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Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political

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An Interview with Slavoj Zizek

For many, Jacques Lacan represents postmodern theory at its height--that

is, at its worst. Lacan, so say his detractors, made a career out

of obscurantism, and may not even have believed very much of what he

said. Noam Chomsky once indicated such a hypothesis when he explained

that "my frank opinion is that [Lacan] was a conscious charlatan, and

he was simply playing games with the Paris intellectual community to

see how much absurdity he could produce and still be taken seriously."

Even Lacanians might find it in their hearts to forgive Chomsky

such a remark, since it was Chomsky who, after asking Lacan a question

concerning thought (at the latter's 1968 presentation at MIT), received

the reply, "We think we think with our brain; personally, I think with

my feet. That's the only way I come into contact with anything solid. I

do occasionally think with my forehead, when I bang into something."

As if to condense the aura of contrariness and enigma he cultivated in

such exchanges, Lacan often relayed his teachings through now-infamous

maxims and mathemes, those Zen koans of the French postmodern era:

"Desire is desire of the Other," "There is no sexual relation," "The

Woman does not exist."

No wonder Chomsky and many others turn their heads in exasperation.

The best counterpoint to suspicions such as Chomsky's may well be found in

the work of Slavoj Zizek, whose frenetic endorsements of Lacanian theory

achieve a dense complexity even as they provide moments of startling

(and typically humorous) clarity. Take Zizek's way of explaining why

even one of the most banal features of late twentieth-century culture,

the laugh-track of situation comedy, is itself an illustration of the

Lacanian thesis that "desire is desire of the Other":

. . . let us remind ourselves of a phenomenon quite usual in popular

television shows or serials: "canned laughter." After some supposedly

funny or witty remark, you can hear the laughter and applause included in

the soundtrack of the show itself--here we have the exact opposite of the

Chorus in classical tragedy; it is here that we have to look for "living

Antiquity." That is to say, why the laughter? The first possible

answer--that it serves to remind us when to laugh--is interesting enough,

since it implies the paradox that laughter is a

[End Page 1]

matter of duty and not of some spontaneous feeling; but this answer

is not sufficient because we do not usually laugh. The only

correct answer would be that the Other--embodied in the television set--is

relieving us even of our duty to laugh--is laughing instead of us. So

even if, tired from a hard day's stupid work, all evening we did nothing

but gaze drowsily into the television set, we can say afterwards that

objectively, through the medium of the Other, we had a really good time.

</blockquote>

Whimsical and yet theoretically earnest solutions to everyday conundrums

such as this can have the effect of seducing even Zizek's most skeptical

readers, but this is not to say that Zizek's work hasn't earned him

opponents. For many, Zizek's Lacanian analyses of contemporary culture

cannot quite shed the burdens of classical psychoanalysis itself:

in an academy happily enamored of historicism and often disinclined

toward universalisms of any kind, Zizek's mostly ahistorical,

psychoanalytic defense of the Enlightenment draws criticism from

various epistemological camps. One of the most persistent reproaches,

for instance, has been voiced by Judith Butler, who asks rhetorically,

"Can Zizekian psychoanalysis respond to the pressure to theorize

the historical specificity of trauma, to provide texture for the

specific exclusions, annihilations, and unthinkable losses that

structure . . . social phenomena . . . ?"

Others have raised suspicions about the political implications of the

Zizekian subject: "[Zizek] views the modern individual as caught

in the dichotomy between his or her universal status as a member

of civil society, and the particularistic attachments of ethnicity,

nation and tradition, and this duality is reflected in his own

ambiguous political profile--marxisant cultural critic on

the international stage, member of a neo-liberal and nationalistically

inclined governing party back home."

I recently met with Zizek in order to discuss such complaints, as well

as to elicit his opinions on the ongoing crises in the ex-Yugoslavia,

Zizek's country of birth. The latter topic has become a heated

subject for Zizek, who ran a close campaign for the presidency of

Slovenia in 1990, and who views the resurgence of nationalism in the

Balkan states as a phenomenon that has gone completely misunderstood by

the West. Since the Bosnian conflict began near the outset of the

last decade, ex-Yugoslav politics have taken up more space in Zizek's

thinking, but still, there is probably no dominant feature within the

contemporary landscape he analyzes. For Zizek, one quickly realizes,

life is essentially an excuse to theorize; hence, his Lacanian commentary

on the psychopathology of everyday existence rarely ceases. As we packed

into a crowded elevator in New York's St. Moritz hotel, for instance, the

panel of control buttons caught Zizek's eye, provoking an excursus on

the faulty logic behind the hotel's symbolic exclusion of the thirteenth

floor. "You

[End Page 2]

cannot cheat God!" he proclaimed, drawing bewildered glances from the

people around us. "They shouldn't call it the fourteenth floor--they

should just make the thirteenth floor an empty mezzanine, an

ominous lack in the midst of the others." Somehow, the commentary slid

effortlessly, naturally, into the subject of voyeurism, and from there,

to the Lacanian distinction between the gaze and the look. Our later

conversation partook of a similar, free-associative pattern even as it

returned to a few fundamental concerns: the position of Lacanian theory

in today's academy, Zizek's friendly antagonism with Judith Butler,

Zizek's own polemic against multicultural identity politics. And talking

with Zizek, one realizes that these issues are all of a piece with a

larger problem: What kinds of political ontology--what manner of social

perception, for that matter--does today's theoretical constellation

allow or, more particularly, foreclose?

Christopher Hanlon: Your home city, Ljubljana, is home to a

number of prominent Lacanians today. Was there something particular about

the Slovene--then the Yugoslav--scene that made Lacan particularly crucial

during the 1980s, when you were first formulating your project?

