Search Results

This chapter examines Slavoj Žižek's development from post-Marxism to revolution. Žižek's evolution from the primacy of the symbolic to an unintended repetition of the movement that culminated in Marxist desymbolization was accompanied by verbal fireworks and tenuous interpretations, for example of Ernesto Laclau or Jacues Lacan. He attempted to combine reductionism and voluntarism into what he calls a “positive vision” that he identifies now with “communism,” now with “Leninism,” and then again with the terrorist actions taken by self-defined leftist groups in Peru or Vietnam. In so doing, Žižek is trying to “fill in the hole,” to overcome the indeterminacy, and to secularize the transcendence of the political to the social. In addition to discussing the dramatic shift in his own politics, this chapter considers Žižek's views about universality and his critique of Jacques Derrida's religion without religion.

Both ancient and contemporary discussions about the nature of desire and ontology (and the relationship between the two) have been driven by economic concerns. Both the relationship between God and the world and that between the individual and the world have been conceived as economic problems, as have the questions of freedom, evil, creation, and teleology. The centrality of the economic question to the discussion of ontology and desire is particularly apparent in the debates that have taken place around the nature of “the gift.” This chapter explores the debates between Jacques Derrida and Jean Luc Marion over the nature of the gift and examines Slavoj Žižek’s relationship to these debates. It goes on to explore the theme of violence, which—as I argue—is a key term in Žižek’s work for the economic problem of the gift, and offers a reading of Žižek’s understanding of violence in relation to Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence.

This chapter addresses key questions about Žižek’s divinely violent ontology of failure: first, how to specify the difference between “good” aneconomic violence and “bad” economic violence and, second, a broader question about how to address the limitations of Žižek’s analysis when it comes to accounting for the complex intersections of gender, class, and white supremacy in the systems and structures whose ordinary violence Žižek wants to interrupt. First, I argue that the divine violence Žižek advocates might be usefully understood in relation to the psychoanalytic notion of trauma. Second, I explore the specifically gendered nature of Žižek’s violent rhetoric via Grace Jantzen, Julia Kristeva, and Marcella Althaus-Reid. Finally, I draw on the work of Lee Edelman, Frank Wilderson, and Linn Tonstad to address some of the key weaknesses of Žižek’s analysis.

This chapter examines Žižek’s account of the relation between desire and the death drive and gives an account of the ways in which this central Žižekian notion is ontologized and how this model inherits and transforms certain key theological terms, offering resources not for escaping but for confronting the antagonisms of Christian theology. It traces the key notion of the death drive through Freud, Lacan, and Žižek, examining how Žižek takes up this psychoanalytic notion to give an account of the social order. In contrast to Dionysius’s Neoplatonic account of eros and ontology, Žižek’s materialist ontology of failure is one in which both desire and being are irreducibly particular and contingent. It is precisely out of the cracks in being that unity is impossible, out of the failure of every identity that newness is generated. Division is a good in itself, not merely something to be undone in order to return to union with God; and the desire for union is itself a false and unrealizable dream.

This chapter examines some productions in the late twentieth century (Fugard's The Island, Gambaro's Antígona Furiosa, and Glowacki's Antigone in New York) that have employed Antigone as a kind of homo sacer, and then applies this analogy in a more detailed discussion of Seamus Heaney's version of The Burial at Thebes at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004. Heaney's version was inspired by President Bush's ‘war on terror’ and the detention and ‘rendition’ of suspected terrorists in prisons beyond legal redress. The language deployed in the play echoed statements made by President Bush and evoked his administration's unwarranted invasion of Iraq and torture of prisoners. By comparing recent versions of Antigone that represent her as homo sacer, subjected to a liminal state between life and death, the chapter demonstrates how the ‘state of exception’ theorized by Georgio Agamben has become normalized in the twenty‐first century. It draws parallels between the ‘exceptional’ actions of governments such as the Bush administration and the Argentinian dictatorship, making up the laws as they go along, removing people from their homes and environment, and incarcerating or disposing of them outside the polis, outside the reach of their friends and families. Moreover, it shows that Western governments are taking advantage of the ‘war on terror’ to develop new methods of social control (such as increased security measures by the US Department of Homeland Security and other agencies, including more intensive customs inspections, omnipresent CCTV cameras, heightened threat alerts, etc.) that deprive citizens of their civil rights. By applying Agamben's notions of ‘homo sacer’ and ‘state of exception’ to these adaptations, as well as Slavoj Žižek's and Judith Butler's comments on recent political developments, it demonstrates the claim that Antigone makes on behalf of the disenfranchised of the world.

This chapter deals with one of the more controversial contributors to recent debates in film studies: Slavoj Žižek. His reconceptualization of Lacanain psychoanalytic theory around the category of the real has steered psychoanalytic film theory in new and interesting directions. He declares that they are shaped by the ideals people posit in the real, but in so far as that is the case, their experiences of reality are always shaped by ideological fantasy. This, ultimately, is Žižek's most fundamental breakthrough: that ideological fantasy is a good thing, not something that should be eschewed or dispensed with. In other words, ideological fantasies are not illusions. Rather, it is only by way of ideological fantasy that people can come to experience reality itself in the first place. Žižek's conclusion is that ideological fantasy effectively makes the world in which people live: ideological fantasy is at the foundation of what we call ‘reality’.

