Geoff Boucher. Hegel-Marx-Derrida Seminar, Melbourne 19th February 2000
Can there be a democratic socialism that renounces the utopian fantasy of social harmony, without abandoning some form of redistributive justice? Does a modern ethos exist that might support a democratic socialist politics? When we conceive of radical politics as a democratic agon, can we go beyond liberal democracy and the “moral worldview” of the postmodern “ethics of Otherness"? And if we conceive of the extension of democracy within modern ethical life as “the way things are done” — as a whole way of life — can we avoid a “reconciliation to reality” that smacks of surrender?
Slavoj Žižek’s theory of social antagonism within ethical life, expressed in Tarrying with the Negative (1993), allows us to respond with a definitive “Yes!” to all these questions. I contend that Tarrying with the Negative elaborates a theory of ethical life designed to radicalise the postmarxian politics of radical democracy. The main claim of this paper is that Žižek implicitly radicalises postmarxism by abandoning the neutral gaze “from nowhere” and adopting an openly partisan stance. Only by “tarrying with the negative” — by not only accepting social division, but also adopting an openly partisan stance and being prepared to fight for it to the end — can the Left hope to convert the mass demand for égaliberté [‘equaliberty,’ or egalitarian liberty] into a new social order. By accepting the impossibility of a neutral gaze “from nowhere” and militantly identifying with the excluded, singular remnants of the New World Order, the Left can “traverse the national fantasy” and go beyond the major limitations of social democracy and postmarxian radicalism. For Žižek, these limitations are the resigned acceptance of capitalist liberalism and the related “hysterical demand for a new master” — the suspension of the Left program on the “impossible” demand of the masses for égaliberté considered as the demand of the Other (instead of the desire of the subject) and the vicious cycle of marginal subversion and “repressive tolerance”. In line with postmodern ethics, Žižek conceives of contemporary ethical life as constituted by singular articulations to the universal law, inventions of universalisable moral rules that take the form of transgressions of social norms in response to the singular desires of modern subjects. Yet unlike the deconstructive “ethics of Otherness,” Žižek proposes that, instead of fixating on the demand of the Other (and therefore playing the game of letting anxiety about our “infinite responsibility” endlessly postpone the ethical act), we have to “tarry with the negative” of a radical autonomy that explodes social antagonism into the open and takes responsibility for a singular response to the universal law — that is, we have to pass to the act. In short, Žižek is suggesting that what appears as their mass demand for égaliberté is actually our highest desire; what seems to be their filthy nationalist enjoyment is actually the secret truth of our liberal democratic desires. It is only through the politics of identification with the excluded remainder and traversal (‘crossing-out’) of the nationalist fantasy that the Left can emerge from this vicious circle of misrecognition and cooptation. Yet while Žižek employs a concept of ethical life that includes social antagonism, he marginalizes the role of ethical life as a universal medium for social conflict, thereby missing the central Hegelian insight into the increasing complexity of the universal as a result of social division.
Žižek does not reject the program of radical democracy, the concept of politics as hegemonic articulation, or the notion of social antagonism. For postmarxian radicalism, “the objective of the Left should be the extension and deepening of the democratic revolution initiated two hundred years ago” (Mouffe, 1992a: 1). This needs to be supported by a culture of radical democratic citizenship, a political “grammar of conduct” where social enemies who accept the “rules of the democratic game” are converted into political antagonists, a political culture supported by active political engagement (Mouffe, 1991: 76; Mouffe, 1992a: 1-14; Mouffe, 1992b: 1-8). This concept of democratic citizenship as a political grammar of conduct involves the sedimentation of contingent political decisions into social norms, a “whole way of life” that constitutes the pre-reflexive horizon of “the way things are done” in moral and political conflict. It represents a moral and political “common sense,” and as such is the result of hegemonic articulations. This conception of a “political grammar of conduct” as “the way things are done” in moral and political conflict is remarkably close to the Hegelian notion of ethical life. Yet instead of supplying an ethical justification for postmarxism, Laclau and Mouffe claim to have provided a “politicisation of ethics” (Laclau, 1995b; Laclau, 2000a: 79-86).
