaism sustains the exception as a wound to behealed in messianic time, whereas Christianity argues that the messiah (the

universal value) is already here in the dimension of time, in the messagethat the exception or gap exists in God. In Paul/Jesus, God has to be impene-trable also to himself, he has to have a dark side, an otherness in himself, some-thing that is to himself more than himself (Zizek 2010). Thus, the secret of thesubstantial Other is also a secret for the Other it is thus reduced precisely tothe experience of a separation between the Other and its secret, objet petit a(Zizek and Milibank 2009: 38).

This may at first glance sound like the same tired line that Christianity hasaccomplished the Jewish messianic tradition: the New Testament supersededthe Hebrew Bible, etc., so why are there still Jews around? And it is certainlyvalid to wonder why Zizek goes to so much trouble to locate the desire of therevolutionary in Christian love. What, for example, does Zizek gain by linkingthe spirit that binds activists together in a Party to a concept like the HolySpirit? But, to be fair, what Zizek is proposing in an apres coup manner is a Hegelian negation of the negation which will turn the teaching of Paul/

Jesus of the theologians on its head until it reappears in the (secular) desireof the revolutionary, sustained by an anti-utopian dialectical materialistreading in which evil is an effect of the structure and the history of the signif-iers and the drive of the cut in the divine that introduces the idea a Not-Alldimension to the Other. Only atheists can truly believe, wrote Zizek, the onlytrue belief is belief without any support in the authority of some presupposed

figure of the Other (Zizek and Milibank 2009: 101).Before he can make such a claim about Christianity, however, Zizek has to

perform a number ofnegations of negations to the entirety of world religionsand philosophies. For Zizek, the universal (justice) can assume different mean-ings and values at different points in time. This line of reasoning, of course,had also supported Freuds assertion that meaning (of the signifier) differsat different periods in the life of a subject (Freud 2002). And by the samereasoning, Zizek proposes that the messianic-emancipatory teachings ofPaul/Jesus look different in the wake of Hegels and Lacans teachings fromthe way they did, for instance, during the Trinitarian debates and the Arian

heresy of the early Church. Therefore, even if Paul/Jesus were not Lacanian,Marxist, or Hegelian avant la lettre, the teachings of Paul/Jesus couldbecome Lacanian, Marxist, and Hegelianapres coup. What this means is not



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that Paul/Jesus were waiting for someone to come along and unearth thehidden pre-Lacanian treasure buried in their teachings. If in alienation, thesubject is confronted with a full and substantial Other, supposedly hiding inits depths some secret, its inaccessible treasure, Zizek writes, de- alien-ation has nothing to do with an attainment of this secret: far from managing

to penetrate right into the Others hidden kernel, the subject simply experi-ences this hidden treasure (algama, the object- cause of desire) as alreadymissing from the Other itself (2005: 40). Indeed, Zizek argues that there is nothere to be unearthed, because strictly speaking there is no hidden untoldstory in it (2003: 127). A signifier is only a subject for another signifier.Thus, you have universals that only acquire meaning for those who believein the universal and who strive to live their life by it. But today, the Paul/

Jesus event heralds a revolutionary state of emergency: the other side of thestate of emergency created by global consumer Capitalism and the new secur-ity-military complex. Today, a libidinal Holy Spirit calls for people with revo-

lutionary subjectivities to come together, to unplug from the community inthe same way that the early Christians left their families in order to enterinto a new community held together by a new desire (in the form of Christianlove) and the impossible Cause of realising universal justice in a concrete uni-versal form, that of a fighting collective grounded in the reference to anunconditional universalism (Zizek 2006: loc. 261517). Thus Zizek claimsthat Party activists today should do what Christianity did with regard tothe Roman Empire, that global multiculturalist polity. Namely, they shouldcreate a new collective held together not by a Master-Signifier, but by fidelityto a Cause no longer restrained by the logic of deadlock (Zizek 2011: 130;Zizek 2003: 3).

