Talk:Fascism and Stalinism

One of the key claims of Zizek's political theory is that every ideology relies on an unassimilable kernel of enjoyment.l As we saw in the previous chapter, this means subjects are attached to an ideological formation not simply because of a set of identifiable reasons or causes, but because of something extra. Ideological formations rely on an extra, nonrational nugget that goes beyond what we know to produce our sense of who we are and what the world is for us. This nugget of enjoyment can be what we desire but can never achieve, as in, say, national unity. It can also be what we want to eliminate, but never can, as in, for example, political corruption. Again, the idea of enjoyment as a political factor is that some contingent element of reality takes on a special, excessive role and so attaches us to a socio-political formation. In Zizek's words, this element "becomes elevated to the dignity of a Thing."2 It becomes a fantastic stand-in for enjoyment.

Enjoyment, then, is a category that can help political theorists account for differences among ideological formations. A typical move for political theorists working in the liberal tradition is to emphasize the legitimacy of a political formation. For these theorists, what makes a formation legitimate is the presence of consent: can the power formation be understood as one on which people would agree? In contrast, Zizek differentiates among ideological formations in terms not of legitimacy but of enjoyment. A primary task for the political theorist, then, is to grasp how a given formation organizes enjoyment.

Accordingly, Zizek rejects "totalitarianism" as a category through which to analyze fascism and communism. The category is too broad, too embedded in a simple liberal framework of consent versus force, to account for how political subjects might be attached to and invested in fascist and communist arrangements of power. Breaking with liberal political and intellectual notions of "totalitarianism," Zizek argues for the difference between fascism and communism in terms of their organizations of enjoyment, in what steals it and what provides it.

Zizek's thesis is straightforward: the difference between fascism and Stalinism rests in their relationship to "class struggle," that is, to the fundamental antagonism rupturing society.3 The Nazis attempted to neutralize class struggle by displacing it onto what they naturalized and racialized as an essential, foreign element to be eliminated. Stalinism, a perverse bureaucratic formation perceiving itself as having won and thus eliminated the class struggle, tried to retain and enhance economic productivity. It strove to direct exceptional economic production and growth without the constraints of the capitalist form.

In this chapter, I set out Zizek's analyses of the discursive structures of Nazism and Stalinism, showing how he reaches these conclusions. As I do so, I add to the concept of enjoyment an additional element of Zizek's political theory, namely, his use of Lacan's "four discourses." I begin by considering in more detail what is at stake in Zizek's refusal of the term totalitarianism as a way of thinking about fascism and communism.

The Totalitarian Threat

In his 2001 book, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, Zizek argues that the term totalitarian prevents thought.4 The elevation of Hannah Arendt "into an untouchable authority," he announces, "is perhaps the clearest sign of the theoretical defeat of the Left."5 In subjecting the term totalitarianism to critique by differentiating among its objects, that is, by emphasizing contra Arendt that fascism and communism are not the same, that they mobilize enjoyment differently, have different projects and, indeed, have different degrees of greatness or authenticity, Zizek is trying to clear out a space for radical politics. As he clearly states in the conclusion of his 2004 book, Organs without Bodies, "Nazism was enacted by a group of people who wanted to do very bad things, and they did them; Stalinism, on the contrary, emerged as the result of a radical emancipatory attempt."6 Three aspects of Zizek's effort to open up possibilities for radical thought by distinguishing between Nazism and Stalinism bear emphasizing.

First, when he rejects the idea that fascism and communism are "totalitarian" regimes, Zizek is resisting the forced choice that entraps radical thought. Challenges to the present combination of global capitalism and liberal democracy typically encounter the rejoinder that revolution always leads to totalitarianism, that the present is the best we can have because any attempt to change it will inevitably lead to something worse, as the experiments of the twentieth century made so bloodily clear? Zizek argues that to accept this forced choice between acquiescence to the present and the risk of a totalitarian future, however, is to accept liberal democratic hegemony in advance, to close off the very possibility of thinking otherwise. If there is not one totalitarianism, one option, one alternative to liberal democracy, then the choice for liberal democracy is not so clear. One needs to think about it, to understand how other possibilities emerged and might emerge, what aspirations they held in the past and may hold in the future. One has to recognize the differences between Left and Right critiques of the present liberal democratic order.

Accordingly, Zizek, second, links the rise of fascism not to dogmatism but to liberalism's suspicion of every form of engagement.8 Many leftist intellectuals today reject deep, constitutive attachments to practices or beliefs as primitive or dangerous. Liberal neutrality and so-called postmodern relativism overlap in a skepticism about convictions.9 In Zizek's view, this rejection is indicative of a cynicism complicit with fascism. It produces the atmosphere of confusion and undecideability-all ideas are equal, none is better than another-into which the fascist decision for order intervenes. Precluding radical, dogmatic, defenses of equality or justice, suspicion toward engagement "defangs" leftist thought in advance by refusing the division or choice-this, not that-constitutive of politics.1O

Third, Zizek seeks to recall the history of antifascismY World War II involved an alliance between liberal democratic and socialist countries. The Cold War steadily eroded this alliance. In the wake of the demise of socialism, it seems all but forgotten. This forgetting supports intensifications of global capitalism and the present rise of neoconservativism and religious fundamentalism. The grip of neoliberal economic policy and its rhetorical alliance with classic liberal appeals to freedom has meant that, officially at least, socialism is a dead project-a false start. Lost in this ideological convergence is an ideal celebrated under Stalinism, namely, a view of material production and manual labor as a "privileged site of community and solidarity." What such a notion maintains, Zizek writes, is that "not only does engagement in the collective effort of production bring satisfaction in itself; [but also] private problems themselves (from divorce to illness) are put into their proper perspective by being discussed in one's working collective."12

Little effort has been made to learn from the socialist experiment-to consider its successes, possibilities, and the traumatic results of its failure. Accordingly, Zizek resolutely condemns Frankfurt School theorists for failing to consider in any serious or systematic way either the specificity of Stalinism or the "nightmare of real existing socialism."13 One of the merits of Zizek's critique of totalitarianism is thus the way that it addresses directly the horrors of Stalinism in order to create a space for this work of recovery. As he says, a crucial political task "is to confront the radical ambiguity of Stalinist ideology which, even at its most 'totalitarian,' still exudes an emancipatory potential."14 Stalinism was not totalizing in the sense that it closed the gap between real and ideal. It appealed to aspirations for justice and solidarity. Dissidents and critics could thus evoke communist ideals against the regime itself. In other words, they could draw on more than liberal democracy and more than market freedom. Real existing socialism was a tragedy in socialism's own terms.15

In the face of the prominent fury of religious and ethnic nationalism at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, Zizek's account of fascism and Stalinism's differing organizations of enjoyment provides political theory with an important new way of understanding attachments to and excesses of political violence. His analysis of the difference between fascism and communism makes clear how not all opposition, not all revolution, is the same. In this respect, it can benefit emancipatory struggles against authoritarian and right-wing regimes as it learns from socialist experience and highlights the interconnections between capitalism and ethnic nationalism. Zizek's rejection of totalitarianism, then, is a crucial component of his effort to open up a space for the critique of liberal democracy and its capitalist suppositions.

As the following sections make clear, Zizek's engagement with fascism and communism changes in the course of his writing. For example, in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, Zizek considers the Holocaust in Lacan's terms, as Nazism's "desperate attempt to restore ritual value to its proper place" through that "gigantic sacrifice to the obscure godS."16 Yet, in "Lenin's Choice," the afterword to his edited collection of Lenin's writings, Revolution at the Gates, published in 2002, Zizek rejects Lacan's reading of the Holocaust, accepting instead Giorgio Agamben's notion of the Jews as homo sacer, ones who could be killed but not sacrificedP He likewise changes his account of Stalinism, altering his early formulation of the "totalitarian" subject as he comes to emphasize what I argue is a kind of split Stalinism, a Stalinism split between its perverse operation and its official bureaucratic face.18

Additionally, Zizek is not always consistent in his terms. He may compare fascism and Stalinism, where fascism stands in for National Socialism. Conversely, he sometimes uses Nazism as an example of fascism. He may use Stalinism as a synonym for late socialism or he may distinguish between Lenin, the Stalinist fantasy of Leninism, the period of the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union of the twenties, the purge of the nomenklatura in the thirties, and the late days of real existing socialism. My approach to these changes is, first, to emphasize the fundamental antagonism of class struggle as the kernel that remains the same throughout Zizek's discussion of fascism and communism and, second, to recognize that sometimes the changes signal that we are dealing with a "parallax gap," that is, the displacement of an object that comes about when it is viewed from different perspectives.19

To see parallax at work, stretch your arm out in front of you; point your index finger up; close one eye and then the other while looking at the tip of your finger. Your finger will seem to move back and forth. This movement, or shift, is parallax. The Mobius strip provides another example of parallax at work. The weird thing about the Mobius strip is that it seems to have two sides. But, when you try to follow or trace one side, you end up, not with two sides, but just one. At the very place where you would expect the two sides to meet, you encounter one side. So, really, the sides never meet. You can never have both sides together; it is either one or the other. 20 The notion of the parallax gap is a way of thinking of the two sides of the strip. The shift between desire and drive that I introduce in Chapter One is a further example of a parallax gap. These are two radically incommensurable organizations of enjoyment. Adopting one perspective on enjoyment displaces the other. The parallax gap thus expresses the way "the 'truth' is not the 'real' state of things, that is the 'direct' view of the object without perspectival distortion, but the very Real of the antagonism which causes perspectival distortion. The site of truth is ... the very gap, passage, which separates one perspective from another."21 Truth is neither one perspective nor multiple perspectives. Instead, it is found in the distortion or gap as such.