Žižek identifies the underlying problem with Laclau’s “politicisation of ethics” in The Ticklish Subject:
[Laclau] oscillates between proposing a neutral formal frame that describes the working of the political field, without implying any specific prise de parti, the prevalence given to a particular leftist political practice. ... Laclau’s notion of hegemony describes the universal mechanism of ideological ‘cement’ which binds any social body together, a notion that can analyse all possible socio-political orders, from fascism to liberal democracy; on the other hand, Laclau nonetheless advocates a determinate political option, ‘radical democracy’ (Žižek, 2000a: ).
This alternation between a formally neutral, metalinguistic claim that is belied by the partisan content of the statement is evidence of the effort to try to occupy the pure position of metalanguage — the “view from nowhere” — at the level of the enunciation. This problem extends all the way through Laclau and Mouffe’s position: radical democracy is a neutral theory of politics and a partisan project; democratic citizenship is the horizon of democratic politics and the aim of a new grammar of political conduct; ethics is only an effect of political decisions, but nonetheless radical democracy should be preferred as more egalitarian.
Once we accept the necessity of a partisan standpoint, however, we do not by any means have to resign ourselves to relativism. Additionally, it is possible to make universal claims from a partisan perspective without claiming to be the “incarnation of universality” — and Tarrying with the Negative explains why. To understand Žižek’s point here, it may help to look at Lacan’s version of the “prisoners’ dilemma,” in “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty” (Lacan, 1988). Three prisoners, condemned to death, have an opportunity for one of them to be exonerated. The warden places one disc on the back of each of the prisoners, drawn from a set of two black discs and three white discs. The prisoners can see the disc on the other’s back, but there is no way that they can see their own disc. The first prisoner to walk to the door and tell the warden what colour disc they have on their back — without talking to the other prisoners — is released. Lacan demonstrates that, not only will they solve the problem, but that they will all walk to the door at the same instant. If there are two black discs dealt, then one prisoner (seeing two black discs) will immediately walk to the door. The others, seeing this, will immediately respond. If there are two or three white discs, then the prisoners will hesitate. Noting this hesitation, all prisoners will calculate that there is only one black, but two or three white discs. If there are two white and one black, the two white disc prisoners will note one black and move to the door (and the other prisoner, noting their certainty after an initial hesitation, will respond). If there are three white discs, the prisoners will all note the double hesitation of the others, and accordingly move to the door. What has this got to do with ethical life? Žižek has demonstrated that there exists an uncanny “subject before subjectivation” — the pure void of the death drive, $ — and a “sublime object of ideology” — the object (a) — that anchors the political field by tying ideological signifiers to primal affects. In the final chapter of Tarrying with the Negative, Žižek shows that modern ethical life is supported by an ideological (nationalist) fantasy that the subject can by no means acknowledge. In other words, modern subjects carry on their backs the “disc” of a fantasy link between the uncanny subject that they are and the “sublime” object of their unconscious desire, a disc that they may by no means look directly at. For a theory of ethical life to be something more than a description of human viciousness, then, it is essential that subjects can look at their “disc,” albeit indirectly, and perform ethical acts on the basis of this rational knowledge. When Žižek talks about “traversal of the nationalist fantasy,” it is precisely this Hegelian unity of theoretical and practical reason that is at stake.
