The Politics of Universal Truth

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The Politics of Universal Truth: An Introduction to Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian Dialectics

Geoff Boucher

Sketch Draft, Tuesday, April 11, 2023

In the arena of contemporary theory and postmodern culture – dominated by the postmarxian abandonment of

revolutionary politics and the envious resentment of Enlightenment that is characteristic of postmodernism – Slavoj

Žižek is a breath of fresh air. Žižek swims against the stream: a defender of Hegel against the legions of

deconstructionists for whom “totality” means “totalitarian”; a supporter of Lacan not as a postmodern theorist but as an

Enlightenment thinker; an advocate of Lenin in an age of universal Menshevism. In opposition to cynical resignation,

postmodern relativism and New Age obscurantism – the plague of pragmatists, sophists and mystics that represent the

intellectual apologists for the New World Order – Žižek calls for a revolutionary analysis of the links between corporate

globalisation and cultural subjectivity that might, according to the manifesto for the series he edits, “detonate a dynamic

freedom” from capital. If modernity opens the “abyss of freedom,” then postmodernism is precisely the symptom of a

retreat from that abyss. Žižek’s work is an effort to re-open the abyss of freedom and determine a different direction for

the social, by means of a politicised, Lacanian Enlightenment. What’s more, Žižek is immensely entertaining.

“Enjoy your Žižek!” is the imperative of the amusing introduction to Žižek’s work currently circulating on the

Internet. The article highlights Žižek’s eccentricities, role as theoretical provocateur and what Žižek would perhaps call

the “idiotic enjoyment” of reading Žižek. “Enjoy your Žižek!” probably sets the standard for the reduction of Žižek’s

politicisation of Lacanian psychoanalysis to an ensemble of discursive quirks – “central casting’s pick for the role of

Eastern European intellectual” (Boynton, 1998: 1). The potential trap that the article flirts with, of course, is that this is

Žižek as the object of an Orientalist fantasy. It is not a fantasy that he is averse to manipulating. Žižek plays on the

tropes of the fantasy space marked out by what has been called a “non-doxological, even exotic” interpretation of Hegel

(Gasché, 1994: 278 n.214). This produces a seemingly bizarre medley of popular culture, Lacanian psychoanalysis,

Hegelian philosophy and radical politics. Shifting effortlessly between recondite polemics with deconstruction and

interesting motifs from Alien, Žižek proclaims that his intent is to read – in the spirit of Lacan’s “Kant avec Sade” –

“the most sublime theoretical motifs of Jacques Lacan together with and through exemplary cases from contemporary

mass culture” (Žižek, 1991: vii). “Looking awry” at contemporary philosophy, Žižek’s texts are generously larded with

invective (who can possibly forget Žižek’s description of the work of his former postmarxist cothinkers, for instance, as

“a hysterical demand for a new master”?) and the ascription of psychopathologies to his highly respected discursive

interlocutors (Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida are, for instance, “perverts”). Working hard to position himself as the

Other of trans-Atlantic postmodern cultural studies, Žižek delights in the paradoxes engendered by the Lacanian

concept of the “Real” and the frisson of “politically incorrect” provocations to postmodern relativism. At once

disturbing (“the enemy today is not the fundamentalist but the cynic” (Žižek, 2001: x)) and eerily familiar (“the

unbearable is not difference …[but] the fact that there is no difference: there are no exotic, blood-thirsty “Balkanians”

in Sarajevo, just normal citizens like us” (Žižek, 1994: 2)), Žižek’s discourse is designed to appear as outlandish and

fascinating.

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In short, Žižek likes to play the fool. Now, the role of the fool, of course, is to gild unpleasant truths with wit.

Indeed, Lacan takes the effect of the witticism to be exemplary of what psychoanalysis refers to as the “subversion of

the subject in the dialectic of desire”. The joke plays on the split between the (conscious) subject of the statement and

the (unconscious) subject of the enunciation. We laugh at the joke’s subversion of the self-identity of the ego. If, then,

the joke is on us, what is Žižek’s position of enunciation, and what is the content of the Žižekian witz? The description

of Žižek’s discourse as outlandish and fascinating, yet eerily familiar, was intended precisely to evoke the Freudian

concept of the manifestations of the unconscious as uncanny. Žižek positions himself as analyst to contemporary culture

