Fascism and Stalinism

Introduction

Ideology relies on an unassimilable kernel of enjoyment.

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."

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