Important to Zizek is the way the concept of a parallax gap designates an insurmountable discord between different perspectives.22 By means of this concept, Zizek accounts for perspectival shifts in his own work-the way that seemingly incommensurate claims are not simple contradictions but in fact indications of a more profound gap within the field or object under consideration. More importantly, though, he uses the notion of a parallax gap to revise Lacan's notion of the Real and to augment his reading of Hegel as a philosopher of negativity.

In brief, unlike Lacan's Real, Zizek's "parallax Real" is not something that remains the same beneath varying changes in symbolization. Instead, it has no substantial density; it is simply the gap in perspectives, the shift from one to another. The Real, Zizek writes,

is the disavowed X on account of which our vision of reality is anamorphically distorted; it is simultaneously the Thing to
53

Zizek's Politics Fascism and Stalinism 56 Freud conceives the fundamental antagonism as the death drive. Hegelian dialectics treats this antagonism as a contradiction and a fundamental incompleteness.3! Zizek, while endorsing and adopting both these views, adds to them the Marxist name for antagonism: "class struggle." Zizek conceives class struggle as the struggle over the meaning of society: which class stands-in for society as a whole and which class is thereby constituted as a threat to it?32 He thus does not view class struggle in positive terms, that is, as referring to an opposition between existing social groups. To treat class struggle positively would be to integrate it within the symbolic, to reduce it to already given terms, and thereby to eliminate the very dimension of antagonism. As Zizek points out, the fact that "class struggle" cannot be understood as positive in this sense is clear once we recognize how classes tend to be symbolically represented in threes, the upper, lower, and middle classes.33 Representations of class, in other words, occlude social division, substituting distinct, naturalized categories for the reality of conflict. He writes, "The 'middle class' grounds its identity in the exclusion of both extremes which, when they are directly counterposed, give us 'class antagonism' at its purest ... the 'middle class' is, in its very 'real' existence, the embodied lie, the denial of antagonism."34 Class st(uggle designates the impediment that gives rise to these different symbolizations, to the differing ways that the extremes are posited as well as to their fetishistic disavowal in the form of the middle class. Second, class struggle for Zizek is not a species of identity politics. It is not one among a variety of struggles for hegemony in the social field. Class struggle operates according to a logic fundamentally different from that of identity politics. The basic goal of feminist, gay, and anti-racist activists is to find ways of getting along, to find new ways of accepting and valuing the diversity of ways of becoming, "to translate antagonism into difference."35 In contrast, the aim of class struggle is to intensify antagonism, to 57 Chantal Mouffe.27 It is their merit to have developed a theory of the social field, Zizek writes, founded on the notion of antagonism, "on the acknowledgement of an original 'trauma,' an impossible kernel which resists symbolization, totalization, symbolic integration."28 The idea is that there is no "essence" of society or set of ordered relations constitutive of sociality as such. There is no society in which every element fully occupies a place.29 Instead, society emerges around, through, and as a result of failures and solutions, struggles, combinations, and exclusions. One simple way to think about the impossibility of the social is with respect to the nonsocial. How might such a line be drawn? Would it refer to nature? The divine? Chaos? How would we be able to determine the contents or attributes of each side? Wouldn't we be compelled to draw the line within society, finding the natural, the divine, and the chaotic as gaps or ruptures in sociality? The very notion of the completeness of the social, moreover, presupposes a fixity of meaning incompatible with language. It erases anything like freedom, change, or contingency from human experience. Typically, Marxists have understood the antagonism at the heart of society in terms of alienation and hence as resolvable. Social unity is possible. It will result when workers are no longer alienated from their labor, each other, and themselves, that is, when the revolution comes and capitalism is overthrown. Again, like Laclau and Mouffe, Zizek rejects the Marxist vision of an ultimately reconciled, unantagonistic society. Instead, he views antagonism or radical negativity as constitutive of the human condition. "There is no solution, no escape from it; the thing to do is not to 'overcome,' to 'abolish' it, but to come to terms with it, to learn to recognize it in its terrifying dimension and then, on the basis of this fundamental recognition, to try to articulate a modus vivendi with it."30 We can't eliminate antagonism, but we can affect it. We can change the ways it is materialized-the structures that form around it.

Zizek's Politics Fascism and Stalinism transform the multiplicity of differences into a division between us and them and then to annihilate them (that is, the "socio-political role and function" of capitalists understood as a class). The goal is not mutual recognition or respect. It is transforming relations of production so as to eliminate capitalists altogether. Additionally, class struggle determines the very horizon of political struggle today: "it structures in advance the very terrain on which the multitude of particular contents fight for hegemony."36 Here again breaking with Laclau and Mouffe, Zizek separates class out of the proliferating political struggles around sex, sexuality, race, ethnicity, ability, religion, and the environment (new social movements, identity politics) to emphasize the way that this very proliferation is an aspect of postindustrial society. Global capitalism "created the conditions for the demise of 'essentialist' politics and the proliferation of new multiple political subjectivities."35 Movements thus unfold in the spaces opened up (and closed off) in the course of the expansions and intensifications of capitalism-expansions and intensifications that are themselves manifestations of class struggle, both in terms of gains made by labor and in terms of capitalist successes. To shift gears somewhat with a too simple example, in the late twentieth century, identity-based movements corresponded with changes in consumerism. Not only did marketers begin identifying niche markets such as youth, Blacks, gays, and senior citizens, but consumer choices themselves came to signify (and substitute for) a certain politics. One could signal one's radicality by a style of dress, by the music one purchased, and by the places one shopped. Accordingly, Zizek's point that class struggle is not reducible to identity politics draws our attention to the way class modifies and impacts particular and identity-based struggles, constituting a kind of extra barrier to their successes. Feminists have witnessed precisely this barrier as college-educated upper- and middle-class women rely on lower-class women to work in our homes and care 58 for our children. Opportunities for some women have not meant opportunities for all but have reinforced already existing inequalities. In acknowledging the appropriateness of Zizek's prioritizing of class struggle, we might also think of the challenges of political organizing in the intensely mediated terrains of communicative capitalism: it requires lots of time and money. 38 Here again we have an indication of the way that the very terrain of politics is configured so as to privilege financial and corporate interests. In sum, for Zizek, class struggle is the antagonism inherent to and constitutive of the social field. It is the formal gap that accounts for the fact that other struggles can link together in different ways, for the fact that not all feminist and antiracist struggles, for example, are necessarily progressive. Class struggle suggests a division that traverses or splits all existing, positive divisions. As I see it, Zizek's rendering of the fundamental antagonism constitutive of the social as "class struggle" is strictly correlative to his emphasis on the way that Capital overdetermines every aspect of contemporary life.39 That it seems impossible today to imagine a world without capitalism, that the constraints and demands of productivity, trade, investment, accumulation, and employment seem natural, inevitable, and unavoidable is both the result of class struggle, the horizon in which it occurs, and the very form that it takes. Class struggle, then, marks the division in capitalist society, the specificity of the rupture in the social field of communicative capitalism. In referring to the fundamental antagonism as class struggle, Zizek highlights Capital as the determining fact of the current historical epoch even as he allows for movement, change, and struggle. Differently put, class struggle is another name for Capital, or it is Capital viewed from a different perspective: the parallax gap involved in thinking social relations under Capital. We could even say that class struggle is the excess that even as it drives capitalist development, designates its limit. If that obstacle 59