This chapter examines the movement from the symbolic to a desymbolization that opens the door to political voluntarism by focusing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Theory, where they sought to restore the theoretical dignity of Marxism by articulating a “post-Marxism without apologies.” Laclau and Mouffe's post-Marxism belongs to the intellectual history of France after 1968. In Hegemony and Socialist Theory, they reformulate proletarian dialectics into a theory that explicitly acknowledges the power of the symbolic as well as its debt to Claude Lefort's theory of democracy. Laclau's subsequent explorations and criticisms of deconstructionist philosophy and of Lacanian psychoanalysis are shown to be directed by his and Mouffe's concern to understand how radical politics can find its place in a world whose institution is ultimately symbolic and in which no agent or actor comparable to the dialectical proletariat can—or should—be imagined. An early ally in this search was Slavoj Žižek, who argues that “universality” is complicit with capitalist domination.

In this chapter I suggest that a rereading of Dionysius’s Mystical Theology through Jacques Lacan’s four discourses illustrates how a Žižekian ontology makes possible a materialist reading of apophatic theology and Christian identity. Slavoj Žižek’s work offers the possibility of repeating Dionysius differently, under the aegis of a Žižekian materialism within which apophatic theology is the condition of both the possibility and the impossibility of cataphatic theology. In such a materialist theology, Christian identity can be understood according to the logic of drive: that is, not as a commitment to a particular set of answers or a particular vision of harmony, but precisely as the commitment to a particular problem, the problem of what it means to be faithful to Christ.

This epilogue summarizes issues underlying the emergence of post-Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s as Marxism lost its hold on the imagination of the western European intellectual left. The post-Marxism associated with Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Derrida, and Slavoj Žižek attempted to hold onto the possibility of radical action and progressive transformation, while also renouncing Marxism's idea of a privileged social actor, Leninism's insistence on a vanguard party possessing correct theory, and indeed, the basic Marxist-Leninist belief that a theory could ever adequately guide social movements operating within a complex historical reality. Many of the resonances between the eras before and after Marxism's ascendancy may be tied to the prominent role of the symbolic, which has furnished us a red thread by which to track a number of thinkers wrestling with the challenge of reconceiving democratic theory in a context marked by the collapse of really existing socialism and the weakening hold of the Marxist model.

This chapter picks up afresh the question of whether the contrast between Rancière's emphasis on human equality and Lyotard's accent on dissymmetry can really be reduced to a matter of straightforward opposition. By exploring the possibility of certain connections between the economy and practice of masochism described by Deleuze and the formation of civil life in the Lyotardian ‘text’, it aims to show that Deleuze's depiction of masochism's desire to educate the other corresponds in significant ways with Lyotard's image of the ‘Other’ as master-teacher. The chapter goes on to explore some of the writings of Slavoj Žižek and concludes with a reading of Levinas's postwar writings on Léon Brunschvicg.

This chapter explores Giovanni’s pursuit of Annabella’s heart in John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore, suggesting that it is the Courtly lover’s necessary abject position in relation to the beloved which explains the play’s ambivalent representation of Anabella’s sincerity, her honesty, and the reason Giovanni casts her murder as revenge. Ford’s depiction of Annabella’s rhetoric, her stage positions, her unfathomability, even her death, is consistent with the representation of a courtly love lady, the seemingly chaste, silent, and obedient actor, either a virgin or a whore, appearing regularly in early modern literature and theatre. Revenge, however, is part of courtly love’s ideology, according to Slavoj Žižek’s seminal essay, ‘Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing’, and Giovanni’s expectations for Annabella’s behaviour exposes the contradictions inherent in the courtly love rhetoric found in the play. Rather than being sadistic towards his sister, luring her into incest and then killing her, Giovanni has all the marks of an abject masochist, as does Annabella.

The nueva canción, or ‘new song’, movements that emerged in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, and whose beginnings are normally associated with the Chilean Violeta Parra (1917–67) and the Argentinean Atahualpa Yupanqui (Héctor Roberto Chavero 1908–92), have been subject to a significant body of scholarly attention. This chapter uses the impact of nueva canción to explore some of the ways in which consciousness might be thought of as applying to groups as much as individuals. The chapter starts with a discussion of the public nature of consciousness and how one might address consciousness (of any kind) epistemologically, whether through the brain sciences, psychology, psychoanalysis, or philosophy. This section is followed by an interpretation of the kinds of consciousness involved in the social and political world, paying attention to the historical and cultural iterations of consciousness. Discussion of these modalities inevitably highlights the gaps between them, but it is not the purpose of this chapter to attempt to bridge those gaps. Rather, it suggests, via reference to the work of Slavoj Žižek, that we should allow these types of inquiry to resonate with each other. Having set out a general and theoretical contribution to consciousness studies, the chapter then proceeds to a set of considerations more clearly located in a specific, ongoing cultural moment, that of the nueva canción.