Slavoj Zizek: I believe it was simply some

incredible contingency. The first thing here is that, in the

ex-Yugoslavia, the phenomenon is strictly limited to Slovenia--there are

practically no Lacanians in the other Yugoslav republics. But I'm often

asked this question: "Why there?" The only thing I can say is that there

were some marginal, not-sufficient, negative conditions. One was that

the intellectual climate was very open; or rather, the regime was open if

you didn't directly pursue political opposition. There was intellectual

freedom, borders were open, and so on . . . . And the other thing was that

Slovenia was, far from being isolated from Europe, a kind of microcosm,

in the sense that all of what went on in the philosophical scene around

the world, all main orientations, were fairly represented. This is to

say, there was a clear Frankfurt School or Critical Theory orientation,

there was a Heideggerian orientation, there were analytical philosophers,

and so on and so on . . . . But within this constellation, I don't have

a precise theory, though it's something I'm often asked. Why there? One

thing is that in other areas--around Zagreb and Belgrade, in Croatia and

Serbia--they have much more substantial psychoanalytical traditions,

and maybe this is what prevented them from appropriating Lacan. In

Slovenia, there was no psychoanalytic tradition, so we were starting

from a zero-point.

For me, the original spark came out of the confluence of

two traditions: Frankfurt School marxism and, of course, Lacanian

psychoanalysis. When I was a young student in Slovenia, the intellectual

scene

[End Page 3]

was divided between Heideggerians and the Frankfurt School. Under

Yugoslav Communism, that is, dialectical materialism was dead; it was no

longer the State philosophy. It was some kind of vague humanist marxism,

linked to the Frankfurt School. At least in Slovenia, the main opposition

was Heideggerrian: this is why my first book was on Heidegger and

language. But what made me suspicious was this phenomenon, as it seemed

to me, by which both Heideggerians and the followers of the Frankfurt

School began to speak the same language. This precisely aroused me.

CH: Though Slovene culture and politics play a pronounced

role in your later work--say, from The Metastases of Enjoyment onward--American popular culture remains the central touchstone. Do you

see America as more pathological, more ripe for analysis?

SZ: This is perhaps the result of my personal trauma,

which was that my relationship with Slovene art, especially with Slovene

literature and cinema, was extremely negative. In Slovenia we have a

cult of literature, especially poetry, as "the fundamental cornerstone

of our society"; the idea is that the Slovene poets effectively created

the Slovene nation, so there's a false veneration of poetry. On top of

it, most Slovene writers now are, in no uncertain terms, right-wing

nationalists, so I'm happily not on speaking terms with them--it's

a kind of negative gesture of pride for me to turn to American pop

culture. Although, in the last few years, I have been turning toward

so-called "literary" or high culture; my new book will deal with

Shklovsky, Tchaikovsky, and so on.

CH: Another new book? Does Verso at all worry that you might

flood the market?

There have been some surprises here. For example, they

were worried about The Ticklish Subject. "After so many books,

who will buy such a thick book, 400 pages . . . ." But OK--I know that I

am very close to flooding the market; the next thing will be that

next month a short book on David Lynch's Lost Highway will come

out by the University of Washington Press, Seattle. Then it will be this

other book, this big triple-orgy, this dialogue, between Judith Butler,

Ernesto Laclau, and me. The idea was that each of us should write an

opening statement, maybe fifty pages, defining his or her

position toward the other two. Then two rounds of questions and answers;

it grew into a big book, about three hundred printed pages. And it's

very interesting to me, because it isn't a polite debate; it's nasty,

nasty--it almost but I hope didn't ruin our personal relationships. We're

really pretty good friends, but it does get

[End Page 4]

nasty, with all these rude expressions, you know: "He's totally missing

the point," "He didn't do his homework," "Sounds like she's decided to

tone it down a little bit," and so on and so on.

CH: I want to ask about one common critique of your work, most

recently voiced by James Hurley, that centers on what we might call your

"intrapsychic" focus.

For you, of course, ideological coercion occurs at the libidinal level,

at the constitutive level of a subject who "is" a disjunction between

the Symbolic and the Real. But some commentators have expressed concern

that this intrapsychic focus has the effect of leaving us little to do

by way of intervening upon specifically institutional mechanisms

of coercion. Do such objections concern you?

SZ: No, because I think that such criticism misses the

point of Freudian subjectivity. I think that the very term "intrapsychic"

is misleading; I think that, at least for Lacan, who emphasizes this

again and again, the proper dimension of the unconscious is not "deep

inside." The proper dimension is outside, materialized in the state

apparatuses. The model of split subjectivity, as later echoed by Louis

Althusser, is not that there is something deep in me which is repressed;

it's not this internal psychic conflict. What subverts my conscious

attitudes are the implicit ideological beliefs externalized, embodied

in my activity. For instance, I'm interested in this new fashion of

Hollywood Holocaust comedy. Have you noticed how, starting with Life Is

Beautiful, we have a new genre, repeated in Jakob the Liar, and

so on? Apropos of this, I ask, "Why do Holocaust tragedies fail?" For me,

Speilberg is at his lowest during a scene from Schindler's List,

when the concentration-camp commander faces the Jewish girl and we

have this internal monologue, where he is split between his attraction

to the girl and his racist tract: you know, "Are you a rat? Are you a

human being?" and so on. I think this split is false. I take here quite

literally Lacan's dictum that psychoanalysis is not psychology, that the

ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis is that when you analyze phenomena

like Nazis or Stalinism, it is totally wrong to think that you will

arrive at any pertinent result through so-called in-depth profiles

of figures like Stalin or Hitler. Here there is a lesson to be

learned from Hannah Arendt--though at a different level I disagree with

her--about the banality of evil. The banality of evil means for me that

the key is not, for example, the personality of Eichmann; there is a gap

separating the acts of Eichmann from Eichmann's self-experience. But what

I would add is that this doesn't mean that Eichmann was simply innocent

in the sense that he was possessed by some kind of brutally objective

logic. My idea is more and more that we are dealing with--to reference

my eternal idea about canned laughter--what I am tempted to call a kind

of canned hatred. In the same way that the TV set laughs

[End Page 5]

for you, relieves you of the obligation to really laugh, Eichmann himself

didn't really have to hate the Jews; he was able to be just an ordinary

person. It's the objective ideological machinery that did the hating;

the hatred was imported, it was "out there."