In sum, the revolutionary desires to serve the Cause totally: The onlything that really exists are these individuals and their activity (Zizek and Mili-

bank 2009: 60). Absolutely committed, the revolutionary is a subject living in astate of emergency, in the time of an event that opens her to new possibilities.She becomes the agent of the event, working and waiting for the return of theuniversal (the desire for justice) as a concrete, partial, historical moment ofrupture and change. This longing to actualise a concrete universal desire for

justice, in all its impossible, messianic, time-bound, and secular dimensions,calls Walter Benjamin to mind (someone surprisingly absent in Zizeksrather subject-heavy writings). Both Zizek and Benjamin are sensitive

readers of the seductions of modernity (or postmodernity), be they the seduc-tions of 20th century films or the 19th century arcade and palaces of commerce.Both Zizek and Benjamin see how the aestheticisation of life in modernity(or postmodernity) binds the subject to a fascinating gaze of the Other. And

both in their own way long for an event that will allow revolutionary subjectsto pass beyond the deadlock structures of modernity (or postmodernity). Ofthe two, Zizek is more optimistic about the possibility of escape.

What of the Occupy Wall Street protesters? What hope do they have ofrealising something extimate to the current structures of global Capitalism?Zizeks bet is that they can be part of an event if they do not betray the revolu-

tionary moment or their revolutionary desire. The possibility recalls other suchrevolutionaries, such as Leon Blum, who published his memoirs in the 1930sduring another state of emergency in France. New social programs were being

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introduced by the Popular Front, during a time of great social unrest when theThird Republic was deeply unsettled by economic crisis, a resurgent NaziGermany, and home grown French fascisms. Fascist and proto-fascist organis-ations, like the veterans groupCroix de Feuand thePPF,were clashing in thestreets of Paris with defenders of the Popular Front when Blum published

his memories. The memoirs included these recollections of the DreyfusAffair (18941906): Life for me, wrote Blum, and for my friends, no longercounted. All that mattered was Justice (Rose 2011: 92).This simple sentiment,I believe, sums up Zizeks entire conception of the event and the desire of therevolutionary, a sentiment he finds expressed in the teachings of Paul/Jesus,Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Lacan, and a few others: a spirit he tried to summonwhen he spoke to the Occupy Wall Street protesters in 2011.

References

Freud, S. 1964. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of SigmundFreud. Moses and Monotheism. vol. 24. Edited and translated by James Strachey.London: Hogarth Press, 1137.

Freud, S. 1991. Negation. In General Psychological Theory.Translated by Joan Riviere.New York: Touchstone Books, 21317.

Lacan, J. 1977. The Four Fundamental Principles of Psychoanalysis. Translated by AlanSheridan. London: Karnac Books.

Lacan, J. 1990. Television. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.Lacan, J. 1993.Seminar III.Translated by Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.Lacan, J. 2002. Seminar XX. Translated by Bruce Fink. Albany: State University of

New York Press.Lacan, J. (ed.). 2006.Ecrits.Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.Lacan, J. 2007.Seminar XVII.Translated by Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton &

Co.Rose, J. 2011. Proust Among the Nations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Roudinesco, E. 1990.Lacan & Co.Tanslated by Jeffrey Mehlman. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.Turkle, S. 1990. Dynasty.London Review of Books23 (6), 39.Weiss, P. 2005. The Aesthetics of Resistance. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel.

Durham: Duke University Press.Zizek, S. 2003. The Puppet and the Dwarf. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Zizek, S. 2005. Interrogating the Real. London: Continuum.Zizek, S. 2006. The Parallax View. London: The MIT Press.

Zizek, S. 2008. Violence. London: Profile Books.Zizek, S. 2010. Living in the End Times. London: Verso Press.Zizek, S. 2011. What Can Lenin Tell US About Freedom Today? Slavoj Zizek

Bibliography. Available online: http://www.lacan.com/freedom.htm(accessed 2011).Zizek, S., and Milibank, J. 2009. The Monstrosity of Christ. Edited and introduced by

Creston Davis. London: The MIT Press.

Along with PhDs in Clinical Psychology and Modern European History,Andrew Steintrained in Modern Psychoanalysis before beginning formationas a Lacanian Psychoanalyst. He has written on elder care and the theme of thesecond death, on Freud and Lacan, on Bataille and Surrealism, on Foucaultand History, and on Zizek.

http://www.lacan.com/freedom.htmhttp://www.lacan.com/freedom.htm

Documents

Event and Ideology