Zitek's Politics Fascism and Stalinism is removed-that ultimate inequality, ownership, and exploitation-there is no capitalist production. I read Zizek's version of class struggle, then, as involving both antagonism as the fundamental gap constituting society and a shift in our perspective on Capital.40 Class struggle is Real in the Lacanian sense that it is inaccessible through the symbolic (where it appears instead as three classes or is present only in the distortion it effects on any representation) and unavoidable, or determining. In this way, class struggle encapsulates Zizek's claim that "there is no relationship between economy and politics" such that we can grasp both levels at the same point.41 Thinking about economy and politics together produces a pronounced parallax; it involves a set of shifts back and forth from one to the other and the inevitable displacement that results. Class struggle is for Zizek what "sexual difference" is for Lacan.42 Just as Lacan explains sexual difference by saying "there is no sexual relationship," no place or perspective where feminine and masculine are equal or commensurate, so should we read Zizek's term class struggle as a way of designating the lack of a relationship between economy and politics, the gap and distortion in our thinking from one to the other. As I mention at the beginning of this chapter, Zizek's rejection of the notion of totalitarianism as a category through which to analyze fascism and communism hinges on his claim that fascism and communism deal with class struggle in different ways. Fascism tries to resolve class struggle by displacing the antagonism onto race, placing all the blame for the upheavals of capitalism onto the Jew.43 The Jew is figured as a foreign body, corrupting the organic unity of the nation. The fascist solution is thus to purify the social body by eliminating the Jew. Racial difference takes the place of class struggle. In contrast, communism confronts antagonism directly. It attempts to hold onto unbridled productivity, striving to realize the capitalist fantasy of ever-accelerating development unconstrained by the capitalist form.44

Fascism: The Discourse of the Master Zizek's discussions of fascism focus on Nazi Germany and the way the Nazis attempted to force order onto the excesses of capitalism by displacing class struggle onto the naturalized and racialized figure of the Jew. He emphasizes the role of the fascist, "totalitarian" Master in delineating the political body to be ordered and protected. He attends as well to the workings of the Nazi bureaucracy and to aesthetic dimensions of Nazi rule. Each perspective involves a shift from the other, alerting us to the underlying, traumatic gap of the Real even as each can be understood in terms of the more conventional Lacanian account of the registers of the Real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. The imaginary refers to fantastic images and figurations. The symbolic denotes the order of language and norms (as well as their violations). The Real exceeds, ruptures, and conditions these norms and images; we can understand it here via the notion of antagonism. My claim, then, is that Zizek's three accounts of Nazi rule exemplify the parallax Real. In so doing, the Real appears as an aspect or dimension of itself.45 National socialism, Zizek explains, was an attempt to change something so that nothing would change.46 It confronted capitalism's revolutionizing, destabilizing tendencies, yet it did so in a way that sought to ensure the continuity of capitalist production. Nazism tried to eliminate the antagonism fundamental to capitalism (and to society) by locating it in a specific cause that could then be eliminated.47 Instead of acknowledging social division, it conceived society as a unified body. Nevertheless, it could not avoid the very real disruptions fracturing Germany in the wake of its defeat in World War 1. Nazism treated this unity as an empirical social fact, one that could be identified and restored. Differently put, Nazism attempted to retain capitalist productivity by subjecting it to political control, that is, by displacing the economic crisis onto a set of political coordinates where the problem was identified and embodied as the Jews. 61

Zitek's Politics Fascism and Stalinism Zizek's account of Nazism as an effort to have capitalism without capitalism relies on the notion of class struggle in two key senses. The first is historical and involves class struggle in its positive dimension: National Socialism emerged as a specific response to capitalism's excesses and disruptions (to economic and financial crises), labor unrest, and the work of organized communist and socialist parties. The Nazis rose to power through the suppression and elimination of communists. The second sense is conceptual and involves class struggle as abstract, as antagonism or a kind of negation. Nazism attempts to control and contain the self-revolutionizing excesses of capitalism by displacing them onto the figure of the Jew as the cause of all disruption. It responds to antagonism by treating what is constitutive as accidental, natural, and remediable. Zizek draws on Lacan's formula of the discourse of the Master to explain the functioning of the social bond provided by National Socialism. The discourse of the Master is the first of Lacan's four discourses-those of Master, hysteric, university, and analyst. Lacan developed these four discourses in part to account for differences in the ways that discourses function, differences in the kinds of social links they provide and the kinds of suppositions and requirements that structure them. Claims uttered in the name of scientific knowledge, for example, rely on a discursive formation different from that upon which moral injunctions rely. A full account of Lacan's four discourses is beyond the scope of this book.48 Nevertheless, it is important to attend to them since Zizek draws upon them frequently as he theorizes the ways that ideological formations organize enjoyment. The four discourses constitute one of the primary systematic elements of his thought and they provide a useful heuristic for thinking through the ways that discursive structures differentially rely on and produce authority, truth, and enjoyment. 62 In brief, the four discourses are sets of formulae that distinguish between speaking and the place from which something is spoken. For example, my question, "What are you doing?" can be understood in a variety of ways, depending on to whom I am addressing the question and what underlies or supports my asking of the question. If I ask my young daughter, "What are you doing?" I am likely speaking from a position of parental authority. If I ask an associate in my laboratory, "What are you doing?" I may be speaking as a fellow scientist. If I ask a political leader, "What are you doing?" I may be challenging her authority, calling upon her to justify her policies and decisions. Lacan formulates the differences among these questions as different discourses, different ways that communication establishes a social link. These three situations are examples of the discourse of the Master, the discourse of the university, and the discourse of the hysteric. I discuss the fourth discourse, the discourse of the analyst, later in this chapter. The formulae for the four discourses are based on Lacan's formula of the signifier: the signifier represents the subject for another signifier. If we return to my example of asking my daughter, "What are you doing?" we can say that the signifier Mommy represents me in relation to another signifier, daughter. That she does not call me by first name is a sign of our relation to one another. We might also think of email addresses. My email address represents me for another email address. It can travel all over the place, often becoming integrated into enormous mailing lists and serving me spam. My name represents me to other names. I cannot control the dissemination and circulation of my name; people can attribute words and views to my name that I would never recognize as my own. Understood more generally, then, Lacan's formula of the signifier tells us that a signifier is that which has a meaning effect, that this effect occurs in relation to other signifiers, and that this effect will exceed these relations.49 63

Zizek's Politics Fascism and Stalinism 64 What about the bottom half of the formula, $-a? First, $ is the matheme for the Lacanian split subject, the subject who is always decentered with respect to the symbolic order of language, as we saw in Chapter One. As we also saw in Chapter One, a stands for an excessive kernel or nugget of enjoyment, that which disrupts the subject. Second, the positions that $ and a occupy in the discourse of the Master are those of "truth" and "production," respectively. The bottom left position in the formula stands for the truth that underpins the speaker or agent, a truth that must be hidden or suppressed. The bottom right position in the formula is the excess produced in the relation expressed between the two sides of the top half of the formula. Third, the formula $-a is also the Lacanian formula for fantasy. The formula for the discourse of the Master thus expresses in a kind of weird algebra some basic attributes of this specific kind of social bond. It tells us that the Master's words provide knowledge with a support in fundamental truth. Why? Because truth underpins the Master's injunction to t~e slave. Yet the fact that $ is in the position of truth tells us that there is something fishy in the Master's claim to speak from the position of truth. It tells us that the Master is hiding the fact that he, too, is a split subject. The Master is covering his own weakness or lack, the way that, like everybody else, he also fails to occupy language fully. He, too, had to give up the fantasy of full enjoyment when he entered the symbolic, even as his words require fantastic supplement. Thus, there is an excess to his words, an enjoyment that exceeds speaking, truth, and knowledge. Hence, objet petit a is in the position of production. Finally, because the lower half of the formula for the discourse of the Master is itself the formula for fantasy, we see that the Master's authority depends on fantasy as its necessary support. What does this have to do with fascism? Zizek reads Nazism as introducing a Master into a chaotic social field. National Socialism operates as a discourse of the Master. Describing German 65 The discourse of the Master is the first of Lacan's four discourses or four accounts of the social link provided in commu- I nication. Its structure is rooted in the absolute authority of the Master's word. The Master's word is law-even if it seems unfair or crazy. So the Master can say, "do this" or "do that," "pick that cotton," "kneel!" or "go fight that battle!" Any ofthese injunctions is acceptable within the discourse of the Master simply because the Master said it. Lacan's "matheme" or symbol for the Master is Sl. In the discourse of the Master, this symbol occupies the first (upper left) position in the formula. Lacan calls this position the position of the "agent," that is, the one who is speaking. The formula is written: Sl S2 $ a The formula tells us that the Master (Sl) is speaking, that he is the agent. Moving one step clockwise to the right, we have the position of the other, or addressee. One might expect that the addressee of the Master would be the slave and that S2 would then be the matheme for slave. Unfortunately, matters are more complicated. S2 stands for "knowledge" or the "chain of signifiers." The idea is that in working for the Master, the slave acquires knowledge that the Master both lacks and does not care anything about. We can see, then, the top half of the formula as expressing the idea of an arbitrary signifier (Sl) holding together or directing a chain of signifiers or knowledge (S2). Another example might be that of the capitalist addressing the worker. The capitalist likely has no idea how to fix the machine or produce the goods that the worker is producing, and he does not really care how things are done; he just wants them done. The important thing here is that S2 stands for knowledge.