Yet Žižek’s conception of ethical life does not involve the reconciliation of social antagonism. Žižek stands opposed to the postmodern concept of the “recognition of difference” as a form of ethical life characterised by the transmutation of social antagonism into a managed diversity. Indeed (paradoxically, for those for whom “Hegel” just means “teleological totalitarian”), the postmodern “recognition of difference” is far closer to the later, conservative Hegel than to Žižek. In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Encyclopedia philosophy of mind (1812) and Philosophy of Right (1820), ethical life is the domain of “objective spirit” that mediates “shapes of consciousness” to “forms of life” in the medium of intersubjective universality. This refers, broadly speaking, to the domain of culture as a whole, self-reflexive and universal, way of life. Relative to philosophy, considered as the “highest expression” of a whole way of life, ethical life lacks the systematic, self-reflexive grasp of itself as a process of the production of reality. Instead, it appears to social agents as a “social space,” the place where a certain “cultural logic” happens (a set of material and formal inferences that produce a system of categories which constitute shared reality), the terrain on which a certain range of language games become possible. In short, ethical life is the domain of the lived experience of discursive practices, whereas philosophy gains a critical distance on lived experience and considers the “conditions of possibility and impossibility” for these discursive practices. For the later Hegel of the Philosophy of Right, the philosophical treatment of ethical life enables a systematic reconstruction of the “cultural logic” of modern society, encompassing the family, property and civil society, and the state as the highest instrument of ethical life, and culminating in a proposal for a modern corporatism (including a constitutional monarchy) that might guarantee a harmonious society. This “end of history” conservatism is alien to the young Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit, for whom ethical life is the site for social conflict as well as the working out of a shared universality. Žižek’s existentially influenced interpretation of Hegel shares nothing with Hegel’s later, corporatist vision, basing itself instead in a contemporary re-thinking of the Phenomenology. Nor does it spring from the teleological conception of historical necessity advocated by Hegel’s Philosophy of History. In the Phenomenology, the “end of history” is an ascesis, continually repeated by every form of ethical life in its (ultimately and inevitably) failed effort to symbolize the dynamics of social contradictions. For Žižek, the division of the modern subject, $, entails conflict between subject and ethical substance: the subject is tied to ethical substance by fantasy, but opposed to the monstrous Things (i.e., it’s neighbours) that it encounters in this substance. Žižek’s conception of ethical life is not the “resolution” of social antagonism in a universal differential medium that might function as the arena for the reconciliation of subject and substance. For Žižek, the dialectical triad culminates in irreconcilable opposition: the substance versus the subject.
For this reason, the young Hegel — Žižek’s paradigmatic critical intellectual — is “the most sublime of hysterics”. According to Žižek, in conversion hysteria an impeded traumatic kernel is converted into a somatic symptom, and “a homologous conversion is what defines the ‘figures of consciousness’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit ... [which are an] ‘existential dramatisation’ of a theoretical position whereby a certain surplus is produced: the ‘dramatisation’ gives the lie to the theoretical position by bringing out its implicit presuppositions”. In “dramatising” their position, the subject “renders manifest what remains unspoken in it, what must remain unspoken for this position to maintain its consistency”. Therefore, “every ‘figure of consciousness’ implies a kind of hysterical theatre” (Žižek, 1991a: 142). In short, Hegel’s “examples” subvert the Idea that they exemplify (Žižek, 1991a: 144). This hysterical “displacement” of the problem solves it, by making it disappear: “a problem disappears when we take into account (when we ‘stage') its context of enunciation” (Žižek, 1991a: 145).
Now, I propose that we adopt precisely this Hegelian discursive strategy and “look awry” at Žižek’s theory, allowing an example to subvert the theoretical propositions it exemplifies. The context of enunciation for Tarrying with the Negative is clear: Tarrying with the Negative was written during the “crapulous depression” following the descent of the Yugoslavian uprising from democratic revolution into ethnic cleansing. The proposition that ethical life means “substance versus subject” can therefore be located in a precise historical conjuncture. Likewise, the work frames a single problem: the “reinvention of democracy” in Eastern Europe is sustained by the enjoyment of the national Thing, and so “Eastern Europe is returning to the West the ‘repressed’ truth of its democratic desire” (Žižek, 1993: 208). For Žižek, this means that “there is ultimately only one question which confronts political philosophy today: is liberal democracy the ultimate horizon of our political practice, or is it possible effectively to comprise its inherent limitation?” (Žižek, 1993: 221). The inherent limitation of liberal democracy — its inability to become universal, its reliance on the Other of “irrational fundamentalism” to define its own identity — suggests that the central opposition of contemporary political philosophy is between liberalism and communitarianism. Yet this problem, this question and this opposition are themselves framed by the political problematic of radical democracy, the proposition that the task of the Left today is the extension and deepening of the Democratic Revolution of modernity.
