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