Zizek's Politics Fascism and Stalinism anti-Semitism in the 1920s, Zizek writes, "People felt disoriented, succumbing to an undeserved military defeat, an economic crisis which ate away at their life savings, political inefficiency, moral degeneration ... and the Nazis provided a single agent which accounted for it all: the Jew, the Jewish plot. That is the magic of a Master ... "50 Crucial to the Nazi appeal to order is the production of meaning, the provision of an explanation that could tell Germans who they were. The Master's speech orders the social field, telling Germans that they are a great, unified, people, a people tied by their blood to their land. In providing Germans with their place, moreover, the Nazi Master necessarily produces a remainder, something that exceeds the social field or unified body of the people. Nazism identifies and naturalizes this remainder in the fantastic figure of the Jew. Differently put, the order that the Nazi Master establishes is based on a fantasy (recall that the bottom half of the discourse of the Master is the formula for fantasy, $-a). More specifically, this fantasy is that the subject is an object for the other's enjoyment (an idea we encountered in the preceding chapter). 51 The German subject is fantasized as the object of the Jews' enjoyment. Instead of the Germans themselves enjoying, the Jews were enjoying in their place. Instead of the Germans themselves profiting, living well, happy, and secure, all this profit, happiness, and security is fantasized as possible, reachable, were it not for the activities of the Jews who have stolen it. The very activity, strength, and agency that the fascist Master promises and seemingly installs in his people is thus premised on his subjects' ultimate passivity, that they have been and are the victims of an other who steals their enjoyment. The Master guarantees their enjoyment, indeed, their very possibility of understanding themselves as a nation characterized by a national Thing, by presenting that enjoyment as threatened or stolen. I have explained thus far Zizek's theorization of the social bond provided by fascism in terms of the discourse of the Master. 66 National Socialism confronts the upheavals of class struggle by attempting to retain capitalism and displace its disruptions onto a naturalized and racialized fantasy of the Jew. In this ideological formation, the Real of antagonism overlaps with the fantasy of stolen enjoyment. I turn now to the structure of National Socialism as a symbolic order. To understand fascism symbolically, as a set of norms and laws, involves a shift in perspective. For Zizek, this is a shift to the Nazi bureaucracy. Taking up the vast bureaucratic infrastructure of the Third Reich, Zizek rejects Hannah Arendt's notion of the banality of eviI.52 In her account ofthe trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, Arendt emphasizes Eichmann's meticulous investment in rules, order, bureaucracy, and paperwork. In Arendt's work, the horror of mass extermination appears not as some terrifying monstrous evil but as the accumulation of details, the mindlessness of displacing responsibility by just following orders. The Nazi regime is the rules and laws that make it up and allow it to function. Zizek argues that the Holocaust can in no way be reduced to a machinic byproduct of bureaucratic administration. Rather, it needs to be understood in terms of its relation to enjoyment. Under the Third Reich, the systematic extermination of Jews, Poles, Roma, and homosexuals was, even when known, not openly avowed (unlike, for example, the imprisonment of communists and sterilization of the "mentally defective"). As Zizek points out, "the execution of the Holocaust was treated by the Nazi apparatus itself as a kind of obscene dirty secret, not publicly acknowledged, resisting simple and direct translation into the anonymous bureaucratic machine."53 The fact that the administration of the death camps had hidden components, that exactly what was being administered had to remain concealed, is what makes Arendt's account ultimately unsatisfying. There was clearly more to the Holocaust than the administration of rules by civil servants, namely, the relation of the rules to enjoyment.

Zizek suggests three ways in which the symbolic logic of the bureaucracy operated with respect to enjoyment. The rules enabled subjects to maintain a gap between their duties and the horrors they were perpetrating. In this sense, the rules were a kind of shield, a big Other on whose behalf subjects were acting. They provided subjects with a symbolic screen against the Real of enjoyment. Additionally, the rules enabled subjects to participate in shared transgression. Precisely because the horrors of the extermination camps could not be officially acknowledged, precisely because the crimes remained crimes, remained obscene violations of German ethical codes, those carrying them out participated in a shared transgression. Collective violation thus provided a libidinal support for or sense of Nazi commonality. 54 They were all in this together. Finally, the rules delivered their own libidinal kick, that excess that provides enjoyment to those who are carrying out orders. Describing the way bureaucratization itself was a source of enjoyment, Zizek writes, Does it not provide an additional kick if one performs the killing as a complicated administrative-criminal operation? Is it not more satisfying to torture prisoners as part of some orderly procedure-say, the meaningless "morning exercises" which served only to torment them-didn't it give another "kick" to the guards' satisfaction when they were inflicting pain on their victims not by directly beating them up but in the guise of an activity officially destined to maintain their health?55 In addition to analyzing Nazism from the perspective of the Real of antagonism and from that of the symbolic order of its bureaucratic rules, Zizek also considers the imaginary dimension of Nazi ideology. We can understand this ideology as what the Master provides and what the symbolic rules are established to secure. Yet, insofar as there is an irreducible gap between these three domains, they will not be strictly commensurate. To summarize the analysis thus far, we first saw how the Master's discourse responded to the antagonism of class struggle and displaced it onto race. Here Nazism both tries to control capitalism's disorder and relies on this disorder for its own power; it can identify what corrupts society and purify society of this corruption. The racialization of antagonism through the Master effects a closure, a full incorporation of the system's excess. Even the level of fantasy supports rather than disrupts the discourse of the fascist Master insofar as it confirms the theft of enjoyment. Recall, the fantasy promises enjoyment by positing it as missing and by explaining why: it was stolen by the Jews. Second, we approached Nazism from the perspective of the symbolic. This shifted our attention to the split between the official face of the rules and the obscene enjoyment that supports it. This perspective helps account for the attachment of German subjects to the regime, to the way the rules themselves delivered enjoyment. The account of enjoyment from the perspective of the symbolic, then, is not the same as the fantasy of stolen enjoyment we encountered when we began from the Real of antagonism. There is a gap between the analyses, yet singularly each misses important dimensions of fascist rule. I now move to the third perspective on fascist rule: the imaginary or the fantastic images and scenes that inspired National Socialism. The shift to this third domain draws out yet another relation to enjoyment crucial to Nazism, namely, an attachment to an aestheticized ideal of community. 69 (If this seems far-fetched, one might consider villains in Hollywood movies. They set up elaborate mechanisms to torture and confront the heroes, whereas the extras are simply shot. This point was made directly by Doctor Evil's son in Michael Myers' film, Austin Powers. Incredulous before his father's comically elaborate plan, involving sharks with laser beams attached to their heads, Scott, the son, asks, "Why don't you just shoot him?")

Contra Martin Heidegger and with Alain Badiou, Zizek asserts that Nazism did not contain any "inner greatness."56 Nonetheless, this does not mean it lacked an "authentic" vision. 57 This vision, "a notion of the deep solidarity which keeps the community of people together" was a kernel of nonideology, an ideal or aspiration that cannot be reduced to an instrument of power.58 Zizek argues, "Of course Fascist ideology 'manipulates' authentic popular longing for a true community and social solidarity against fierce competition and exploitation; of course it 'distorts' the expression of this longing in order to legitimize the continuation of the relations of social domination and exploitation. In order to be able to achieve this effect, however, it none the less had to incorporate authentic popular 10nging."59 People are not simply coerced. Nor do they directly accept open plays of power. Rather, their tie to an ideological formation is secured by utopian longings for something more, something better. Every ideology, including fascism, relies on such a non ideological kernel. In Nazism, this kernel was rendered as "an ecstatic aestheticized experience of Community."60 Far from an element of the total politicization of society, Nazi spectacles relied on the suspension of the political through elaborately staged rituals. They were theatrical enactments that produced an illusion of community, a mirroring of community, by covering over the way modernization and technological mobilization necessarily disrupted the imagined organic social body.61 Not only was the experience of community aestheticized, but so was its horrific other, the concentration camp. Zizek emphasizes that the Nazi camps involved an "aesthetics of evil."62 "The humiliation and torture of inmates," he writes, "was an end in itself." It served no rational purpose and in fact was counter to efficient use of the inmates in forced labor.63 Instead, it produced broken, barely human beings, beings who having lost any will to live, simply persisted. They seemed to feel no pain and showed little reaction to stimuli. Their attitude was one of complete and fundamental indifference. Zizek's discussion of the aesthetics of evil in the camps thus draws on Giorgio Agamben's account of the Muselmann (Muslim). He joins Agamben in viewing the Muselmann as the "zero-level of humanity" or unsymbolizable point of the Real.64 The Muselmann can be considered neither animal nor human. Nor can his experience be formulated in terms of authenticity or inauthenticity. Instead, the Muselmann is the point at which all such oppositions break down. He emerges as an excess of the Real over the imaginary, spectacularized, and aestheticized production of a German community. In taking up Zizek's account of fascism, I have emphasized his analysis of Nazism as a displacement of the Real of class struggle onto the racialized figure of the Jew, as the symbolic operation of bureaucratic rules and the relation of this operation to enjoyment, and as an imaginary longing for community aestheticized and theatrically enacted. Yet these differing analyses do not fit into a single explanation. They arise instead out of the parallax gap between economy and politics, our inability to think both together. In these analyses, it is clear that "there is no relation between economy and politics," that economy and politics do not meet but that their relation involves an inevitable gap. This parallax, moreover, overlaps with the Real of antagonism, with the displacements and distortions that result from the effort to avoid class struggle-to have capitalism without capitalism. The Nazis attempt to have capitalist modernization without its disruptions and upheavals, to replace class struggle with a "naturalized" power struggle between organic society and its corrupting excess. Thus, for Zizek their revolution was not a revolution at all but just a fake, a spectacular enactment covering over and sustaining its failure to confront this antagonism directly.