– including theory as its “highest expression” – and effects a “dialectical punctuation” of the philosophical discourse of

(post)modernity. Contemporary theory is concerned above all with the forms of “the coming community” – that is, with

the destiny of modernity and the possibility of a “democracy to come”. The contemporary motifs of intersubjectivity

regulated by unconstrained communication (Habermas), the gift as the beginning of every social relation and an infinite

hospitality towards the other (Derrida), the pragmatic acceptance of “postmodern liberal bourgeois democracy” as the

best of all possible worlds (Rorty), all aim at a utopian concept of universal peace. The unpleasant truth carried by

Žižek is stated with a characteristic combination of the categorical imperative laced with illegitimate enjoyment: “Enjoy

Your Symptom!”; “Love Thy Neighbour? No Thanks!”; “Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself!” The postmodern ethics of

infinite responsibility towards the other and the regulatory-cum-ethical framework of postmodern political correctness

are only, Žižek suggests, efforts to evade the traumatic encounter with the filthy enjoyment that the other is supposed to

possess. The postmodern “ethics of Otherness” is a polite displacement of an unconscious hatred for the other.

The completion of modernity’s destruction of tradition – the famous “reflexive modernity” and the “risk society”

- are supposed to make possible the democratisation of the institutions of modernity and the pacification of social

antagonisms in a postmodern social contract. Taking the appalling disintegration of former Yugoslavia as paradigmatic

of the “discontents of postmodernity,” Žižek suggests that the sublimity of a “democracy to come” and “openness

towards the Other” are forms of self-deception. Instead of ethnic nationalism being – as the sociologists of the risk

society propose - the product of a regression to tradition, it was, Žižek suggests, the result of the complete entry of

former Yugoslavia into modernity. Instead of the “openness to the Other” being an ethical response to ethnic cleansing

that might avert future catastrophes, this actually leads either to a suspension of ethics (“how can we possibly judge the

Other’s practices of mass executions, clitoridectomy, widow burning and torture?”), or to an assimilationism masked by

folkloric condescension (“we love the funny hats and falafels of the Other, but the moment they acquire guns they

suddenly – oh, mystery! – turn into Islamic fundamentalists, who have to be bombed by the cruise missiles of

democracy”). Both the postmodern ethics of Otherness and the sociology of reflexive modernity have no answers to

what Žižek calls the “momentous question of the momentous question of the disavowed ‘passionate attachments’ which

support the new reflexive freedom of the subject delivered from the constraints of Nature and/or Tradition (Žižek, 2000:

344). By “passionate attachments,” Žižek is referring to the dependency on subjection that sustains the freedom of the

subject. Žižek’s claim is that postmodern culture inverts the standard relation between public hierarchy and a private

freedom composed of secret transgressions: the typical subject is now the secret devotee of sado-masochistic sexual

practices, as the hidden obverse to the new social freedom. “The passionate attachment to some extreme form of

regulated domination and submission becomes the secret transgressive source of libidinal satisfaction, the obscene

supplement to the public sphere of freedom and equality. The rigidly codified Master/Slave relationship turns up as the

very form of ‘inherent transgression’ of subjects living in a society in which all forms of life are experienced as a

matter of the free choice of a lifestyle” (Žižek, 2000: 345). This may be taken in the widest possible sense, so that, for

instance in Australia, we are “all good multiculturalists,” but, “strangely enough,” vote en masse for one of the most

racist governments in Australian history – that is, our public pluralist tolerance is sustained by a private regimen of

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fanatical hatred towards this or that marginalized group, something that the conservatives knew well how to exploit in

the conditions of the secret ballot.

In the face of this perversion of moral life, the postmodern ethics of Otherness and the sociology of reflexive

modernity can suggest only to “love thy neighbour”. It is not the lameness of this injunction that disturbs Žižek, so

much as its suppressed premise: the full (Biblical) injunction is to “love your neighbour as you love yourself”. It is

precisely this narcissistic pseudo-dialectic of identification with the Same and rage against the Other that forms the core

of the discontents of modernity, according to Žižek. What psychoanalysis reveals is that the neighbour, precisely as my