CH: He even reported that he admired the Jews, that he used to

literally vomit with disgust at the efficiency of the extermination

. . .

SZ: Yes! So again, I would say that this reproach misses

the point in the sense that the fundamental lesson of psychoanalysis

is that the unconscious is outside, crystallized in institutional

practices. This is why, for me, commodity fetishism is a nice example of

this--not collective, I'm not speaking of course about some Jungian

collective unconscious--unconscious in the sense of the set of

presuppositions, beliefs. The subject is not aware of these beliefs,

but the beliefs are materialized in the social practices, rituals,

institutions in which the subject participates. So in this sense, I claim

that this idea that when you analyze in psychoanalytic terms what are

ideological phenomena, you translate them into intrapsychic phenomena,

definitely does not hold for Lacan. If anything, Lacan can be accused

of the opposite mistake, of externalizing these issues. For example,

in a friendly discussion with him years ago, this is what Fred Jameson

reproached me with: that the inner self-experience disappears with me,

that I externalize everything into social rituals.

Let me put it this way: Lacan is an author with which it's incredible

how "anything goes." It's incredible how whatever comes to our head,

you can attribute to Lacan--people are very insensitive to the things

Lacan actually says. OK, he's a difficult author, but nonetheless,

some of the things he says are formulated very clearly. Just to give you

an example: though I appreciate her very much--especially her late work,

The Psychic Life of Power--Judith Butler repeatedly makes this

strange claim, this strange thesis, that for us Lacanians (not for her),

"unconscious" is Imaginary resistance to the Symbolic Law. Where did she

find this? I'm almost tempted to say, "Wait a minute! If there is

one phrase that is the first commonplace about Lacan, the first

association, it is 'The unconscious is structured like a language'!" The

unconscious is the Symbolic order. Where did she find this

idea that the unconscious is Imaginary resistance? I know what she

means--her idea is that we are caught in the web of social relations

which are the Symbolic order, and that unconsciously, our resistance is

to identify with the set of social norms, and so on and so on. OK! An

interesting thesis, but unfortunately, it has absolutely nothing

to do with Lacan.

[End Page 6]

CH: I'd like to discuss your ongoing debate with Butler,

but first, could we talk about another more general facet of your

reception? I've seen you speak on several occasions now, and each time,

I notice the same split within your audience. On the one hand, there's a

kind of weird delight you can elicit, an experience of almost fanatical

excitement, but on the other, one also observes a deep displeasure. Of

course, many public intellectuals gain both followers and opponents,

but with you, there's almost no middle ground between these two extremes

. . .

SZ: . . . I know. My friends tell me that if you

check the amazon.com reviews of my books, I get either five

stars or no stars. You know, either, "It's total crap!" or "It's a

revelation!" Never, "It's a moderately good book, not very good, but some

solid achievements." This is an interesting point in the sense that--this

is true especially in England, with Radical Philosophy; they don't

like me there--there are these fantasies circulating around me, that I

shouldn't be trusted; beneath this apparently marxist, left-wing surface,

there is this strange, decadent, even nationalistic attachment . . .

CH: Peter Dews has indicated such a suspicion [in The

Limits of Disenchantment].

SZ: Yeah! And I'm still on speaking terms with Peter

Dews, but I told him, "My God!" Where did he get that? Because the

irony is that in Slovenia, nationalists cannot stand me. In Slovenia,

I'm always attacked as a "national nihilist," a "cynicist," and so

on . . . . The idea that I'm a nationalist seems simply ridiculous to

me, a kind of propaganda. The catch is the following one: I come from

Slovenia, and for a lot of Western left-wingers, we Slovenes committed

the original sin. The idea is that we were the first ones to leave

Yugoslavia, that we started the process and then hypocritically escaped

the consequences. We stepped out when the house of cards was starting

to collapse, and started it all, and we didn't even suffer for it. It's

incredible how strong this accusation is. So Dews's big reproach is

"Why didn't you oppose the disintegration of Yugoslavia?" First, I was

pretty much indifferent to this at the time. But the thing that surprises

me about this is that--typically in England--the very same people who

are opposed to the disintegration of Yugoslavia, if you ask them about,

for instance, Ireland: all these principles are suddenly reversed. So

that is not nationalist madness?

I guess I would say that at least one level of this political suspicion

against me is conditioned by what I call this politically-correct

Western-leftist racism. In the aftermath of the disintegration of

Yugoslavia, a new entity was produced with which I don't want to have

anything to do: the

[End Page 7]

traveling post-Yugoslav academic. You know, going around, telling the

world how horrible it is, all this nationalist madness, blah, blah,

blah . . .

CH: "How can you stand up here talking about David Lynch when

your country is in flames . . ."?

SZ: Yeah, yeah, that kind of stuff. And I've never wanted

to play that game, to present myself as this kind of victim. This is one

aspect. The other aspect is a general resistance to Lacan. Let's put it

this way: vaguely, we have three orientations today. For phenomenologists

or Heideggerians, Lacan is too eccentric, not to be taken seriously. For

Habermasians--though Dews is usually an exception here--Lacanians are some

kind of protofascists, irrationalists, whatever; basically, they prefer

not to enter into discussion with us. For example, in one of her last

articles, I saw Nancy Fraser make a line of distinction between Kristeva

and Lacan, claiming that Kristeva may be of some use, but that Lacan

can be of absolutely no use. . . . With deconstruction, it's the

same--you know, this incredible tension between Lacan and Derrida. Then,

of course, for cognitivists, Lacan is simply deconstruction. So all main

orientations definitely reject the Lacanian approach.