This chapter focuses on the world premiere of Udi Aloni's film, Forgiveness, in Ramallah. The screening of Forgiveness was attended by intellectuals as well as Palestinian artists and filmmakers such as Mahmoud Darwish and Slavoj Žižek. Two hours before the event, the second Lebanon war began as Israel entered Lebanon. In the film's commentary notes, Aloni wrote: “People flee from traumatic zones in an attempt to find a new life, only to find out that they are going back to the terror time and again.” This chapter describes the tension that foregrounds the Ramallah premiere of Forgiveness, along with some remarks by Aloni and Žižek about the film.

This chapter considers the topic of anxiety, especially the anxiety of the body in relation to traditional thought about the divine and the human. To suggest a distinction between repression and anxiety in contemporary theology, the chapter attends to Freud's reversal in his understanding of the relationship between anxiety and repression, and Slavoj Žižek's interpretations of Lacan in relation to Kant.

Applying the theory of acousmatic sound presented in chapters 4 and 5, this chapter analyzes the role of acousmatic sound in philosophical accounts of the voice, from Husserl to Žižek and Dolar. The acousmatic voice’s source remains underdetermined or uncertain, provoking the question: “Who speaks?” The acousmatic voice can be heard in four other voices, around which the chapter is organized: the phonographic voice of recording technologies, the phenomenological voice of Husserl’s first Logical Investigation, the ontological voice of conscience in Heidegger’s Being and Time, and the psychoanalytic voice in Lacan (as developed by Mladen Dolar in A Voice and Nothing More.) Each of these four voices, and the philosophical work that each voice is intended to achieve, runs aground when it encounters the acousmatic voice.

The chapter argues that the structure evident in recent discussions of mysticism can also be found in modernist and postmodernist critical theory. It draws attention to a structure to be found repeatedly in the arguments of Jean-François Lyotard, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Derrida and Theodor W. Adorno: namely, the self-consciously paradoxical position which makes any alternative to the modern forms of identity that they criticize structurally unavailable. The chapter suggest a change of perspective, following up aspects of Derrida's and Adorno's arguments which they did not pursue further. The new perspective asks what type of identity or way of life underpins the conviction that alternatives are structurally unavailable. This opens the way for an historical approach to forms of identity.

This chapter examines how the various ways of dealing with the mismatch between visibility and audibility help one to imagine a social space centred on the failure of communication, or untranslatability. To do so, it considers the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, Bonnie Honig, and Slavoj Žižek. Nancy theorises community in relation to failed communication, whereas Honig and Žižek focus on uncertainty as a key affective device to discuss the link between community and unintelligibility. Built on their works, the chapter develops an understanding of belonging centred on a gothic mode of relationality where people relate to one another based on ‘not knowing’ others let alone themselves. Unlike a traditional form of belonging to a community where people search commonality through intelligible communication between the self and the other, the gothic mode of belonging is realised in people's own inability to translate their voice, in the failure to achieve intelligibility.

Philanthrocapitalism is the name given to the recent trend towards the funding and management of development programmes by philanthropic foundations. This chapter analyses philanthrocapitalism as an ideological formation, which I locate within the ‘post-political’ modality of contemporary depoliticization. Drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek, I suggest that this ideological formation is sustained by a specific economy of jouissance, which sutures the class antagonism of Western capitalist societies through fostering libidinal attachments and fantasies of organic wholeness against the unknowable enjoyment of an African Other. I argue that the post-political should therefore be understood as operating not only at the level of discourses and institutions, but also through the mobilisation and regulation of specific forms of jouissance. This argument is developed through a critique of the Millennium Promise foundation. Millennium Promise was founded in 2005 by the billionaire venture capitalist Ray Chambers and the celebrity development economist Jeffrey Sachs, with the aim of ‘ending poverty’ in a series of model villages across sub-Saharan Africa. Millennium Promise embodies the post-political consensus of contemporary ‘global governance’, while its celebration of philanthropic largesse, its discursive framing of ‘Africa’, and its developmental fantasies all demonstrate the operation of jouissance as a post-political factor.

This chapter assesses the discourses on Bruce Lee found in fields concerned with cultural politics, such as cultural studies, media studies, film studies, and ethnic identity studies. In these fields, Bruce Lee ought to be regarded as culturally-politically significant, particularly in terms of his contributions to Asian-American identity politics, diasporic Chinese cultural identity, the deconstruction of white Eurocentric hegemony in Hollywood film and notions of masculinity, his kinetic, symbolic and affective associations with civil rights movements and decolonization struggles, and so on. The chapter clarifies the ways in which all of these assessments of Lee's contribution, intervention, or significance imply one or another relation between culture, media, and politics, with film playing a constitutive articulating role. It indicates the extent to which many such studies of Lee's significance for cultural politics offer celebratory narratives which are slightly problematic in being utopian. It also draws on a Slavoj Žižek's argument about the “strange exchange” between “Asia and Europe”—an exchange which is exemplified in the case of Bruce Lee. It explores the Žižekian critique of the kinds of protests, aims, objects, and achievements implied by those who champion Bruce Lee.