Because, for psychoanalysis, sexual difference is paradigmatic of social antagonism, Žižek thinks through this problem using the Lacanian “formulae of sexuation”. Following the strategy of “looking awry” at Žižek, I suggest we map these formulae, without further ado, onto the categories of postmarxian political theory. The result is the following:
These are two subjective structures (a subject with a ‘hat’ on, or a prisoner with a disc on their back), akin to “masculine” and “feminine” in the Lacanian algebra. The lower section designates symbolic relations (discursive practices) that create unconscious subjects: the autonomous subject structured by discourses of democratic citizenship, and the subject of the discourse of community membership, a hysterical subject engaged in a demand to the liberal master that they fix their empty, anomic society up. The upper section (the ‘hat') indicates the “loop of enjoyment” — possessive individualism and nationalist enjoyment, respectively — structured by unconscious fantasy, the vicious kicks that these subjects get from their “way of life”. To justify this “mapping operation” to the Lacanians, I have tried to interpret the Lacanian symbols in this context. The symbol F designates lack: society as the lack of community, as the empty mechanical aggregate that “replaces” the organic community. The symbol (a) indicates an unconditional demand, in this case, the unconditional demand for égaliberté. The symbol S(Ř) specifies the empty locus of modern power, the space of a purely formal universality which is both unsayable and non-displaceable (this corresponds to the moral law in Kantian philosophy, for instance). Žižek’s question is: given that we all position ourselves relative to this major divide in contemporary politics, what ‘hat’ are we wearing when we engage in politics? How can we escape wearing the hat (or disc) of possessive individualism? And if we oppose liberalism, how can we avoid sliding into the embraces of nationalist enjoyment?
Now — I want to interpret Tarrying with the Negative chapter-by-chapter, to bring out the underlying logic of this difficult book.
Žižek wants to demonstrate that the division in the subject is correlative to a division between subject and society. This is accomplished by demonstrating that the divided subject necessarily transposes its internal impossibility onto the social field as an ‘obstacle in the field of vision,’ namely, the other person qua absolute Otherness. For Žižek, the “transcendental unity of apperception” is actually an uncanny quasi-transcendental subject that corresponds to the Lacanian “subject of the signifier,” $, while the phenomenal field standing opposed to the quasi-transcendental subject is framed by the “transcendental object,” another quasi-transcendental entity that corresponds to the Lacanian object (a). The decentred substance of modern ethical life stands opposed to the quasi-transcendental subject because what the subject “finds” in the phenomenal field (ethical life considered as an object under observation by the subject) is the formal unity supplied by the uncanny object (a). The appearance of the object (a) in the field of vision causes the apparition of undead monsters, that is, the experience of alienation from an ethical life populated by spectral phantoms, absolute Others. This means that the divided subject can exist only in a primordial relation to an other that “is” its lost half.
Žižek’s mapping of the Lacanian subject onto the Kantian subject | When the Other comes too close, the subject encounters the (a) in the field of vision as a monstrous Thing |
Thing (the Real): noumenal “thinking substance" |
This happens “through the lens of the fantasy”. The fantasy at once constructs the Other as a fascinating object of desire, and determines that their proximity is experienced as an intolerable anxiety that causes the eclipse of the subject. This is why Žižek claims that “fantasy supports reality” and “reality is fragile”. |
Based on the mapping of the Lacanian subject onto the categories of political theory, we obtain the following basic schema:
“Desire is the desire of the Other": the mysterious object that the Other “possesses” is at once the fascinating thing that we just have to have and (once we approach too close) a repellant enjoyment, the “sick filth” of the Other that converts them into a monstrous Thing. The cause of (political) desire in the autonomous subject is the unconditional demand for egaliberté — but every actual irruption of this unconditional demand fills the subject with anxiety at the “fanatical over-identification” of the “fundamentalist” Other.
Now Žižek needs to show that this division in the subject (and its alienation from the substance) entails the existence of social difference. Drawing upon Lacanian psychoanalysis, Žižek takes sexual difference to be paradigmatic of social difference. The interpretation of the cogito as a disjunctive syllogism (“I think, therefore I am not,” etc.) implies the existence of two, quite different cogitae. The “feminine” cogito means the choice of symptom: I am, therefore it thinks (and so my whole existence is reduced to a symptom). The “masculine” cogito elects fantasy: I think, therefore it is (and a semblance of being is only possible in fantasy). For Žižek, sexual difference is the key to the possibility of self-reflexivity. The decentring of the subject implies that the Other is the point of my self-reflexivity. They do so only as Thing, as absolute Otherness: the Other possesses the gaze that knows the unbearable truth about myself. The assumption of various social identifications consists of a series of efforts to anticipate “what I am for the Other,” i.e., to guess what this point of self-reflexivity holds.