CH: Well, apropos of this Habermas/Lacan division you mention

. . .

SZ: . . . But wait a minute--who stands for Lacan? I don't

think we are strong enough Lacanians to function as opposition. The

debate is usually either Habermas versus communitarians, who consider

Habermas too much of a universalist, or on the other hand Habermas

versus deconstructionists, who again question whether we need universal

norms. The point is . . . don't you think that for Habermasians we

rarely even enter the picture? The big debate is, for example in the

feminist circle, Nancy Fraser or Seyla Benhabib against Judith Butler,

against Wendy Brown--you have that opposition. Or deconstruction versus

neopragmatism--we simply do not enter the picture.

CH: Well, here in the States, the opposition seems to me, more

and more, to be between neopragmatists--I'm not thinking of Habermasians

so much as I am about people like Richard Rorty, Walter Benn Michaels--and

"the theorists," in a totalizing, reductive sense. For instance, a

couple of years ago, I saw Cornel West intone a kind of neopragmatist

complaint against you during a roundtable discussion: how do you justify

your highly abstract work, when there are concrete political battles to

be waged, and then call it liberal?

SZ: Cornel West? Was that the Harvard roundtable?

[End Page 8]

CH: Yes. In any case, I point out the instance as an indication

that perhaps it's theory itself that is discounted, or discountable,

right now, rather than Lacanian theory in particular.

SZ: Well, I don't think that . . . OK, Cornel West did

say that. But I nonetheless don't think that he perceives us as the

main opponent. Because this very reproach that you mention is not a

reproach that can be addressed specifically to Lacan. My idea

is the old marxist idea that this immediate reference to experience,

practice, struggle, etcetera, usually relies on the most abstract and

pure theory, and as an old philosopher I would say, as you said before,

that we simply cannot escape theory. I fanatically oppose this turn which

has taken place in social theory, this idea that there is no longer time

for great theoretical projects, that all we can do is narrativize the

experience of our suffering, that all various ethnic or sexual groups

can ultimately do is to narrate their painful, traumatic experience. I

think this is a catastrophe. I think that this fits perfectly the

existing capitalist order, that there is nothing subversive in it. I

think that this fits perfectly today's ideology of victimization,

where in order to legitimize, to gain power politically, you must present

yourself, somehow, as the victim.

An anecdote of Richard Rorty's is of some interest to me here. You know

Rorty's thesis--and you know, incidentally, I like Rorty, because he

openly says what others won't. But Rorty once pointed out--I forget

where--how if you take big opponents, such as Habermas and Derrida,

and ask them how they would react to a concrete social problem, whether

to support this measure or that measure . . . . Are there any concrete

political divisions between Habermas and Derrida, although they cannot

stand each other? There are none! The same general left-of-center,

not-too-liberal but basically democratic vision . . . practically, their

positions are indistinguishable. Now, Rorty draws from this the conclusion

that philosophy doesn't matter. I am tempted to draw a more aggressive,

opposite conclusion: that philosophy does matter, but that

this political indifference signals the fact that although they appear

opposed, they actually share a set of presuppositions at the level of

their respective philosophies. Besides, not all philosophers would

adopt the same position; someone like Heidegger definitely would not,

and a left-winger like [Alain] Badiou definitely would not.

The big question for me today concerns this new consensus--in England

it's the "third way," in Germany it's the "new middle"--this idea that

capitalism is here to stay, we can maybe just smooth it out a little with

multiculturalism, and so on . . . . Is this a new horizon or not? What

I appreciate in someone like Rorty is that at least he openly makes this

point. What annoys me about some deconstructionists is that they adopt

[End Page 9]

as their rhetorical post the idea that what they are doing is somehow

incredibly subversive, radical, and so on. But they do not render thematic

their own deep political resignation.

CH: You've been a long-time opponent of what you call postmodern

identity politics, and especially the subversive hope some intellectuals

attach to them. But with your newest book, this critique acquires a more

honed feel. Now, you suggest that partisans of the identity-politics

struggle have had a "depoliticizing" effect in some way. Could you hone

your comments even further? Do you mean that identity politics have come

to supersede what for you are more important antagonisms (such as that

between capital and democracy, for instance), or do you mean something

more fundamental, that politics itself has been altered for the worse?

SZ: Definitely that it has been altered. Let me put

it this way: if one were to make this reproach directly, they would

explode. They would say, "My God, isn't it the exact opposite? Isn't

it that identity politics politicized, opened up, a new domain,

spheres of life that were previously not perceived as the province

of politics?" But first, this form of politicization nonetheless

involves a transformation of "politics" into "cultural politics," where

certain questions are simply no longer asked. Now, I'm not saying that

we should simply return to some marxist-fundamentalist essentialism,

or whatever. I'm just saying that . . . my God, let's at least just

take note of this, that certain questions--like those concerning the

nature of relationships of production, whether political democracy is

really the ultimate horizon, and so on--these questions are simply no

longer asked. And what I claim is that this is the necessary consequence

of postmodern identity politics. You cannot claim, as they usually do,

that "No, we don't abandon those other aspects, we just add to politics

proper." No, the abandonment is always implicit. Why? Take a concrete

example, like the multitude of studies on the exploitation of either

African Americans or more usually illegal Mexican immigrants who work

as harvesters here in the U.S. I appreciate such studies very much,

but in most of them--to a point at least--silently, implicitly, economic

exploitation is read as the result of intolerance, racism. In Germany,

they don't even speak of the working class; they speak of immigrants . . .