Other, confronts me first and foremost as a stranger, as a traumatic, unwelcome reminder of the division that I bear

within myself. In my unconscious fantasy, I convert this internal impossibility of being whole into an external obstacle

to be managed or destroyed, as opportunity permits. Žižek’s claim is that this fantasy is normally constrained by

symbolic rituals (forms of ethical life) that supply a neutral medium for the resolution of differences – but the

perversion of moral existence consonant with postmodernism leads to the disintegration of this shared world of social

norms. The terrifying irruptions of communal violence, religious fundamentalism and Western militarism are evidence

that the second, “reflexive” modernity (for Žižek, equivalent to postmodernism) brings not just liberation, but also

frightening new forms of domination. For Žižek, therefore, only Lacan’s ethics of the drive and the concept of

psychoanalytically-informed politics as “traversal of the fantasy” yield a compelling response to the problems of

community and violence in the postmodern condition.

For Žižek, modernity’s leap into the “abyss of freedom” leads not to the emancipation of the autonomous subject

but to the hypocritical conformism of an “enlightened cynicism”. The new “end of history” of the post-Communist

global hegemony of American finance capital – the event-less reality of the New World Order – intensifies the

depoliticisation characteristic of modernity. This produces postmodern post-politics: Richard Rorty’s “postmodern

liberal bourgeois democracy” as the horizon for the multiplicity of all particular struggles for recognition. “Postmodern

post-politics,” Žižek argues:

no longer merely represses the political, trying to contain it and pacify the “returns of the repressed,” but

much more effectively “forecloses” it, so that the postmodern forms of ethnic violence, with their

“irrational” excessive character, are no longer simple “returns of the repressed” but, rather, represent a

case of the foreclosed (from the Symbolic) which, as we know from Lacan, returns in the Real (Žižek,

2000: 198).

The deadlock of the contemporary world, then, springs from the declining efficiency of symbolic authority and

the rise of post-political technocracy, exemplified by the “global Third Way” of Anthony Giddens and Tony Blair. This

generates a combination of depoliticised apathy and anti-political fundamentalism, which means that violence is

increasingly the matrix for the resolution of social conflicts. Žižek’s effort to create an emancipatory politics capable of

breaking through this pseudo-dialectic of cynicism and violence leads him to declare himself a “Pauline materialist,” or

ethical Marxist. As he explains, “the New World Order, as in medieval times, is global, but not universal, since it strives

for a new, global order with each part in its allocated place” (Žižek, 2000: 200). Therefore:

we are thus more and more locked into a claustrophobic space within which we can only oscillate

between the non-event of the smooth running of liberal-democratic capitalist global New World Order

and fundamentalist Events (the rise of local proto-fascisms, etc.) which temporarily disturb the calm

surface of the capitalist ocean – no wonder that, in [similar] circumstances, Heidegger [for instance]

mistook the pseudo-event of the Nazi revolution for the Event itself. Today, more than ever, one has to

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insist that the only way open to the emergence of an Event is that of breaking the vicious cycle of

globalisation-with-particularisation by (re)asserting the dimension of Universality against capitalist

globalisation. [Alain] Badiou draws an interesting parallel here between our time of American global

domination and the late Roman Empire, also a “multiculturalist” global state in which multiple ethnic

groups were thriving, united (not by capital, but) by the non-substantial link of the Roman legal order – so

that what we need today is the gesture that would undermine capitalist globalisation from the standpoint

of universal Truth, just as Pauline Christianity did to the global Roman Empire (Žižek, 2000: 211).

Yet Žižek’s most recent statements tend instead towards a Romantic refusal of the Law. For Žižek, the enigma of

freedom is the sudden suspension of the “principle of sufficient reason”. Freedom is the moment of a groundless,

irrational decision (Žižek, 1997: 30), paradoxically executed by a new Master (Žižek, 1997: 72). We need to “repeat