Stalinism

Unlike Nazism, Stalinism, Zizek argues, involved a Real Event. It grew out of real revolutionary change, a real attempt to confront antagonism directly. Even the horrifying excesses of Stalinist terror testify to its inner greatness.65 For Zizek, the contrast between Stalinism and Nazism appears most clearly at precisely that point where supporters of the notion of totalitarianism find an identity between the two regimes-the camps and the purges. Yet, as I explain, this contrast in itself cannot sufficiently explain the different structures of communism and fascism, the way they provide enjoyment. Zizek's account of these different structures, moreover, shifts as he grapples with the legacy of real existing socialism and comes to emphasize the difference between Stalinism and Nazism and the similarity between Stalinism and liberal democracy. Accordingly, after I set out Zizek's comparison of the Muselmann (Muslim) and the victim of the Stalinist show trials, I return to Lacan's four discourses, using their formulation of changes in the social link as a basis for thinking through Zizek's analysis of a Stalinism split between perversity and bureaucracy.66 the revolutionary state of emergency ended and the communists declared victory in the class struggle. The show trials, in other words, operated within and as the law of the new regime. To this extent, they enact a simultaneous realization and perversion of law. The structure of law under Stalinism thus does not follow the structure theorized by Agamben (following Carl Schmitt) in terms of the norm and the exception. Instead, nothing, even the gulag, was external to the system; everything was part of it. Nevertheless, "at the same time, the system is non-all, it is never able to totalize itself, fully to contain the excesses it generates."67 The same moves or agents that facilitated the revolution could destroy or derail it; what was a middle course at one point could be a rightist deviation at another; over-fulfilling the Party's expectations could become counter-revolutionary sabotage. Indeed, the same law that codified collective ideals could become a perverse vehicle for enjoyment, an excuse for doing one's duty. As I mention in the previous section, Zizek draws from Agamben in treating the Muselmann (Muslim) as the key figure in the Nazi concentration camps. In the Stalinist camps, Zizek points out, one rarely finds an equivalent figure. He cites Primo Levy: "It is possible, even easy, to picture a Socialism without prison camps. A Nazism without concentration camps is, instead, unimaginable."68 The Stalinist camps were not essential components of socialist rule. Rather than relying on an "aesthetics of evil" that inverted the idealized, ecstatic vision of community as offered by the Nazis, the gulag extended basic socialist notions, treating its prisoners as an expendable work force. It would get as much work from the imprisoned as possible and then dispose of the remainders. For Zizek, this difference between the camps tells us that under Stalin "ethical miracles of mass defiance and demonstrative public solidarity were still possible."69 To exemplify his point, Zizek describes a series of strikes that broke out throughout Siberian labor camps in 1953. Most of the 73 The Discourse of the Pervert To understand Stalinism in terms of the discourse of the pervert, I begin by comparing the Nazi extermination camps with the Soviet gulag, moving then to consider the difference between the Muselmann and the victim of the Soviet show trial. This comparison yields two key results. First, we see how, for Zizek, even the worst excesses of Stalinism retained an emancipatory dimension, an ideal that cannot be reduced to the horrors of Stalinist terror. Second, and consequently, this glimmer of hope corresponds to the difference in the place of law in Nazism and Stalinism. Whereas Nazi rule relied on a state of exception and a suspension of law in the camps, Stalinist law consolidates at the point when 72

Lizek's Politics Fascism and Stalinism strikes collapsed in the face of threats and promises from Moscow. One, Mine 29 at Vorkuta, held out. Zizek writes, When the troops finally entered the main gate, they saw the prisoners standing behind it in a solid phalanx, their arms linked, singing. After a brief hesitation, the heavy machineguns opened up-the miners remained massed and erect, defiantly continuing to sing, the dead held lip by the living. After abollt a minute, reality prevailed, and the corpses began to litter the ground. However, this brief minute in which the strikers' defiance seemed to suspend the very laws of nature, transubstantiating their exhausted bodies into the appearance of an immortal singing collective Body, was the occurrence of the Sublime at its purest, the prolonged moment in which, in a way, time stood still. It is difficult to imagine something like this taking place in a Nazi extermination camp.70 ideals were not excluded from the gulag; the Soviet work camps were not spaces exempt from these ideals; on the contrary, the presence of the camps marks the incompleteness of the socialist project, its failed realization despite the boasts of the official rhetoric to victory in class war. Nothing was external to the system; nevertheless, the system could not totalize itself. Instead, it drew from its own internalized negativity, to revolutionary upheavals now instantiated as rule by the Party. Zizek highlights this fundamental distinction between Nazi and Soviet terror by comparing the Muselmann to the victim of the Stalinist show trials: "The Nazi treatment produces the Muslim; the Stalinist treatment produces the accused who confesses."72 These two figures occupy "the Void." Deprived of all life, they are past caring about either their existence or their historical place, yet they differ insofar as the victim of the show trial must participate in his degradation. Although a staging and a perversion, the show trial remains within and part of the law; the victim is expected to act his part, to play the role the Party assigns to him. The victim is thus not simply tortured and rendered lifeless and abject; rather, he is forced actively to relinquish his human dignity. He must be made willingly to sacrifice every remnant of ethical integrity for the sake of the Party?3 Only by confessing to betraying the Party can he uphold it. Zizek reads the 1937 trial of Nikolai Bukharin in terms of this tragic dilemma (more precisely, in terms of a "horror beyond tragedy").?4 Bukharin could not face the sacrifice of his ultimate commitments, of that beyond to life that makes his life as a revolutionary worth living. In one of his last speeches before the Central Committee, Bukharin explained that, for the sake of the Party, he would not commit suicide but would simply continue his hunger strike. On the one hand, he accepted the Party line that suicide signifies an insidious counter-revolutionary plot. Far from a heroic, authentic act, suicide was understood completely instrumentally, as a way to deceive the Party and disgrace the Central Committee. Bukharin even accepted that there "is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge."75 On the other hand, while he recognized that he had committed some "political sins," he denied the guilt thrust upon him and would "deny it forever."76 He continued to insist upon his subjective position, his innocence, and his complete sincerity. In a desperate, emotional letter to Stalin earlier that same year, he agonized over the possibility that Stalin might actually think he was guilty: "But believe me, my heart boils over when I think that you might believe that I am guilty of these crimes and that in your heart of hearts you yourself think that I am really guilty of all these horrors. In that case, what would it mean?"77
Zizek points out that, in his letter, Bukharin inverts the standard ethical relationship between guilt and responsibility. We typically think it unjust to punish someone who is innocent of the crimes of which he is accused. What really worried Bukharin, however, is not that Stalin would punish him unjustly, but that Stalin actually believed the punishment was warranted. Preferable would have been Stalin's acknowledgment that Bukharin was innocent but nonetheless had to be sacrificed for the good of the Revolution. This acknowledgment, this attachment beyond mere life, is precisely what Bukharin was denied.
For Zizek, Bukharin's insistence on his innocence confirms his guilt. He writes,

his utter devotion to the Party and to Stalin personally, he was not ready to renounce the minimum of subjective autonomy.78
Thus Bukharin still clings to the logic of confession deployed by Foucault-as if the Stalinist demand for a confession was actually aimed at the accused's deep self-examination, which would unearth the most intimate secret in his heart of hearts. More precisely, Bukharin's fatal mistake was to think that he could, in a way, have his cake and eat it: to the very end, while professing
That such an act of solidarity and collective resistance was possible suggests to Zizek the fundamental difference between the Nazi and Soviet camps. The defiant unity of the miners confronted the Soviet regime with its own perverted revolutionary ideal. It is as if, at least in this instance, those imprisoned by the regime believed more in the regime than the regime believed in itself. The incommensurable "logics" of the Nazi and Soviet camps marks a fundamental difference between fascism and communism. The Nazis were determined to purify the nation of a foreign intruder. The camps were the space of this exclusion. As theorized by Agamben, the camps were a state of exception where law was "in force in the form of a suspension," where what was outside and external to the law was indistinguishable from what was internal to the law, where there was no difference between following and transgressing a norm.?l In the Soviet case, the camps involved not purification and exclusion but continuation of a radical revolutionary project. As the example of the strikes makes clear, socialist