CH: "Visiting workers."

SZ: Right. But the point is that we now seem to believe

that the economic aspect of power is an expression of intolerance. The

fundamental problem then becomes "How can we tolerate the other?" Here,

[End Page 10]

we are dealing with a false psychologization. The problem is not that

of intrapsychic tolerance, and so I'm opposed to this way in which all

problems are translated into problems of racism, intolerance, etcetera. In

this sense, I claim that with so-called postmodern identity politics,

the whole concept of politics has changed, because it's not only

that certain questions aren't any longer asked. The moment you begin to

talk about . . . what's the usual triad? "Gender . . ."

CH: "Gender/Race/Class"?

SZ: Yes. The moment you start to talk this way, this

"class" becomes just one aspect within an overall picture which already

mystifies the true social antagonisms. Here I disagree with Ernesto

Laclau's more optimistic picture of the postmodern age, where there are

multiple antagonisms coexisting, etcetera . . .

CH: . . . But aren't you then subordinating what is "merely

cultural" to a set of "authentically" political problems?

SZ: No, no. I'm well aware, for example, that the

whole problematic of political economy also had its own symbolic

dimension. . . . I'm not playing "merely cultural" problems against

"real" problems. What I'm saying is that with this new proliferation of

political subjects, certain questions are no longer asked. Is the state

our ultimate horizon? Is capitalism our ultimate horizon? I just take

note that certain concerns have disappeared.

CH: Let's talk about another aspect of this critique you lay

out. Part of your polemic against this "post-political" sphere concerns

the great premium you place on the "Lacanian act," the gesture that

resituates everything, creates its own condition of possibility, and

so on. Could you specify this further by way of pointing to an example

of such an act? In culture or politics, is there some instance of an

authentic Lacanian act that we can turn toward?

SZ: [...] You've got me here, in that sense. But I'm

not mystifying the notion of act into some big event . . . . What I'm

saying is that the way the political space is structured today more

and more prevents the emergence of the act. But I'm not thinking of

some metaphysical event--once I was even accused of conceiving of some

protofascist, out-of-nowhere intervention. For me, an act is simply

something that changes the very horizon in which it takes place, and I

claim that the present situation closes the space for such acts.

We could even draw the pessimist conclusion--and though he doesn't

[End Page 11]

say so publicly, I know privately that Alain Badiou tends to this

conclusion--that maybe politics, for some foreseeable time, is no longer

a domain where acts are possible. That is, there were times during which

acts did happen--the French Revolution, the October Revolution, maybe the

'68 uprisings.

I can only say what will have been an act: something which would break

this liberal consensus, though of course not in a fascist way. But

otherwise, there are examples from culture, from individuals' experiences;

there are acts all around in this sense. The problem for me is that in

politics, again, the space for an act is closing viciously.

CH: Let's move on to another topic. I have to ask you about your

reaction to what may be Derrida's last word on his whole conflict

with Lacan, published in Resistances to Psychoanalysis. Without

retracting any of his original theses concerning Lacan's seminar on "The

Purloined Letter," Derrida now insists that "I loved him and admired

him a lot," and also that "Not only was I not criticizing Lacan, but I

was not even writing a sort of overseeing or objectifying metadiscourse on Lacan," <a name="REF8" href="#FOOT8">8</a>

that it was all part of a mutual dialogue . . . . What is your

response to this?

SZ: I would just like to make two points. First, I still

think, as I first developed in Enjoy Your Symptom!, that

"resistance" is the appropriate term here. In deconstructionist circles,

you can almost feel it, this strong embarrassment about Lacan. So

they can buy Lacan only, as it were, conditionally, only insofar as

they can say he didn't go far enough. I claim that the truth is the

exact opposite; the only way they can appropriate Lacan is to submit

him to a radical misreading. You know, all the time we hear about the

"phallic signifier," and so on, and so on, but the figure of

Lacan they construct is precisely what Lacan was trying to undermine. For

example, one of the standard criticisms of some deconstructionists here

in the States is that Lacan elevates the "Big Other" into some kind

of non-historical, a priori symbolic order . . . . My only, perhaps

naïve answer to this is that the big Lacanian thesis from the

mid-fifties is that "The Big Other doesn't exist." He repeats

this again and again, and the point of this is precisely that there is

no symbolic order that would serve as a kind of prototranscendental

guarantor. My second point would be a very materialist, Althusserian

one. Without reducing the theoretical aspects of this conflict,

let's not forget that academia is itself an "Ideological State Apparatus,"

and that all these orientations are not simply theoretical orientations,

but what's in question is thousands of posts, departmental politics,

and so on. Lacanians are excluded from this. That is to say, we are not

a field. You know, Derrida has his own empire, Habermasians have

their own

[End Page 12]

empire--dozens of departments, all connected--but with Lacanians, it's

not like this. It's maybe a person here, a person there, usually marginal

positions. So I think we should never underestimate this aspect.

I think it would be much nicer, in a way, if Derrida said the opposite:

not that "I really hated him," but "there is a tension; we are

irreducible to each other." This statement you point out is the kiss

of death. What's the message in this apparently nice statement from

Derrida? The message is that "the difference is really not so strong,

so that our field, deconstruction, can swallow all of this; it's

really an internal discussion." I think it is not. I'm not even saying

who's right; I'm just claiming--and I think this is more important

than ever to emphasize--the tension between Derrida and Lacan and their

followers is not an interfamilial struggle. It's a struggle between two

radically different global perceptions. Even when they appear to use

approximately the same terms, refer to the same orders, they do it in a

totally different way, and this is why all attempts to mediate between

them ultimately fall short. Once, I was at a conference at Cardozo Law

School where Drucilla Cornell maintained that the Lacanian Real was a good

"first attempt" at penetrating beyond this ahistorical Symbolic

order, but that it also retains this dimension of otherness that is

still defined through the Symbolic order, and that the Derridean

notion of writing incorporates this otherness into the Symbolic order

itself more effectively, much more radically, so that the "real Real"

lies with Derrida's écriture, Lacan's "Real" is still under

the dimension of the metaphysical-logocentric order, and so on. This is

typical of what I'm talking about. We should simply accept that there

is no common language here, that Lacan is no closer to Derrida than to

Hegel, than to Heidegger, than to whomever you want.