Lenin” and proceed to the reconstruction of society from the ground up. We have to embrace the “terrifying violence”

of a “New Beginning,” one wrought by the “asocial” drives and not by a universalisable desire (for instance, for

justice). It is high time to realize that so-called “diabolical evil” – opposition to the moral law on principle – is actually

the same as the formal structure of the ethical act. Therefore we should proceed immediately to the “suicidal passage al

acte,” the political Act that disturbs the Real and bypasses the symbolic texture of social norms and discursive

legitimacy. This leads to his advocacy of “the step beyond desire itself [to] adopt the position of the saint who is no

longer bothered by the Other’s desire as its decentred cause” (Žižek, 1997: 79). According to Žižek, desire is historical

and symbolised, generated within the ceaseless metonymy of the signifier. Drive, by contrast, is “acephalous,” non-

signified, “a kind of inert satisfaction” exemplified by “repulsive private rituals” – the saint is an undead partial object,

pure willing, what is in the subject beyond the subject … the death drive (Žižek, 1997: 80-81). The consequence of this

position is that “there is no intersubjectivity proper in drive”: desire is addressed to the symbolic Other, seeking active

recognition, “while drive addresses itself to the silence in the Other” (Žižek, 1997: 81). Drive is external to the

reference to the Other, to the Symbolic Law, to the social – it is asocial … and apolitical. The ethical act (which by a

short-circuit of the normal hiatus between ethics and politics is also the political Act) is a “supreme crime” against the

moral order, one that creates its own norms ex nihilo and retroactively justifies itself – history will absolve us, since, if

we win, we shall write the history … etc., etc. The next step – actually taken by Žižek, since he is nothing if not

consistent with his own positions – is to accept that (on these terms, at least), “repeating Lenin” involves re-writing

Stalinism, this time as high tragedy rather than as dark farce. While Žižek insists that this is not an advocacy of

amorality (but instead the restitution of ethical life), his paradigm of the ethical act in The Ticklish Subject is a love

affair between a teacher and a 14 year old student; while Žižek assures us that this is not a terrorist ethics, his most

recent example of an act that “touches the Real” was the destruction of the World Trade Centre buildings…

Žižek is caught in an antinomy. In the important essay, “The Unconscious Law: Towards an Ethics Beyond the

Good,” Žižek asks:

is not Lacan’s entire theoretical edifice torn between these two options: between the ethics of desire/Law, of

maintaining the gap, and the lethal/suicidal immersion in the Thing? (Žižek, 1997: 239).

Whatever the case with Lacan, this certainly describes Žižek’s dilemma perfectly. On the one hand:

Approached from [the] Kantian standpoint, Lacan’s “do not give way on your desire” (the ethical injunction

not to compromise on one’s desire) in no way condones the suicidal persistence in following one’s Thing; on

the contrary, it enjoins us to remain faithful to our desire as sustained by the Law of maintaining a minimal

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distance towards the Thing – one is faithful to one’s desire by maintaining the gap which sustains desire, the

gap on account of which the incestuous Thing forever eludes the subject’s grasp (Žižek, 1997: 239).

This is the Žižek who declares that the death drive (the Thing) represents the dimension of radical negativity that

cannot be reduced to an expression of alienated social conditions. Instead, “it defines the human condition as such: there

is no solution, no escape from it; the thing to do is not to overcome, to abolish it, but to learn to recognise it in its

terrifying dimension and then, on the basis of this fundamental recognition, to try to articulate a modus vivendi with it”

(Žižek, 1989: 5). Therefore:

it is not only that the aim is no longer to abolish this antagonism, but that the aspiration to abolish it is

precisely the source of totalitarian temptation; the greatest mass murders and holocausts have always been

perpetrated in the name of man as a harmonious being, of a New Man without antagonistic tension (Žižek,

1989: 5).

Indeed, this fantasy of the absolute crime that opens a New Beginning is sadistic. It is the fantasy that:

liberates Nature from its own laws, rendering it possible to create new forms of life ex nihilo, from the zero-

point. It is therein that Lacan locates the link between sublimation and the death-drive: sublimation equates to

creation ex nihilo, on the basis of the annihilation of the previous Tradition. It is not difficult to see how all

radical revolutionary projects, Khmer Rouge included, rely on this same fantasy of a radical annihilation of

Tradition and of the creation ex nihilo of a new (sublime) Man, delivered from the corruptions of previous

history (Žižek, 1991: 261).

But on the other hand, prohibition eroticises, and so there’s an irresistible fascination in the “lethal/suicidal

immersion in the Thing” – at least for Žižek. Hence, in the “unplugging” from the new world order by the “authentic

psychoanalytic and revolutionary political collectives” that Žižek now urges (Žižek, 2000: 160):

‘uncoupling’ does actually involve ‘symbolic death’ – one has to ‘die for the law’ (Saint Paul) that regulates

our tradition, our social substance. The term new creation is revealing here, signalling the gesture of

sublimation, of erasing the traces of one’s past (‘everything old has passed away’) and beginning afresh from

the zero-point: consequently there is also a terrifying violence at work in this ‘uncoupling,’ that of the death

drive, of the radical ‘wiping the slate clean’ as the condition of the New Beginning (Žižek, 2000: 127).