Following the map of political theory onto the Lacanian subject, I propose that Žižek’s second move results in the following:
This results in two, mutually exclusive (antinomic) worldviews:
The existence of mutually exclusive wholes leads to the fantasy of social harmony. This fantasy cannot be dispensed with. The best we can do is to obtain critical distance from it. The object (a) is something that the subject encounters as traumatic, and the fantasy scene reconstructs this traumatic encounter as utopian harmony. For instance, in the liberal fantasy, this appears as the “original position” of a free and equal agreement between democratic citizens to enter into a political community for mutual advantage, now broken by the irruption of the traumatic demand for égaliberté. In the communitarian fantasy, the lost organic community is affirmed as the vanished whole, now replaced by the traumatic anomie of modern alienated society.
These exclusive wholes become antagonistic when the phantasmatic harmony is shattered by the emergence of a radical autonomy that insists upon its singular desire. The act of social division is “radically evil,” expressing the dimension of the death drive. This insistence on a singular desire destroys the mutual relation of the two subjective worldviews and shatters the illusion of mutual complementarity. By pushing the complementary worldviews to their point of inherent deadlock, we suddenly find ourselves in the domain of pure fantasy, where ghosts walk and the undead reign. While this brings the latent social antagonism into the light, only the “radically evil” gesture of social division opens the path to a new harmony within a restructuring of the differential field of symbolic relations.
The insistence of the Other on their “insane,” “destructive” desire — their existence as the embodiment of radical evil — explodes the fantasy balance of the mutually exclusive worldviews, revealing the presence of monstrous Things in the ideological field of vision:
The collapse of the mutually exclusive worldviews explodes the fantasy of a balanced society, but this is not yet a social contradiction. Žižek argues the sharpening of opposition into contradiction only happens when the ruling master signifier, the universal, encounters itself in one of the subjective structures, converting the other into a singularity. Social division becomes a division in the universal medium to the extent that the two subjective structures divide into universal and singular, dominant and subordinate, master and slave. This is exactly what happens when a new universal becomes hegemonic, since hegemony is founded upon a constitutive exception: something is marginalized, converted into a marginalized remainder, in order to create the new social harmony. For instance, in the logic of sexual difference, masculine is the universal and a particular subjective structure — leading to the exclusion and marginalisation of the feminine as a singularity lacking all substantial existence, that is, as a mere semblance (as “truncated man”).
A performative act converts the Real of social antagonism into the Symbolic (differential) field of politics, via the moment of social contradiction. This performative act is not voluntarist. It cannot convert anything into a new master signifier — only the existing (dis)contents of the reigning social order. The insistence on a singular desire means, therefore, insistence upon the singularity, upon the marginalized and excluded remainder from the reigning hegemonic universal. This (Hegelian) logic of the “positing of the presuppositions,” of the anticipation of the new order from the perspective of the excluded and marginalized in the old order, takes the form of the symbolic act of giving the new order a name. This performative act of naming is at once merely linguistic (altering nothing) and deeply political (it unites a chaotic constellation of oppositional forces into the configuration of a new hegemonic alliance). This surplus within ethical life that makes the shift from the old order to the new order possible is precisely what a neutral gaze renders invisible.
In this diagram, the “communitarian” has become nothing more than a symptom of the ruling liberalism.