CH: Judith Butler--with whom you have engaged in ongoing if

cordial debate--maintains that the Lacanian topology is itself dubious

for its nonhistorical, transcultural presuppositions. You yourself have

written that "jouissance is non-historical" <a name="REF9" href="#FOOT9">9</a>

--How do you respond to complaints such as Butler's?

SZ: Ah! This is what we are struggling with for dozens,

maybe hundreds of pages, in this book. My answer is to say that she

is non-historical. That is to say, she presents a certain narrative,

the same as Ernesto [Laclau]. With Ernesto, it's that we have an older

type of essentialist class politics, then slowly, slowly, essentialism

starts to disintegrate, and now we have this contingent struggle for

hegemony where everything is open to negotiation . . . . With Judith

Butler, there is the same implicit narrative: in the old times, there

was sex essentialism, biologically-identified; then slowly, slowly,

this started disintegrating into a sex/gender distinction, the awareness

that gender is not biologically--

[End Page 13]

but rather culturally--constructed; finally, we come to this

performativity, contingency, and so on and so on. So the same story,

from essentialist zero-point to this open contingency where we have

struggles for hegemony which are undecided. My first reproach as

a philosopher to this is that here, some metanarrative is missing. To

ask a very stupid, naïve question: why were people one hundred and

fifty years ago essentialists? Were they simply stupid? You know

what I mean? There is a certain, almost teleological narrative here,

in which from the "bad" zero-point of essentialism, slowly we come to

the "good" realization that everything is a performative effect, that

nothing is exempted from the contingent struggle for hegemony. But don't

you need a metanarrative if you want to avoid the conclusion that people

were simply stupid one hundred and fifty years ago?

CH: Well, perhaps not a metanarrative in the sense of a guiding

historical trajectory, but an acceptance of a loosely Foucauldian premise,

that one hundred and fifty years ago there were in place certain

institutional mechanisms, power-discourses, which coerced belief from

their subjects, engendered them . . .

SZ: Ah! But if you accept this Foucauldian metanarrative,

then things get a little complicated. Because Foucault is not speaking

about truth-value; for him, it is simply the change from one episteme to

another. Then . . . OK, I ask you another question--let's engage in this

discussion, with you as Butler. So: is there a truth-value distinction

between essentialism and the performativity of gender or is it simply

the passage from one episteme to another? What would you say?

CH: I won't speak for Butler, but if I were a Foucauldian,

I would say that the latter is the case, though I may prefer the later

episteme in light of my own political objectives.

SZ: Yeah, but Butler would never accept that.

CH: You don't think so?

SZ: You think she would? Because I think that the

epistemic presupposition of her work is implicitly--even explicitly,

at least in her early work--that, to put it bluntly, sex always already

was a performative construction. They just didn't know it then. But

you cannot unite this with Foucauldian narrative, because Foucauldian

narrative is epistemologically neutral, in which we pass from one

paradigm to the other. You know, sex was confessionary then; sex is

now post-confessionary, pleasurable bodies, whatever . . . . But OK:

Foucault would be one possible

[End Page 14]

metanarrative. Marxism would provide the other one, in the sense that

"the development of capitalism itself provoked a shift in subjectivity,"

whatever. But again, what I claim is that there is some unresolved

tension concerning historicity and truth-value.

I ask you a different question. Both in Laclau and in Butler, there

is a certain theory: Butler--and I'm speaking of early Butler; later,

things get much more complex, much more interesting, a more intense

dialogue becomes possible . . .

CH: So we're talking about Gender Trouble, parts of

Bodies That Matter . . .

SZ: Yeah, I'm talking about Gender Trouble

with Butler, and about Hegemony and Socialist Strategy with

Laclau. Why? Because let's not forget that these two books were the

only two authentic "big hits" of the time. . . . I'll tell you why:

both Gender Trouble and Hegemony and Socialist Strategy

were read as a model for a certain political practice. With Gender

Trouble, the idea was that performativity and drag politics could have

a political impact; it was, to put it in naïve, Leninist terms, "a

guideline for a certain new feminist practice." It was programmatic. It

was the same with Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. It was

a justification for the abandonment of so-called essentialist

class politics, after which no specific struggle takes priority,

we just have to coordinate our practices, cultivate a kind of "rainbow

coalition," although Ernesto rejects the term . . . . Now, what are these

theories? Are they universal theories--of gender or of social/political

processes--or are they specific theories about political practice,

sex practice, within a certain historical/political moment? I claim that

the ambiguity is still irreducible. At the same time that it's clear that

these theories are rooted in a certain historical moment, it's also clear

that they touch upon a universal dimension. Now my ironic conclusion

is that, with all this anti-Hegelianism, what both Ernesto and Judith

do here is the worst kind of pseudo-Hegelian historicism. At a certain

point, it's as if the access to truth or what always already was true

is possible only in a certain historical situation. So in other words,

philosophically, I claim that beneath these theories of contingency,

there is another narrative that is deeply teleological.

CH: But either Butler or Laclau might rebut this reproach by

pointing out that even such an embedded teleology is no worse than a

matrix of non-historical Lacanian presuppositions.