This sort of “Year Zero”-style rhetoric may be meant as a provocation to the relativists, as a gesture of defiance towards

the contemporary prohibition on thinking about revolution. (“You say that revolution always leads to the gulag, that I’m

a secret Stalinist? Very well then – I openly affirm myself a Stalinist. Now what actual arguments do you have against

my ‘Stalinism,’ aside from the consensus on the undesirability of social transformation, ie., the current doxa?”)

Nonetheless, I suggest that this combination of Leninist voluntarism and “irrational” Pauline materialism does not resist

the postmodern couplet of cynical distance and irrational fundamentalism, but repeats its terms.

Let me make myself perfectly plain on this point. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the advocacy of

revolution, including the resort to violence in order to defend the revolution from reaction. To advocate violence for its

own sake, however, to claim that the revolution is made not in the interests of universal justice, but rather so as to “wipe

the slate clean” … this is categorically not Marxism, but a cynical perversion of socialism lifted from the pages of Karl

Popper or Hannah Arendt, one that accepts the terms of debate set forth by the enemies and slanderers of socialism, for

whom the alternatives are “enthusiastic resignation to capitalism” (“postmarxism”) or “the brutal machine of the

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totalitarian state, where fascism and socialism meet at the extremes of opposition to liberal democracy”

(“totalitarianism”). (“Very well then,” cries Žižek in despair, “let us have totalitarian violence rather than this

ubiquitous nothing.”) Nothing compels the Left – except for the moral cowardice, the willingness to give way on our

revolutionary desire, which is the staple of today’s postmarxian Menshevism – to accept this fatuous opposition

between reformism and totalitarianism. Nothing could be more alien to Marx’s thought (or Lenin’s) than this advocacy

of a New Beginning starting from the zero-point. What is dialectics – which the adversaries of the dialectic have long

stigmatized for its fantasy of progress, for what they claim is its inability to conceptualise that something might be lost

in the historical process and not lifted up to a higher form of development – except a teaching on the idiocy of any

moralizing opposition to the bourgeois order as corrupt and degenerate? Adam Smith and Milton Friedman together

cannot compete with the praise lavished upon capitalism as a socially and morally progressive system by The

Communist Manifesto. It is not that capitalism is an economically progressive society whose moral corruption must be

eliminated – on the contrary, capitalism is a morally superior system whose economic contradictions retard humanity’s

social advance. The proletariat – as Lenin and Trotsky tirelessly repeated – has no culture of its own, and must develop

a higher culture by building upon bourgeois norms.

Žižek’s concepts of the ethical decision and the political act combine political voluntarism with ethical

decisionism. In political voluntarism, sheer will substitutes for the “ceaseless weaving of the spirit,” the slow, nearly

invisible accumulation of objective contradictions and subjective convictions. Instead of the task of “patiently

explaining,” the indefatigable hammering away of revolutionary propaganda, we have the guerilla fantasy of the

“propaganda of the deed,” the exemplary (terrorist) act that “galvanizes” the population by awakening their “latent”

opposition to the social order. In ethical decisionism, a sovereign subject that precedes all socialization determines,

thanks to the unity of the sovereign will, a fresh course, without reference to established norms or protocols of

legitimacy. Advocates of ethical decisionism (the legions of postmarxian admirers of the semi-nazi legal theorist, Carl

Schmidt, for instance) tend to present the moment of decision as a “leap into madness,” a “Pascalian wager,” an ex

nihilo determination of the exception that creates the rule. This mistakes the absence of any Divine Guarantee for moral

conduct for an absence of any criteria for moral judgement whatsoever, the impossibility of knowing all the results of

an action for the impossibility of judging which course seems best under the circumstances. In the Žižekian ethico-

political Act, the death drive – as a pure undivided will prior to socialization, the primordial Will that wills nothing (that

is absolute negativity) – “inhabits” the “saint,” who becomes the object-like instrument for the “ethical,” “asocial”

drive. This combines ethical decisionism and political voluntarism into a single figure. It is uncannily close to the

psychoanalytic description of perversion: the pervert believes that they have to become the instrument for the

enjoyment of the Other (for instance, the Stalinist, who believes that their crimes are legitimate because they are the

instrument of the historical process). Žižek believes that the saint has to become the instrument, not of the Other (of the

social norms), but of the death drive itself. The operative difference, I suggest, will be negligible.