What Bukharin would not give up, what he would not sacrifice, is what we might call his own personhood. His insistence on his subjective innocence means he did not fully accept that the Party determined the truth. Rather, for Bukharin, there were objective facts that needed to be taken into account beyond the Party. He proceeded as if the trial were a ritual for determining the truth, as if somehow the Party were subject to another law, a law beyond its own making. From the standpoint of the Party, however, the trial was a procedure for demonstrating the truth that it knew. To the extent that Bukharin denied this demonstration, he was guilty. He failed to give everything to the Party, to allow it to be everything?9
Zizek also argues that the Stalinist communists themselves were similarly "impure." They, too, were impure insofar as they enjoyed (got off on) demanding that Party members fully sacrifice everything. Their very excessive preoccupation with duty above all else, with a duty violently and terroristically enforced, points to an obscene enjoyment. Zizek thus views Stalinism proper as perverse (as a making of oneself into the instrument of another's enjoyment): the Stalinist communist exculpates himself (for enjoying) with reference to the big Other of the Revolution or of the Progress of Humanity. Stalinism thus differs from Nazism in that it structures enjoyment perversely, as an enjoyment that comes from doing one's duty. One can inflict all sorts of pain on another guilt free, fully exonerated from any sense of responsibility.
The discourse of the pervert is not one of Lacan's four discourses (Master, hysteric, university, and analyst). Nevertheless, its formal structure is identical to that of the discourse of the analyst. 80 Here is the formula for the discourse of the analyst/perverse discourse:

In this formula, objet petit a is in the position of agent; the split subject is in the position of Other or addressee; knowledge (S2) is in the position of truth; the Master (Sl) is in the position of production. The formula tells us that this is a discursive structure where the object, remainder, or excessive kernel of enjoyment speaks. This object may be imaginary; it may be covering a void. Either way, it is a kind of nonassimilable kernel that addresses the subject. The formula also tells us that this speaking excess is supported by knowledge. The subject who is addressed by it, then, supposes that the object's words are based in knowledge (or that the object covers some kind of fundamental, hidden, truth). The outcome of this discourse is authority: (SI) the Master. Because it is produced as a kind of surplus, however, it is not fully operable. It does not anchor knowledge or guarantee truth. We can think of it, then, as a kind of nonfunctioning authority.
Applied to Stalinism, the formula of the discourse of the pervert tells us not to expect rational utterances. Insofar as an unassimilable object speaks, Stalinist injunctions can be irrational and nonsensical. Their content does not matter; some kind of excess or extra is doing the talking. Accordingly, Zizek points out that not only did the investigations part of the Stalinist purges rely on clearly fabricated accusations, but these very accusations fluctuated arbitrarily, latching onto different groups purely in an effort to meet district liquidation quotas.8l The orders issued from the Party leadership were vague and contradictory, at times supporting the nomenklatura against the rank and file, at times supporting the rank and file against the nomenklatura, and all the while demanding harsh measures even as it warned against excess. For this reason, Zizek argues that by 1937, Stalinism ceased to function as a discourse. Its perverse structure used language not as a social link but as a pure, meaningless instrument. 82
S2 beneath objet petit a reminds us that the irrational, pointless orders were supported by the "objective knowledge of the laws of history" or by the Soviet bureaucracy. We note as well that the discourse is not anchored in a Master (SI) and thus can "run amok."83 The discourse is thus less one of authority than of irrational power. During the self-destructive frenzy of the purges, there was no governance or authority to speak of. Rather, there were panicky actions and reactions, an acting out that attempted to cover a more fundamental impotence. Authority proper is foreign, excessive to, Stalinist rule. For Zizek, a clear indication of Stalin's inability to rule appears in the personality cult that grew up around Stalin in the thirties. Stalin was depicted as the supreme genius, providing advice and wisdom on everyday matters of gardening and tractor repair. Zizek writes, "What the Leader's intervention in everyday life means is that things do not function on the most everyday level-what kind of country is this, when the supreme Leader himself has to dispense advice about how to repair tractors?"84
In Zizek's view, the irrationality of the Stalinist purges testifies to the authenticity of the Russian Revolution. They were the form in which the "betrayed revolutionary project" haunted the regime."85 To support this contention, Zizek rejects accounts of the revolution that locate its defeat in the mid-I920s (as in Trotsky's argument that the revolution failed when the Party accepted the doctrine of "socialism in one country") or in the very move to take state power and function as a state (the position of Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus).86 He advocates instead a view defended by historian Sheila Fitzpatrick: the revolution ended in 1937 when the great purges started coming to an end.87 The most profoundly revolutionary period occurred during the years 1928 through 1934, when Russian society was radically transformed. Zizek explains:

It was only the thrust of 1928 that directly and brutally aimed at transforming the very composure of the social body, liquidating peasants as a class of individual owners, replacing the old intelligentsia (teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and technicians) with a new one ... The difficult thing to grasp about the terrible years after 1929, the years of the great push forward, was that, in all the horrors beyond recognition, one can discern a ruthless, but sincere and enthusiastic, will to a total revolutionary upheaval of the social body, to create a new state, intelligentsia, legal system, and so forth.</ref>88
In Zizek's view, Stalinism was a perversion of the revolution, but perversion does not mean the misdirection of the revolution or its betrayal in the form of rule by the Party. Rather, perversion refers to the way it was instrumentalized, to the furthering of violence for the sake of the big Other of history or progress. What we see in Stalinism is a regime confronting the conflict between governance and revolution. Stalinism extended the basic negativity of revolution, the truth of its confrontation with antagonism, back into the regime itself. This prevented any kind of stabilization or completion of the revolutionary moment, acknowledging, in a way, the very conflict between revolutionary energy and the law the revolution attempts to install. Stalinism functioned as a kind of violent transition and point of overlap between revolutionary violence and bureaucratic rule, a "vanishing mediator" (a concept I take up more thoroughly in the following chapter) between the authentic Leninist revolution and the stagnant period of bureaucratic rule that followed.
That the purges continued the violent upheaval and transformation of the revolution is manifest not only in their brutality and irrationality but also in their very notion: "the struggle of the Stalinist Party against the enemy becomes the struggle of humanity itself against its non-human excrement."89 More specifically, the Stalinist terror was at its fiercest after the new constitution was accepted in 1935. That is, its most extreme and irrational moments took place after the regime claimed victory in the class struggle and took upon itself the role of ensuring ever-increasing productivity. Zizek emphasizes that ratification of the Soviet constitution, as it ended the state of emergency, universalized the right to vote, and reinstated the civil rights of groups previously treated as enemies, was supposed to signal the end of class war and the formation of a new, classless, socialist order. The state, then, was not a vehicle for class rule but for rule by the people. Anyone opposed to the regime was thus not an enemy of the working class, but an enemy of the people, "worthless scum which must be excluded from humanity itself."90 The Stalinist state treated any difference from or rupture in the social as a threat to humanity precisely because it declared itself victorious in class war.
Thus far I have discussed Zizek's treatment of Stalinism as a perverse discourse. For Zizek, the brutal violence of Stalinism testifies to the authenticity of the Russian Revolution. Its pervasive irrationality, its inward turn against the Party; and even the demands for sacrifice made during the show trials are evidence of the extraordinary confrontation with class struggle and the effort to transform society in its entirety. Additionally, I have highlighted Zizek's comparisons of the Muselmann and the victim of the show trial and of the Nazi and Soviet camps. Each comparison suggests a difference between the legal logics of fascism and communism. Whereas the Nazi model relies on the idea of a state of exception that blurs the distinction between law and its constitutive outside, the Stalinist case finds law to be pervasive, all-encompassing, but necessarily incomplete. Law can be found even in the most horrifying reaches of the gulag. This suggests both the possibility of glimmers of hope, of ideals that might still be operative, and the perverse instrumentalization of law. I turn now to Stalinism's other, bureaucratic face.

