Slavoj Žižek and the Real Subject of Politics

Slavoj ?i?ek's refusal to sketch an alternative to the global liberal-capitalist order, combined with his claim that there is an urgent need for a repolitization of, most of all, the economy, raises the question of the possibility of radical political thought and action. Considering fundamentalisms and politically correct multiculturalism not as oppositional, but as correlative to the “depolitization” of post-modern societies, ?i?ek invokes the emancipatory legacy of Europe in an attempt to reinvent Marxism in a way similar to what Lenin, thrown into an open situation, had to do in 1917 between the revolutions. A single question confronts political philosophy today: is liberal-capitalist democracy the ultimate horizon of our political practice, or is it possible to open up the space for another political articulation? The key to a repolitization is to identify with the “symptom” of the existing global order's false claim to Universality, with the excluded “part of no part” who politicizes it's predicament by claiming to stand for the real universal. In order not to discard political struggle as “unrealistic”, today's cynical “realist” consensus must be broken. Taking things as they “really are” has become the dominant ideological mode that keeps people from thinking about alternatives. The remedy is to show that things never are “really” as they are.

     

The Suspended Aesthetic: Slavoj Žižek on Eastern European Film

Slavoj iek's writings on Krzysztof Kies´lowski and Andrej Tarkovskij represent direct challenges to the Central and Eastern European tradition of spiritual art and to dominant aesthetic concepts as such. He refuses to separate the solemn films of Kies´lowski and Tarkovskij from popular culture and stresses their import as ethical statements by their directors. Despite this ethical emphasis, iek makes an important contribution to philosophical aesthetics. He implicitly defines art as a suspension of reality which reveals time in its fragility and potentiality. Defining iek's aesthetics in terms of suspension helps to explain his partiality for Kies´lowski and Tarkovskij and bears comparison to the Russian tradition of philosophical aesthetics, in particular Aleksej Losev and Alexander Bakshy.     

Act Without Denial: Slavoj Žižek on Totalitarianism,Revolution and Political Act

iek's thinking departs from the Lacanian claim that we live in a symbolic order, not a real world, and that the Real is what we desire, but can never know or grasp. There is a fundamental virtuality of reality that points to the lie in every truth-claim, and there are two ways of dealing with this:repression and denial. An ideology, a system or a regime becomes totalitarian when it denies the virtual character of both its world and its subject (democracy represses truth's basic lie, which makes it possible for the repressed to return). iek's analysis of totalitarianism, particularly Stalinism, shows how a totalitarian system denies its subject, which, being desire for the Real, cannot act in the name of truth but must acknowledge the contingency of its action (a political act can fail to reach its goal), whereas an established system can no longer fail and has to deny its flaws. Any political act disrupts the (evolution of) the symbolic order and thus is revolutionary, creating an event ex nihilo. An act is a jump into the inconsistency of the symbolic order, i.e. into das Ding, a jump both into and out of the nihil in which our world is grounded. Politics therefore can never be Realpolitik. The realization that politics is a symbolic phenomenon, supported not by the real, but by signifiers, is the Lacanian foundation of iek's political theory.     

Die Wüste Des Realen: Slavoj Žižek Und Der Deutsche Idealismus

Part of Slavoj iek's philosophical background is located in German idealism. In this article, his relation to German idealism is critically assessed, and the key to this assessment is found in iek's favorite medium: film. In film, reality can only appear as a new image, replacing an old reality as fictitious, the real itself, however, remains unreachable by thought. At this point, a parallel with German idealism appears: it was Kant who turned reality into a desert, and Hegel and Schelling who tried to retrieve it. Siding with Adorno and Heidegger, iek reaches a negative conclusion that does justice to neither German idealism nor indeed Schelling. His use of German idealism is one-sided and selective, regardless of the fact that it allows him to formulate an adequate critique of Western society. Perceiving a parallel between iek's conception of cinema and Kantian imagination [Einbildungskraft], the final conclusion is that he approaches German idealism not in terms of its conceptual system-character, but in terms of sensual multiplicity, not seeking unity in it, but precisely fragmentation.     