Strange as it may seem, Žižek’s rehabilitation of Stalin (Žižek insists that we cannot have the revolution without

the revolutionaries, that is, that we cannot have the insurrectionary moment without the subsequent period of

consolidation in which the revolution “eats its own children”: no Guevarra without Castro; no Lenin without Stalin) is a

symptom of his resistance to revolutionary politics. For Žižek, Trotsky (and presumably Guevarra also) remains a

“beautiful soul,” a whinger who cannot stand to see the consequences of the act, and instead maintains the hysterical

stance of demanding the impossible, so as to protect their Simon-pure desire from “corruption” by its enactment. That is

to say, Trotsky’s insistence that the social revolution not become mired in “the familiar filth of capitalism” (for

instance, Stalin’s rehabilitation of nationalism and traditional gender roles), strikes Žižek as hysteria, in opposition to

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Stalin’s “gesture of the leader”. Two things are interesting about this. The first is that, in psychoanalysis, the “discourse

of the master” (the foundation of a new order through a passage to the act - Lenin’s revolutionary gesture, for instance)

is succeeded by the “discourse of the university,” a bureaucratic discourse of legitimation that tries to erase the traces of

contingency in the foundation of the new order, to re-write history as an evolutionary process issuing “inevitably” in the

current social order. Stalin appears in this light as the bureaucratic leader intent upon the eradication of all traces of the

past so as to create a harmonious New Order. But this is itself succeeded by the “discourse of the hysteric,” a discourse

that revives the traces of the traumatic origins of the current order, that prods the symbolic texture of the present,

searching for the hidden evidence of its imperfection that show how this order might have been otherwise (and might be

otherwise once more). And finally, the hysteric is succeeded by the “discourse of the analyst,” a discourse of radical

emptying of the “passionate attachments” to the current order, an insistence on “once more an effort” – an insistence

that we not give way on our desire and settle for conformity to the new order or the compensations of armchair

criticism, but proceed once more to the act. Now, whether Trotsky should be considered, in this light, a hysteric or an

analyst, is really irrelevant. What is interesting is Žižek’s suspension of this dialectic at the “discourse of the

university,” and the related petrifaction of the process into a series of water-tight, necessary and inevitable stages. The

insistence of the early Žižek’s work, on the radical contingency of the historical process, seems to me a useful

corrective to this atrophy of the revolutionary instinct. There is no Lenin without Stalin, and no Trotsky without Stalin

either – certainly. But nothing – absolutely nothing – predetermines the victory of Stalin.

I dispute that a revolutionary desire includes acceptance of the figure of the bureaucratic leader as the

“inevitable” result of the revolutionary passage to the act. For my money, Trotsky is an analyst: “the revolution in

permanence” means, “do not give way on your desire”. Nothing rests upon the precise choice of historical figures here –

I might have chosen Che Guevarra, for instance – since this is not about wrangling over the interpretation of historical

details, but about symbolic paradigms (“archetypes”) upon which to develop ethical judgements. To continue: in this

interpretation, the hysterics are figures like Lukács, Bukharin and Joffe, figures whose criticisms of the Stalin régime

concealed a hidden “passionate attachment” to their subjection and whose actions (recantation, self-destruction)

betrayed their inability to break with the new order. Against the desperate poverty of Žižek’s example of Mary Kay’s

romance with a teenager as the paradigm of an ethical act “beyond the good” (Žižek, 2000: 385-388), I claim that Leon

Trotsky’s exile from Russia and formation of the Fourth International is a real ethical act. Trotsky’s exile meant the end

of any effective political opposition in the Soviet Union, while the formation of the Fourth International ended the

intervention of the Left Opposition within the Third International and made the “Trotskyites” into international pariahs.