Bureaucracy: Stalinism and the Discourse of the University

Zizek points out that one of the key differences between Stalin's and Lenin's time, and hence one of the indications of the perversion of the revolution, is the status of political terror. Under Lenin, terror was openly admitted. Under Stalin, terror was hidden, "the obscene, shadowy supplement of public official discourses."91 As discussed above, the perversity of the Stalinist purges marks in part the continuation of revolutionary negativity against precisely that Party attempting to consolidate state power; it is the Party's own conflict over its betrayal of revolution, its compulsion to "(re)inscribe its betrayal of the Revolution within itself, to 'reflect' or 'remark' it in the guise of arbitrary arrests and killings."92 The purges thus bear witness to the way the revolution involved a real confrontation with class struggle. They are "the very form in which the betrayed revolutionary heritage survives and haunts the regime."93
Nonetheless, the purges are not the only way Stalinism confronts class struggle. Its official face, its public, bureaucratic, existence testifies as well to Stalinism's alleged victory over capitalism, its attempt to have capitalist productivity without capitalism. What, then, is the structure of Stalinist bureaucracy?
To answer this question, I return to Lacan's four discourses, turning now to the discourse of the university. Zizek argues that Stalinist bureaucracy is one of two forms of the university discourse that dominates modernity: capitalism and bureaucratic "totalitarianism."94 This tells us that, for Zizek, capitalism and Stalinism have a similar structure, a fundamental formal similarity. Stalinism, he argues, was a symptom of capitalism.95 To see how this works, we need to look at the discourse of the university:
A first glance tells us that S2, or knowledge, is in the position of the speaking agent. S2 addresses objet petit a, the little nugget or remainder of enjoyment. Sl (the Master) is in the position of truth, and the subject ($) is in the position of production.
We can understand the discourse of the university as a discourse in which knowledge speaks. We can think of it, then, as the rule of experts. These experts provide facts. To be sure, they do not tell us what the facts mean, what we should do with them, or how we should evaluate them. The formula makes this lack of an explicit evaluation visible by putting the subject ($) in the position of production or surplus. The poor subject is left out, split and uncertain, provided no real, solid position by the knowledge that speaks. The knowledge that speaks addresses the object (a in the position of addressee), as if the subject were, for example, the object of the medicalized gaze theorized so well by Foucault. We might also say that the facts address subjects only in terms of their object-like qualities, that is, only as what Agamben conceives as "bare life," only as bodily beings and not as beings oriented toward a higher purpose or cause.96

What is hidden under the facts, however, what the facts want to deny, is the way they are supported by power and authority (Sl below the bar, in the lower left-hand corner; the Master in the position of truth). As Zizek argues, the "constitutive lie" of university discourse is its disavowal of its own performative dimension. University discourse proceeds as if it were not supported by power, as if it were neutral, as if it were not, after all, dependent upon and invested in specific political decisions.97
Capitalism and bureaucratic socialism, as a generation of critiques of technocracy and instrumental reason made clear, emphasize expertise.98 Capitalists ground their expertise in efficiency as understood by economic theory. Stalinism, or the bureaucracy of late socialism, grounds its expertise in its ability fully to plan social life so as to maximize productivity. Each disavows the nonscientific component of political power underlying its administration.99
Likewise, each addresses the subject as a kind of object, providing no real ideological or symbolic locus of subjective meaning. We see this in the way capitalism undermines symbolic identities, how it undermines such forms of attachment through the revolutionary force of ever-expanding and intensifying markets. Instead of a symbolic identity of the kind provided by a Master, capitalism offers its subjects enjoyment (objet petit a).lOO Late socialism also failed to provide a symbolic identity. Those who identified with socialism, those who really believed, were dangerous to a system that relied on its subjects' cynical dis-identification, at best, and actual moral bankrupty (lying about basic facts of life, cheating the system, trading on the black market), at worst.lOl Zizek thus describes Stalinism's obsessive effort to keep up appearances:

We all know that behind the scenes there are wild factional struggles going on; nevertheless, we must keep at any price the appearance of Party unity; nobody really believes in the ruling ideology, every individual preserves a cynical distance from it and everybody knows that nobody believes in it but still, the appearance has to be maintained at any price that people are enthusiastically building socialism, supporting the Party, and so on.102

We can imagine the result of actual identification with socialist ideals-a dissident calling out of corrupt Party hacks with their cars, dachas, foreign currency stores, and well-furnished apartments while regular working people wait in line for bread and live in squalid, over-crowded, poorly built housing complexes out on the edges of the cities.
For Zizek, the most interesting aspect of modern power captured by the formula of the discourse of the university stems from the distinction between the upper and lower levels of the diagram.
The upper level (S2-a), he explains, expresses the fact of contemporary biopolitics (knowledge addressing objects, treating subjects as objects) while the lower (Sl-$) marks the "crisis of investiture," or the collapse of the big Other that I introduced in the first chapter (there is authority, but the subject is a remainder; differently put, authority is not subjectivized). In contemporary capitalist society biopolitics appears in two forms: the life that has to be respected and the excess of the living other that one finds harassing, unbearable, and intolerable. Thus, in one respect, the other is fragile and vulnerable. It must be fully respected. In another, the fragility of the other is so great, the need for respect so strong, that anything can harm it; everything is dangerous. Zizek argues that the discourse of the university enables us to understand how these two attitudes are two sides of the same coin. They are both brought about by a crisis in meaning, by "the underlying refusal of any higher Causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself."103 That is to say, the structure of university discourse reminds us that authority is presupposed yet denied by expert rule; the Master does not speak and does not occupy the position of agent; rather, he occupies the position of Truth.
What about socialist society? Although Zizek's discussions of cynicism address the lower level of university discourse, the cynical expression of empty verbiage characteristic of real existing socialism, he neglects the biopolitical aspects of Stalinism. A plausible reconstruction, which would require strong empirical evidence, might consider the specificities of Soviet medical science and public health policies as well as the racial aspects of Russian dominance in a country of multiple languages and ethnicities. Perhaps more to Zizek's point, such a reconstruction would necessarily focus on the way that, particularly under Stalin, medicine, science, health, and population were linked into a larger focus on production and productivity per se.
As does capitalism, so did socialism rely on "integrating its excess," that is, on a constant revolutionizing. Yet whereas capitalism is a self-revolutionizing economic form, one whose very crises, inequities, and excesses drive its productivity, Stalinism was a selfrevolutionizing political form. Stalinism tried to attain (and surpass!) capitalist productivity without the capitalist form, without, in other words, class struggle. Once class struggle officially ended with the 1935 constitution, the revolutionizing impulse of capitalism came under the control of the political domain in the form of terror. As a consequence, the inequities of capitalism shifted into social life as more direct forms of hierarchy and domination. Zizek writes, "In the Soviet Union from the late 1920s onwards, the key social division was defined not by property, but by direct access to power mechanisms and to the privileged material and cultural conditions of life (food, accommodation, health care, freedom of travel, education)."lo4 For this reason, Zizek can say that Stalinism was the "symptom" of capitalism. It was a symptom insofar as it revealed the truth about the social relations of domination that capitalist ideology presents as free and equa1.105
As I read it, Zizek's account of Stalinism points to a Stalinism split between its bureaucratic operation as a kind of technocratic attempt at productivity unstained by class struggle, on the one side, and as a perverse effort to realize the truth of a vision of human progress toward communism, on the other. Zizek thus confronts the combination of horror and utopian aspiration particular to this socialist attempt to bring the economy fully under political control.
Zizek's analysis of Stalinism as structurally similar to capitalism is particularly important today-Stalinism was perhaps one of the first "postproperty" societies. Citing battles over intellectual property, licensing, and copyright brought about by digitalization, Zizek concludes that a similar dissolution of property now faces capitalist societies.106 Clearly, under the conditions of contemporary communicative capitalism, rights of use and access take on a greater importance than those associated exclusively with ownership. And, even more relevant in my view is the increased dominance of global finance and the concentration of financial control in the hands of a capitalist elite. Under the neoliberal form of capitalism that has become hegemonic since the end of the 1970s, economic power has shifted from "production to the world of finance."107 In any case, Zizek's point is that capitalist societies confront ever more directly raw power relations-the immediate forms of hierarchy and domination characteristic of real existing socialism. The danger accompanying the gradual disappearance of the role of property is the emergence of "some new (racist or expert-rule) form of hierarchy, directly founded in individual qualities, and thus canceling even the 'formal' bourgeois equality and freedom. In short, insofar as the determining factor of social power be in/exclusion from the privileged set (of access to knowledge, control, etc.), we can expect an increase in various forms of exclusion, up to downright racism."lo8 What shape will a postproperty society take? Will it be egalitarian or hierarchical? Struggling over this shape will be the most fundamental political problem in coming years. In Zizek's view, neither the old Marxist utopia of hyperproductive communism nor the liberal-democratic emphasis on neutral procedures and human rights is adequate to this challenge, a point I develop in the following chapter. Thus, it is necessary to undertake the slow, difficult work of building something new.

So What About Lenin?