The Mystical and the Material: Slavoj Žižek and the French Reception of Mysticism

This paper will argue that the work of Slavoj ?i?ek can be fruitfully understood as a response to mystical theology as it has been received in two strands of 20th century French thought—psychoanalysis and phenomenology—and that ?i?ek's work in turn offers intriguing possibilities for the re-figuring of mystical theology by feminist philosophy of religion. Twentieth century French psychoanalysis is dominated by the work of Jacques Lacan and by his students Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. All three of these figures engage in significant ways with mystical theology—particularly with the works and figures of female mystics—as a crucial resource for theorising gender and subjectivity. A second strand of the 20th century French reception of mystical theology is the phenomenological tradition, specifically the work of Jacques Derrida. This paper will argue that, drawing on and challenging both of these elements of recent French engagement with mystical theology, ?i?ek's work offers a materialist ontology which seeks to locate transcendence within immanence and materiality, offering to feminist philosophy of religion the resources for re-thinking the relationship of the mystical to the material.     

The real of the rabble: Žižek and the historical truth of the Hegelo-Lacanian dialectic

In this essay I attempt to answer a fundamental question about ?i?ek’s heterodox reading of Hegel’s dialectic: What project sustains this reading in the first place? That is, what is at stake for ?i?ek himself? The purpose of this essay is to develop in this fashion a reading of ?i?ek (since he does not programmatically answer this question), although not one that is necessarily meant to compete against other alternatives. My argument, then, is that ?i?ek’s ontological and hermeneutical project is ultimately political, that when ?i?ek says we need Hegel “now more than ever,” he has a political situation in mind. By finding an element of Hegel’s thought, the political subjectivity of the “rabble,” that resists the traditional picture of dialectical system (especially the critical picture of the post-structuralists), ?i?ek can overturn the distinction between Hegelian method and system by suggesting that there’s no comprehensible distinction at all. And by politicizing Hegel and drawing out the seeds of Lacanian thought that were nonetheless incomplete until Lacan, ?i?ek’s historiographical project takes on the character of ideological critique. As such, Hegel and Lacan reach us anew, as theoretical players in an anti-postmodern political gambit.     

Laughing at finitude: Slavoj Žižek reads <Emphasis Type="Italic">Being and Time</Emphasis>

“Laughing at Finitude” interprets Slavoj Žižek’s intellectual project as responding to a challenge left by Being and Time. Setting out from discussions of Heidegger’s book in The Parallax View and The Ticklish Subject, the essay exfoliates Žižek’s response to the Heideggerian version of a “philosophy of finitude”—both finding the central insight of Žižek’s work in Heidegger’s radical proposal for “anticipatory resoluteness” and developing Žižek’s critique of Being and Time as indicating Heidegger’s retreat from that proposal within the very book where it appears. Žižek reads Being and Time’s existential thematic as proposing a radical subjectivism and, unlike other Heidegger-critics, praises this aspect of the project. Indeed, Žižek claims that the weakness of Being and Time as a whole is that it is insufficiently radical in its subjectivism. For him, Heidegger is a thinker of ambiguous value, one who develops a program from whose own demands he hides. “Laughing at Finitude” both articulates this accusation of self-deception in Heidegger and examines the imperatives necessary to avoid it, for a dialectical shift from the “tragic” voice in existential treatments of finitude and for a revolutionary collectivist re-conception of social “Mitsein.” It suggests, in the process, Žižek’s own intellectual itinerary.

Review of Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank’s, <Emphasis Type="BoldItalic">The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?</Emphasis> Edited by Creston Davis

The Monstrosity of Christ provides an exchange between the Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek and the British theologian John Milbank. Both authors argue that Christianity is the religion of ‘absolute truth,’ but provide very different accounts of this. Milbank argues that Christianity is true insofar as only the incarnation of Christ mediates the paradoxical metaphysical participation of the finite within the infinite. Žižek argues that the crucifixion of Christ constitutes the death of God, demonstrating that there is no providential or transcendent reality supervening on human history. This realization constitutes the universal truth of Christianity.