Recall that the accommodation to Stalinism made by figures like Brecht and Lukács was justified on the grounds that

membership of the Third International (including repudiation of “Trotskyite deviations”) was the essential condition for

any effective fight against fascism, and you have some sense of the subjective stakes involved. Even for sympathetic

biographers of Trotsky, such as Isaac Deutscher, the formation of the Fourth International was a “suicidal” act of

“madness” that ruined any chance of winning over the tends of thousands of communists in the international movement.

By forming an alternative International (and declaring the Soviet Union “betrayed” and the mass communist movement

“dead for the revolution”), Trotsky committed symbolic suicide – that is, he destroyed what it was in the social order

that supported his identity (the leader of the October Revolution, second only to Lenin), and became an “excremental

remainder,” a piece of waste without a symbolic place (literally – no country would accept Trotsky’s documents or

receive him into exile). Trotsky’s assassination simply sealed what was already, at the level of the symbolic order, the

truth.

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According to Žižek’s cothinker, Alenka Zupančič, in the ethics of psychoanalysis, the ethical act involves a

moment of radical “subjective destitution,” in which the subject proceeds to the act through an “abyssal realisation of

desire” (Zupancic, 2000: 249-259). Psychoanalysis contrasts the “ethics of the master” – the traditional ethics of pre-

modern societies, expressed by the dictum “better death than dishonour” and typified by Antigone – with the “ethics of

the Real,” the modern ethics of the drive, expressed by the dictum “liberty or death”. “Better death than dishonour” is

an either/or choice, a forced choice: only by choosing death does the master retain honour (hence pre-modern heroes are

tragic heroes). “Liberty or death” is a neither/nor choice: only by choosing death does the modern (anti-)hero

demonstrate their lack of attachment to any worldly (“pathological”) goods – thereby losing liberty in the moment of its

attainment (hence modern heroes are tragic anti-heroes).

The master’s realization of desire is accomplished in three steps:

In life, there is one thing that one cannot surrender (the Cause - Honour);

For this Thing, one is ready to sacrifice everything (even life);

One realizes the Cause by sacrificing, in a single gesture, the all of which one is ready to sacrifice

(“better death than dishonour”).

This “all” is constituted with reference to an exception (the Cause). By contrast, the modern “abyssal realisation

of desire,” the “ethics of the Real,” has the following structure:

In life, there is one thing that one cannot surrender (the Cause - Liberty)

For this Thing, one is ready to sacrifice everything (but this everything tolerates no exceptions)

The only way to realize the Cause is to sacrifice it as an exception (sacrifice its exceptional character,

include it in the everything that one is ready and willing to sacrifice: “liberty or death”).

Consider, then, the difference between the Stalinist “ethics of the master” and the Trotskyist “ethics of the Real”.

For Stalin:

In life, there is one thing that one cannot surrender (the Revolution and the Comintern);

For this Thing, one is ready to sacrifice everything (even the lives of revolutionaries);

One realizes the Cause by sacrificing, in a single gesture, the all of which one is ready to sacrifice

(“better mass destruction than the destruction of the Revolution”).

By contrast, for Trotsky:

In life, there is one thing that one cannot surrender (the Revolution and the Comintern)

For this Thing, one is ready to sacrifice everything (but this everything tolerates no exceptions)

The only way to realize the Cause is to sacrifice it as an exception (to denounce the Revolution as

betrayed and to depart the Comintern as dead for revolution).

In this light, for all the talk about “the saint” and the “ethics of the drive,” is not Žižek suspended, fascinated at the

gesture of the master, unable to consummate the abyssal realization of desire, unwilling to accept the full cost of

“tarrying with the negative”?

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The answer, then, to Žižek’s question (“is not Lacan’s entire theoretical edifice torn between these two options:

between the ethics of desire/Law, of maintaining the gap, and the lethal/suicidal immersion in the Thing?”), is “No”.

This is a false statement of the alternatives, an ethical mirror image of the political “dilemma” of postmodern post-

politics (either postmarxian acceptance of the impossibility/undesirability of revolution, or totalitarian madness and the

horrors of a fresh gulag). Zupančič’s statement of the ethics of the Real demonstrates that “not giving way on one’s

desire” (the ethical maxim of psychoanalysis) is compatible with the modern moral imperative, “do your duty!” Modern

ethics involves neither the direct immersion in the death drive (which leads to Žižek’s ethical decisionism and political

voluntarism), nor the avoidance of the drive in a return to the ethics of the master. Instead of Žižek’s “suicidal” politico-