This shift in perspective, from the neutral gaze for which radical resistance is always “premature,” to the “impossible” partisan position that enables the performative gesture of naming the new order (of articulating a new hegemonic alliance), is the same as the shift in perspective from the neutral interpretation of the symptom to the partisan identification with the sinthome. The transformation of symptom into sinthome alters nothing and yet transforms everything. Yet for all that, the subject cannot themselves accomplish the transformation of this radical negativity into a new social order. The modern (autonomous) subject relies for their autonomy on a “gesture of mercy,” a sign from the Other, an “answer of the Real” to their unconditional demand. This gesture of mercy happens when the subject, having passed to the “point of no return,” of subjective destitution and the “suicidal act of abandonment” (Žižek, 1993: 168), receives a sign of “grace” from the Other. For postmarxian theory, elections are an “answer of the Real,” a gesture of grace once society has “suicidally” abandoned stability to the contingencies of popular sovereignty. This “grace” consists in the “loss of loss,” the acceptance of the incompleteness of the Other. This means the knowledge that “the Other doesn’t have it,” the lost object that generates both desire and anxiety. This knowledge opens the possibility of a differential political field where social enemies (monstrous Things that have to be destroyed) are converted into political antagonists.
Identification with the sinthome converts the ruling universal into a mere semblance and opens the possibility for the “gesture of the master,” the conversion of the excluded singularity into the constitutive exception that founds a new universality. The “gesture of the master” (i.e., the formation of a new social order with new universal values) itself depends on “grace,” on an “answer of the Real” (that is, the Other has to say, one way or another, “I yield”). The totalitarian temptation is to go to the limit and then keep going, to extort the consent of the Other (or simply to eliminate them).
How do we “identify with the sinthome” without becoming trapped in the “loop of enjoyment"? In the example, how do we identify with the singular sinthome of communitarianism without becoming enthusiastic nationalists? Žižek’s answer is that “identification with the sinthome” is correlative to “traversal of the fantasy": the singular desire that destroys the ruling order also brings the enjoyment associated with this excluded position into the light — and enjoyment, like a mucous slime that thrives only in the dark, shrivels under this exposure.
National identification is sustained by the enjoyment of the national Thing, the substance of ethical life that the Others “want to steal”. The elementary social bond is not an “imagined community,” nor the symbolic centre of the national state, but instead the relation to the national Thing (a shared mode of transgressive enjoyment). “A nation exists only as long as its specific enjoyment continues to be materialised in a specific set of social practices and transmitted through national myths that structure these practices” (Žižek, 1993: 202). Enjoyment is a singularity that resists universalisation, a sinthome that resists symptomatic interpretation. “The national Thing functions thus as a kind of “particular Absolute” resisting universalisation, bestowing its special “tonality” upon every neutral, universal notion” (Žižek, 1993: 202).
Nationalism thus presents a privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the social field. This is the problem in Eastern Europe: the “reinvention of democracy” is sustained by the enjoyment of the national Thing — and the contemporary “liberal democrats” and leftwing postmodernists secretly knew that this would be the case. The Western fascination with the reinvention of democracy in Eastern Europe is correlative to a nostalgia for the lost object, the Democratic Revolution of modernity — yet the reality in Eastern Europe (in 1993) was the very reverse, a crapulous depression running from corporate nationalism to ethnic cleansing. Ethnic nationalism is the repressed truth of democratic desire.
For Žižek, the postmodern Left has no answer to the problems of liberalism. The fear of over-identification pervades late capitalism and postmodernism: the enemy is the “fanatic” who identifies instead of maintaining cynical distance. Late modernity — postmodern capitalism — creates a dispersed subject that is allergic to commitment. This subject is a “pathological narcissist,” and the postmodern concept of “multiple subject positions” is only the theory of which “pathological narcissism” is the practice. The dispersed postmodern subject maintains its pathological narcissism through the withdrawal from ethical substance — this is why the ethical stance today survives only as radical evil (fundamentalism). “Far from containing any kind of subversive potentials, the dispersed, plural, constructed subject hailed by postmodern theory (the subject prone to particular, inconsistent modes of enjoyment, etc.) simply designates the form of subjectivity that corresponds to late capitalism” (Žižek, 1993: 216).