I have presented Zizek's critique of the notion of totalitarianism and his discussion of Nazism and Stalinism in terms of the primacy of class struggle. The Nazis attempted to create an organic social whole unrent by antagonism. To do so, they racialized antagonism and worked violently to purify the social body of foreign, staining elements, elements they located primarily in the figure of the Jew. Hence, National Socialism followed the discourse of the Master: anti-Semitism posits enjoyment as attainable yet stolen by the Jews. Stalinism perverts an authentic revolutionary moment. It thus confronted class struggle directly, yet in so doing, in subjecting the economy to complete political control, in trying to have capitalist productivity without the capitalist form of private property, it relied on direct forms of hierarchy and domination. Stalinist terror functioned (or disfunctioned) perversely. The pointless, irrational injunctions of the terror were supported by the "truth" of the laws of history, of the absolute knowledge of the Party. Fascism and Stalinism, then, are not the same. Understanding how they are different sheds light on current problems of globalized racism and ethnic nationalism, on the one hand, and the challenges posed by neoliberalism, on the other.
The difference between the discourse of the analyst and the perverse discourse rests in the ambiguity of objet petit a (occupying here the position of agent). In the perverse discourse, objet petit a designates the subject's ($ in the position of addressee) enjoyment. That is, the pervert is the one who knows what the subject desires and makes himself into an instrument of that desire. Accordingly, we see how the formula places knowledge (S2) in the position of truth, supporting the object that speaks. In the discourse of the analyst, this knowledge (S2) is the "supposed knowledge of the analyst." This means that in the analytic setting, the subject presumes that the analyst knows the secret of its desire. But, this presumption is false. The enigmatic analyst simply adopts this position, reducing himself to a void (objet petit a) in order that the subject will confront the truth of her desireYo The analyst is not supported by objective or historical knowledge. Rather, the position is supported only by the knowledge supposed by the subject through transference. Analysis is over when the subject comes to recognize the contingency and emptiness of this place. Zizek follows Lacan in understanding this process as "traversing the fantasy," of giving up the fundamental fantasy that sustains desire. I I I Thus, whereas the pervert knows the truth of desire, the analyst knows that there is no truth of desire to know. The process of traversing the fantasy, of confronting objet petit a as a void, involves "subjective destitution." As the addressee of the speaking object, the subject gives up any sense of a deep special uniqueness, of certain qualities that make him who he is, and comes to see himself as an excremental remainder, to recognize himself as an object. Neither the symbolic order nor the imaginary realm of fantasy provides any ultimate guarantees. They cannot establish for the subject a clear, certain, and uncontested identity. They cannot provide him with fundamental, incontrovertible moral guidelines. What is left out, then, is the authority of the Master (Sl, now in the position of production).
Is the only lesson we can take from the socialist experience a negative one? Is Zizek's message ultimately a conservative warning against radical change? As I read him, the answer is no. I thus conclude this chapter by introducing Zizek's use of Lenin and explore his discussion of Lenin more thoroughly in the last chapter. What we need to keep in mind here is that Stalinism is, for Zizek, a perversion of an authentic revolution. What, then, does an authentic revolution look like? What can we learn from Lenin? For this discussion to be clear, I return again to Lacan's four discourses, more specifically, to the discourse of the analyst.
As Zizek points out, the discourse of the analyst has the same structure as the perverse discourse (Lacan did not consider the perverse discourse as one of the four discourses, emphasizing instead the discourse of the analyst).109 Again, the formula is
S2 Sl

Zizek views the discourse of the analyst as homologous to revolutionary emancipatory politics. What speaks in revolutionary politics is thus like objet petit a, a part that is no part, a part that cannot be recuperated into a larger symbolic or imaginary unity. Such a part, in other words, is in excess of the whole. In emphasizing the structural identity between revolutionary politics and the discourse of the analyst, moreover, Zizek is arguing that the revolutionary act proper has no intrinsic meaning. It is a risk, a venture that may succeed or fail. Precisely what makes revolution revolutionary is that it leaves out (produces as remainder) the authority of a Master: there are no guarantees.
For Zizek, what was remarkable about Lenin was his willingness to adopt this position. Zizek emphasizes two specific moments: 1914 and 1917. In 1914, Lenin was shocked and alone as all the European Social Democratic parties (excluding the Russian Bolsheviks and the Serb Social Democrats) turned to patriotism, approving war credits and generally falling in with the prevailing nationalist fervor. Yet this very catastrophic shattering of a sense of international workers' solidarity, Zizek argues, "cleared the ground for the Leninist event, for breaking the evolutionary historicism of the Second International-and Lenin was the only one who realized this, the only one who articulated the Truth of the catastrophe."112 Likewise, in April 1917, most of Lenin's colleagues scorned his call for revolution. Even his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, worried that Lenin had gone mad, but Lenin knew that there is no proper time for revolution, that there are no guarantees that it will succeed.113 More importantly, he knew that waiting for such an imagined proper time was precisely the way to prevent revolution from occurring. For Zizek, then, Lenin is remarkable in his willingness to take the risk and engage in an act for which there are no guarantees. We should recall that the odds were fully against Lenin-in peasant Russia he did not even have a working class that could take power.
Against communist dogma regarding the laws of historical development and the proper maturity of the working class, Lenin urged pushing through with the revolution. He did not rely on objective laws of history. He also did not wait for permission or democratic support. He acted without grounds, inventing new solutions in a moment when it was completely unclear what would happen. He refused to wait for authorization or do what others thought he "ought" to do, doing instead what he had to do. Lenin, then, takes the position of objet petit a. The truth of his view does not rest in laws of history but in its own formal position in an uncertain situation, a position marked by the Leninist Party.
Recall Zizek's account of Stalinist perversion: its official face was one of bureaucratic, expert rule while its obscene underside was perverse, a violence cloaking itself in duty to the Party. Zizek argues that the problem was that the Stalinist Party was not "pure" enough; it got caught up in enjoying doing its duty. I 14 The difference between the Stalinist and the Leninist Party, then, can be found precisely here. For Lenin, the Party was a form for class struggle. It provided an external, organizing form, a way to cut into, or intervene in, a situation. Its knowledge (S2) was strictly identical to its formal position as "true."115 There was nothing objective or neutral about it: it was a partisan, political truth, the truth of class struggle, of the hard work of organizing, transforming, and even producing a revolutionary alliance of peasants and workers. Lenin accepted the notion that the state is an instrument of oppression, the dictatorship of one class over another, and thus was open to the use of terror.116 In contrast, the Stalinist party claimed neutrality and objectivity, both in terms of the laws of history and in terms of the end of class struggle in the triumph of the socialist state. The ultimate tragedy, says Zizek, is that the strength of the Leninist revolutionary Party made Stalinism possible. There is one last, potentially puzzling, link between Stalinism and Leninism that I want to address, that between the revolutionary willing to go to the limit and the victim of the show trial. Zizek uses the same words, "subjective destitution," to describe them both. Their position is homologous: internal and external to the situation at the same time, markers of the truth of a formation. How should we understand these two figures?
One possibility is that the revolutionary is somehow ethically superior to the victim. The victim pathetically holds onto his individuality, refusing to relinquish it for the sake of the Party. Another possibility is that whereas the revolutionary willingly forsakes all symbolic guarantees, the victim is forced to sacrifice them, forced to undergo a second death. Neither of these is satisfying. The first option presumes a kind of ethical stability that the revolutionary moment disrupts. The second presumes a kind of agency that Zizek finds absent from the revolutionary moment: true revolutionary struggle means one is not free not to act; one is forced into it.
The difference between the discourse of the pervert and the discourse of the analyst suggests a better way to understand these two figures. The victim of the show trial, the victim of the demands made by the Party, alerts us to the tragedy of the perversion of Lenin's revolutionary step. It marks the shift from the urgency of what Zizek understands as "enacted utopia" to the desire to evade responsibility for one's acts by grounding them in duty to a big Other. As I argue in Chapter Four, this difference also embodies a different relation to law, one crucial to Zizek's overall political theory. Unlike some radical thinkers writing today (such as Agamben), Zizek does not abandon law and sovereignty. Lenin's greatness is not simply that of a risk-taker but of a founder, one who takes responsibility for introducing a new order. As we shall see, addressing the fundamental political problems of the day-antagonism in an era post-property and the exclusions and violence of neoliberal capitalism-is a matter not of escaping or abandoning the law but of traversing the fantasies that support the law, confronting the perversity and enjoyment in our relations to law. For these problems to be clear, I move in the following chapter to Zizek's critique of contemporary democracy. I then return to law, emphasizing both the split in law and the possibility of moving from law to love.

Talk:Fascism and Stalinism

Contents

Introduction=

The Totalitarian Threat

Stalinism

Bureaucracy: Stalinism and the Discourse of the University

So What About Lenin?

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