ethical Act that aims directly for the Real, the ethical act involves symbolic suicide – a political intervention guided by

an ethical imperative that brooks no exceptions and is prepared to go all the way in its impossible demand, “the

revolution in permanence”. For, in the final analysis, is not symbolic suicide infinitely more anxiety provoking than real

suicide, than one’s physical destruction (and the destruction of others)? There is a strange comfort in knowing that you

are the instrument of the historical process. Who wants to end up as an excremental remainder on a “planet without a

visa,” having sacrificed everything and yet still having no absolute guarantee that you have done the right thing? By

contrast with the ethics of the drive, Žižek’s “psychotic” politico-ethical Act that aims directly for the Real can only

terminate in a terrorist ethics, in an ethics that substitutes violence in the Real for the dialectics of the spirit (that is, for

interventions in the symbolic fields of culture and politics), and in a politics that desperately attempts to “galvanise” the

historical process through the “propaganda of the deed,” through exemplary acts of violence or extraordinary acts of

transgression. This is what Zupančič calls the “ethics of fantasy” (“the ethics of desire is the ethics of fantasy (or what

we have also called the ethics of the master)” (Zupancic, 2000: 254)), and it is, I suggest, the ethics of the antagonist,

the ethics of nationalism, fundamentalism and fascism. The Left does not need such an ethics.

A politics of Universal Truth? Yes, absolutely! Up to, and including, “repeating Lenin”. But repetition entails a

minimum of difference: our repetition of Lenin will not be a slavish imitation of the past (up to and including a

rehabilitation of Stalin!), but a creative adaptation. We no more need to imitate Lenin than we need to rush out and join

one of the splinters of the Fourth International (and imitate Trotsky). Nor should we imagine that an ethics (a concept of

ethical life, an ethics of the Real) can ground a politics in the traditional sense of supplying an Absolute Guarantee of

the ethical validity of every political act. There are no “short-circuits” between ethics and politics, nor any

“deductions,” in the grand metaphysical style of Hegel, of the political consequences of the dialectical unfolding of

ethical life. Instead, there is a relation of singular articulation, of invention, between ethics and politics. We act without

final guarantees – which is to say, we accept an infinite responsibility for the unforeseeable consequences of our acts –

but not without criteria (such as universality and the treatment of persons as ends, not means). We accept that there are

many politics minimally compatible with modern ethics, and refuse to substitute moral judgement for the rational

cognition of alternative claims (“moralism”). The leftwing claim is not that socialism is the only ethical politics. It is

that it is the best.

So – is Žižek a Romantic ruin, a symptom of the times (of the break with identity politics, during the 1990s, of a

section of the Left, as its confidence began to revive after an historical defeat), with no theoretical value? Categorically

not. I claim that Žižek provides a concept of ethical life that includes social antagonism – that is, a concept of ethical

life that, instead of aiming for a harmonious society staffed by the New Man, recognises the permanence of politics and

articulates a modus vivendi with social antagonism. By reading “Žižek against Žižek,” by shifting the emphasis and

refusing some of the rhetorical escalation that often traps Žižek into accepting alien terms of debate, I believe that it is

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possible to avoid Žižek’s dilemma and articulate a leftwing ethics that might support a contemporary radical politics.

this “reconstruction” is, however, the topic of a subsequent contribution.

Boynton, Robert (1998). “Enjoy Your Žižek!: An Excitable Slovenian Philosopher Examines The Obscene

Practices Of Everyday Life - Including His Own.” Lingua Franca 8(7).

Gasché, Rodolphe (1994). Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University

Press.

Žižek, Slavoj (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York, Verso.

Žižek, Slavoj (1991). For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London and New

York, Verso.

Žižek, Slavoj (1991). Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge,

MA and London, MIT Press.

Žižek, Slavoj (1994). The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality. London and New

York, Verso.

Žižek, Slavoj (1997). The Abyss of Freedom. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press.

Žižek, Slavoj (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. London and New York, Verso.

Žižek, Slavoj (2000). The Fragile Absolute - Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London and

New York, Verso.

Žižek, Slavoj (2000). The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London and New York,

Verso.

Žižek, Slavoj (2001). Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. London and New York,

Routledge.

Zupancic, Alenka (2000). Ethics of the Real. London and New York, Verso.

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Documents

The Politics of Universal Truth