The “nation” is a fantasy object created by formal democracy. “The more the logic of Capital becomes universal, the more its opposite will assume the features of “irrational fundamentalism” (Žižek, 1993: 220). Nationalist “closure” is the inherent opposite of the “neutral” liberal democratic framework. The very project of formal democracy opens the space for fundamentalism (Žižek, 1993: 221). According to Žižek’s frighteningly accurate prediction, “the ethnic conflicts of ex-Yugoslavia offer the first clear taste of the twenty-first century, the prototype of the post-cold war armed conflicts” (Žižek, 1993: 223). The formal democratic state opens the space for nationalism but prohibits chauvinism by maintaining the empty locus of power as something not tied to a specific ethnic enjoyment. Hence, Žižek calls for the separation of powers and the alienation of the state from civil society to create national-democratic (not ethnic national) states in former Yugoslavia (Žižek, 1993: 211).
The way to break out of this vicious circle is not to directly confront “irrational” nationalist particularism, but to invent forms of political practice that contain a dimension of universality beyond Capital (Žižek, 1993: 220). Žižek’s examples of political forces that maintained a dimension of universality beyond capitalism are the “vanishing mediators” of the (non-Communist) democratic socialist parties in Eastern Europe, such as Neues Forum in Germany. The vanishing mediators have an inherently tragic ethical dimension. By “taking socialism seriously,” the third way forces “over-identified” with ideology, refusing the dominant motif of cynical distance: “the fiction of a third way was the only point at which social antagonism was not obliterated” (Žižek, 1993: 231). Subversion, Žižek concludes, resides not in cynical imitation of the performative, but in taking power seriously, sticking to the letter of the law against the fantasy transgressions, the unwritten rules.
So Žižek seems to be saying that we should:
insist on formal equality, democratic rights and so forth (“the letter of the law against the fantasy”); do so through identification with the excluded; together, this constitutes a “traversal of the fantasy” that split us from ideological enjoyment and opens the path to a new universality; accept that égaliberté is not something once lost (the “authentic revolutionary movement”) and forever postponed (the “completely liberated society”), but that its real significance consists in the impetus it delivers to the multitude of emancipatory struggles (“to maintain the very circular movement of repeatedly missing it” (Žižek, 1993: 199)); thus we arrive at a psychoanalytic variant of Laclau’s proposal: shift from the Enlightenment project of emancipation to the postmodern programme of a multitude of partial emancipations.
Or rather, Žižek’s conclusion is confused, internally divided. On the one hand, Žižek is merely offering a concept of ethical life in support of the politics of radical democracy. On the other hand, this fails to answer the “central question for political philosophy,” namely, whether there is any alternative to the democratic game (or it answers it negatively, in contradiction with the rhetorical thrust of the question). Yet there is an alternative to the postmodern programme of the multitude of partial struggles for recognition. Firstly, we have to follow Laclau and Mouffe (and the majority of contemporary socialist political philosophers) in separating democracy and capitalism. Žižek too often uses the term “capitalist democracy” as if this were a necessary connection and not a contingent articulation. Secondly, we have to recognise that these two opposing structures of subjectivity relate to one another, not directly, but through the medium of the shared universality of the democratic revolution of modernity. At crucial points in the argument, Žižek ignores or minimalises the importance of formal universality in ethical life. Too often, Žižek reduces the Democratic Revolution to the reigning political norm (political liberalism), the moral law to the voice of social conscience, the Symbolic Law to the master signifier. Later (after the political break with Laclau), Žižek explicitly recognises that the (empty, formal) universal is transcendent to the hegemonic universal norms — but instead of going back to the early work, Žižek is already off on the tangent of “diabolical evil” as the invention ex nihilo of a completely new universality. What Žižek fails to recognise is that the relation between master and slave, universal and singular, is not a form of ethical life. Ethical life only happens after the dialectics of the master and the slave, once dominant and subordinate share the same (increasingly complex) universal medium. This universal medium is structured by a formal universality that is unsayable and non-displaceable within a form of ethical life — that is, in contemporary terms, by the Democratic Revolution of modernity qua the creation of the empty place of power. After “traversal of the fantasy,” I suggest, what opens for us is not the creation of a new society ex nihilo, but the identification with the universality characteristic of modernity: the invention of universalisable norms in response to a singular context, or what I would call the singular articulation to the universal law. Radical democracy, taken consistently (that is, pushed beyond the prohibition on the universalisation of the democratic revolution, beyond “self-limiting revolution”), already is democratic socialism.
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