SZ: But my God, this is the big misunderstanding with

her! Butler systematically conflates what she calls "Real" with

some nonhistorical

[End Page 15]

symbolic norm. It's interesting how, in order to qualify the Lacanian

notion of sexual difference as a nonhistorical Real, she silently slips

in this nonhistorical gender norm, to then claim that "we homosexuals

are excluded from this," and so on. So her whole criticism inveighs

against this notion that Lacan thinks of sexual difference as part

of a nonhistorical, heterosexual normativity, and that this is what

should be subverted . . . . Of course, my counterpoint is that "Real,"

for Lacan, is the exact opposite. "Real" is that on account of which

every norm is undermined. When [Butler] speaks of historicity, my point

is not that there is something nonhistorical which precedes us. My

point is that the Lacanian Real, in a way, is historical,

in the sense that each historical epoch, if you will, has its own

Real. Each horizon of historicity presupposes some foreclosure of

some Real. Now, Judith Butler would say "OK, I agree with this, but

doesn't this mean that we should re-historicize the Real, include it,

re-negotiate it?" No, the problem is more radical . . . . Maybe the

ultimate misunderstanding between us--from my perspective--is that for

her, historicity is the ultimate horizon. As an old-fashioned

Freudian, I think that historicity is always a certain horizon which

has to be sustained on the basis of some fundamental exclusion. Why is

there historicity? Historicity doesn't simply means that "things change,"

and so on. That's just stupid evolutionism; not in the biological sense,

but common sense. Historicity means that there must be some unresolved

traumatic exclusion which pushes the process forward. My paradox would

be that if you take away the nonhistorical kernel, you lose history

itself. And I claim that Judith Butler herself, in her last book, is

silently approaching this position. Because in Gender Trouble,

the idea that your psychic identity is based on some primordial loss

or exclusion is anathema; it's the Big Bad Wolf. But have you noticed

that, if you read it closely, in The Psychic Life of Power she

now accepts this idea of a primordial loss when she speaks of these

"disavowed attachments"? The idea is now that we become subjects only

through renouncing the fundamental passionate attachment, and that there's

no return, no re-assumption of the fundamental attachment. It's a very

Freudian notion. If you lose the distance, the disavowal . . . it's

psychosis, foreclosure.

The big problem I have with this shift is that it's a very refined

political shift of accent. What I don't quite accept in her otherwise

remarkable descriptions is how, when she speaks about the "marginalized

disavowed," she always presupposes--to put it in very naïve

terms--that these are the good guys. You know: we have Power, which wants

to render everything controllable, and then the problem is how to give

voice to those who are marginalized, excluded . . .

[End Page 16]

CH: You see it as a kind of vulgar Bakhtinianism?

SZ: Yeah, yeah--you know what I'm aiming at. What

I'm aiming at is . . . aren't racist, anti-Semitic pogroms also

Bakhtinian carnival? That's to say that what interests me is not so

much the progressive other whom the power is controlling, but the way

in which power has to disavow its own operation, has to rely on its

own obscenity. The split is in the power itself. So that . . . when

Butler argues very convincingly against--at least she points to the

problematic aspects of--legal initiatives that would legalize gay

marriages, claiming that in this way, you accept state authority,

you become part of the "visible," you lose solidarity with all those

whose identity is not publicly acknowledged . . . I would say, "Wait a

minute! Is there a subject in America today who defines himself

as marginalized, repressed, trampled by state authority?" Yes! They

are called survivalists! The extreme right! In the United States,

this opposition between public state authority and local, marginalized

resistances is more and more an opposition between civil society and

radical right-wing groups.

I'm not saying we should simply accept the state. I'm just

saying that I am suspicious of the political pertinence of this

opposition between the "public" system of power which wants to control,

proscribe everything, and forms of resistance to subvert it. What I'm

more interested in are the obscene supplements that are inherent to

power itself.

CH: Has this relatively pro-State position played a role in

your decision to support the ruling party in Slovenia?

SZ: No, no . . . that was a more specific phenomenon,

a very naïve one. What happened was that, ten years ago, the danger

in Slovenia was the same as in all the post-Communist countries. Would

there emerge one big, hegemonic, nationalist movement that would then

colonize practically the entire political space, or not? That was the

choice. And by making some compromises, we succeeded. In Slovenia,

the scene is totally different than in other post-Communist countries,

in the sense that we don't have--as in Poland, as in Hungary--the big

opposition is not between radical, right-wing, nationalist movements

and ex-Communists. The strongest political party in Slovenia is neither

nationalistic, nor ex-Communist . . . it was worth it. I'm far from

idealizing Slovenia, but the whole scene is nonetheless much more

pluralistic, much more open. It wasn't a Big Decision; it was just

a very modest, particular gesture with a specific aim: how to

prevent Slovenia from falling into the Serb or Croat trap, with one big

nationalist movement that controls the

[End Page 17]

space? How also to avoid the oppositions I mention that define the

political space of Hungary and Poland?

CH: Could we talk about Kosovo? In The Metastases of

Enjoyment, when the Bosnian conflict was still raging, you

insisted that the West's inability to act was rooted in its fixation

with the "Balkan victim"---that is, with its secret desire to maintain the

Balkan subject as victim. More recently, when the NATO bombings

were under way, you claimed that the act came much too late. Now, the

West seems to have descended into a period of waiting for a "democratic

transformation" of Serbia . . .

SZ: . . . which will not happen, I think. Let me end up

with a nice provocation: the problem for me is this abstract pacifism

of the West, which renders publicly its own inability to act. What do

I mean by this? For the West, practically everything that happens in

the Balkans is bad. When the Serbs began their dirty work in Kosovo,

that was of course bad. When the Albanians tried to strike back, it was

also bad. The possibility of Western intervention was also bad, and so

on and so on. This abstract moralism bothers me, in which you deplore

everything on account of . . . what? I claim that we are dealing here with

the worst kind of Nietzschean ressentiment. And again, we encounter here

the logic of victimization at its worst, exemplified by a New

York Times piece by Steven Erlanger.

He presented the crisis in terms of a "truly human perspective" on

the war, and picked up an ordinary [Kosovar] Albanian woman who said,

"I don't care who wins or who loses; I just want the nightmare to end;

I just want peace; I want to feel good again. . . ." This, I claim, is

the West's ideal subject--not a conscious political fighter, but

this anonymous victim, reduced to this almost animal craving . . . as

if the ultimate political project is to "feel good again."

CH: In other words, a subject who has no stake in whether

Kosovo gains independence or not . . .

SZ: No stake, just this abstract suffering . . . and this

is the fundamental logic, that the [Kosovar] Albanians were good so

long as they were suffering. Remember the images during the war, of

the Albanians coming across the mountains, fleeing Kosovo? The moment

they started to strike back--and of course there are Albanian excesses;

I'm not idealizing them in this sense--they become the "Muslim danger,"

and so on. So it's clear that the humanitarian interventions of the West

are formulated in terms of this atmosphere of the protectorate--the

underlying idea is that these people are somehow not mature enough to

run their lives. The West should come and organize things for them, and of

[End Page 18]

course the West is surprised if the local population doesn't find

such an arrangement acceptable.

Let me tell you a story that condenses what I truly believe here. About

a year and a half ago, there was an Austrian TV debate, apropos of

Kosovo, between three different parties: a Green pacifist, a Serb

nationalist, and an Albanian nationalist. Now, the Serb and the Albanian

talked--of course within the horizon of their political projects--in

pretty rational terms: you know, the Serb making the claim that Kosovo

was, for many centuries, the seat of the Serbian nation, blah, blah,

blah; the Albanian was also pretty rational, pointing out that since

they constitute the majority, they should be allowed self-determination,

etcetera. . . . Then the stupid Green pacifist said, "OK, OK,

but it doesn't matter what you think politically--just promise me

that when you leave here, you will not shoot at each other, that you

will tolerate each other, that you will love each other." And

then for a brief moment--that was the magic moment--I noticed how,

although they were officially enemies, the Albanian and the Serb

exchanged glances, as if to ask, "What's this idiot saying? Doesn't he

get it?" My idea is that the only hope in Kosovo is for the two of them

to come together and say something like the following: "Let's shoot the

stupid pacifist!" I think that this kind of abstract pacifism,

which reformulates the problem in the terms of tolerance . . . My God,

it's not tolerance which is the problem! This is what I hate so much

apropos of Western interventionism: that the problem is always rephrased

in terms of tolerance/intolerance. The moment you translate it into this

abstract proposition which--again, my old story--depoliticizes

the situation, it's over.

Another aspect I want to emphasize apropos of Serbia: here, my

friend/enemy, a Serb journalist called Alexander Tijanic, wrote

a wonderful essay examining the appeal of Milosevic for the Serb

people. It was practically--I wondered if I could have paid him to make my

point better. He said that the West which perceives Milosevic as a kind

of tyrant doesn't see the perverse, liberating aspect of Milosevic. What

Milosevic did was to open up what even Tijanic calls a "permanent

carnival": nothing functions in Serbia! Everyone can steal! Everyone can

cheat! You can go on TV and spit on Western leaders! You can kill! You can

smuggle! Again, we are back at Bakhtin. All Serbia is an eternal carnival

now. This is the crucial thing people do not get here; it's not simply

some kind of "dark terror," but a kind of false, explosive liberation.

CH: Do you see a viable political entity in Serbia that might

alter this?

SZ: I can give you a precise answer in the guise of a

triple analysis. I am afraid the answer is no. There are three options

for Serbia: one

[End Page 19]

possibility is that Milosevic's regime will survive, but the country

will be isolated, ignored, floating in its own shit, a pariah. That's

one option. Another option that we dream about is that, through mass

demonstrations or whatever, there will be "a new beginning," a new

opening in the sense of a Western-style democratic upheaval. . . .

But I think, unfortunately, that what will probably happen if Milosevic

falls will be what I am tempted to call the "Russia-fication" of

Serbia. That is to say, if Milosevic falls, a new regime will take

over, which will consist of basically the same nationalists who are

now in power, but which will present itself to the West--like Yeltsin

in Russia--as open, and so on. Within Serbia, they will play the same

corrupt games that Yeltsin is now playing, so that the same mobsters,

maybe even another faction of the mafia, will take over, but they

will then blackmail the West, saying that "If you don't give us economic

help, all of these nationalists will take over . . . ."

CH: The "democratic resistance" in Serbia, in fact, is also

deeply nationalistic, right?

SZ: Of course! What you don't get often through the Western

media is this hypocritical . . . for instance, when there was a clash

between the police and anti-Milosevic demonstrators, you know what the

demonstrators were shouting? "Why are you beating us? Go to Kosovo and

beat the Albanians!" So much for the "Serb Democratic Opposition"! Their

accusation against Milosevic is not that he is un-democratic, though

it's also that: it's "You lost Bosnia! You lost Kosovo!" So I fear the

advent of a regime that would present itself to the West as open and

democratic, but will play this covert game. When pressed by the West to

go further with democratic reforms, they will claim that they are under

pressure from radical right-wing groups.

So I don't think there will be any great transformation. Now that

the Serbs have lost Kosovo, I don't think there will be another great

conflict, but neither do I think there will be any true solution. It

will just drag on--it's very sad.

University of Massachusetts,

Amherst

<a name="authbio" href="#top">Christopher Hanlon</a> recently received his Ph.D. from the University of

Massachusetts, Amherst. His current work concerns the intersections of

psychoanalysis, pragmatism, and American narratives of self-invention. His

interview with Slavoj Zizek took place in New York City on 15 October

1999.

Riot Hero

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