Guide to Slavoj Zizek

The Subject

The cogito

Slavoj Žižek fully endorses the model of the Cartesian subject.

The Introduction of Žižek's The Ticklish Subject begins with his assertion that 'a spectre is haunting Western academia…, the spectre of the Cartesian subject' (TTS: 1). The Cartesian subject, or cogito as it is also known, is, he proclaims, constantly liable to attempts to exorcize it from contemporary thought by New Age obscurantists, postmodern deconstructionists, Habermasians, Heideggerians, cognitive scientists, Deep Ecologists, post-Marxists and feminists.

René Descartes (1596-1650), the French philosopher, mathematician and soldier who is often referred to as the Father of Modern Philosophy. Descartes' starting point for the cogito was a cold winter's day. It was so icy that he climbed into a very large stove to keep himself warm and stayed there all day. During his confinement Descartes commenced upon the philosophic procedure which is named after him: Cartesian doubt. The point of this procedure was to establish what could really be known.

Descartes began by isolating the evidence of his senses: was he really sitting by a fire in his dressing gown? He concluded that he could not be sure. He had often dreamt of just such a scenario and, in his dream, this had seemed real to him. However, even if the dream itself were an illusion, what of the concepts employed by the dream, the mathematical concepts such as shape, number and size which apparently match those of reality? Descartes concedes that although these may seem to be correct, there is a possibility that they are all the invention of an evil genius designed to fool him. If this were the case though, Descartes argues that he could not be deceived if he did not exist in some form. Given that his body may be an illusion, Descartes concludes that at the very least his thought must exist, if it is to be deceived:

While I decided thus to think that everything was false, it followed necessarily that I who thought thus must be something; and observing that this truth: I think, therefore I am, was so certain and so evident that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were not capable of shaking it, I judged that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking. (Descartes 1968:53-54) This phrase and first principle-'I think, therefore I am' or 'cogito, ergo sum'-is what the term 'cogito' designates.

Post-structuralism

The term 'post-structuralism' designates the body of work written by a loosely affiliated group of philosophers and critical theorists.

Among the most prominent post-structuralists are the Frenchmen Jacques Derrida (1930-) and Roland Barthes (1915-1980). Jacques Lacan is often included among this group but Žižek refutes this and charges Derrida with consistently misreading Lacan's work.

Broadly speaking, post-structuralism foregrounds the role of language, showing how it affects what we know and who we are. It argues that reality is a linguistic text, and that, as language is also unstable and subject to a constant slippage of meaning, reality is also unstable and beyond our ability to control it.

cogito and the poststructuralists

There are many ways of interpreting the cogito, but we are interested here only in two-the post-structuralist version and Žižek's version. For the post-structuralists, the cogito is the basis of the centred subject, or, as it is more commonly known, the 'individual', and it is regarded by them as the spoilt brat of philosophy. The individual, as the name suggests, is indivisible. In our day-to-day lives, we tend to think of ourselves as individuals because we feel we are complete, in charge of ourselves and not subject to the whims of outside forces. When Descartes states 'I who thought thus must be something', we understand that 'I', the 'I' of the cogito, to be an individual. It is the 'I' that does the thinking-the thoughts belong to him rather than him to the thoughts. In other words, the 'I' of the cogito is the master of itself. An individual is therefore self-transparent-nothing impedes its understanding of itself because it is in total control and has total autonomy over its actions. There are no dark banana skins of the soul waiting to slip up the psyche, there are no words which threaten to betray the meaning of their speaker, and there are no gusts of history which might suddenly blow the individual from its perch. The world of the individual is an immaculate, windless, danger-free environment.

It is, therefore, a state of perfection. Its main advantage is that nothing impinges upon the autonomy of the individual. Every person, as the saying goes, is an island-self-sufficient, independent and free to do what it wills. Its main disadvantage, however, is that nothing impinges upon the autonomy of the individual. Every person is an island-self-sufficient, independent and free to do what it wills. In other words, the very features of the individual which seem to confer upon it such blessings are also those which blight it. This is because the individual conceived in this way is utterly subjective; everything remains within its dominion and subject to its control. There is no objectivity at all.

If this seems merely to be a philosophical problem, the consequences for this model of subjectivity are equally compelling within 'reality' as well. For example, until recently, it was generally accepted (by men at least) that only men were masters of themselves. Women, on the other hand, were supposed to be subject to passions and feelings which they could not properly control. That is to say, women were not centred subjects but decentred subjects. They were, therefore, not 'proper' individuals and were treated accordingly as second-class citizens, subject to the rule of the masterful men. In fact, the mastery of women formed part of the larger project to dominate the natural world itself (of which women were held to be a part). The results of this project, which is sometimes referred to as the Enlightenment Project, can be witnessed in the devastation wreaked upon the environment. If it seems a little harsh to rebuke a philosophical model with the destruction of the planet, it is perhaps worth remembering that only a subjectivity which thinks it answers exclusively to itself would risk the destruction of nature and not expect to be held accountable for it. For, in destroying nature, we are effectively sawing away at the branch on which we sit.

Against the background of this rampant subjectivism, then, it is perhaps not surprising that philosophers (among them the poststructuralists) discerned the need for a corrective dose of objectivism. They built upon developments in other sciences which had long been chipping away at the monumental authority of the centred subject. For instance, the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) pushed humanity to the margins of the solar system by showing that the Earth orbited the Sun rather than the other way round. Similarly, Charles Darwin, the English naturalist (1809-1882), proved that humans are a species of ape subject to the laws of nature and not a breed apart from other animals. And, in creating the field of psychoanalysis at the beginning of the twentieth century, Freud's disclosure of the unconscious demonstrated that much of our psychic life is inaccessible and beyond our control. All of these developments, along with others, helped to breach the seemingly impervious subjectivism of the individual, showing it to be subject to forces outside of itself, or else that it belonged to a world of which it was not the centre.

Building upon these theories, the post-structuralists rejected the notion of the cogito with its associated individualism and advanced in its stead the idea of the decentred subject. As I have already suggested, this subject is not an autonomous being with the power of self-determination but rather an effect of the structure of discourse where competing discourses intersect and speak through the subject. In this way, the meaning of the subject is not inside or at the centre of itself; instead the meaning of the subject is decentred or located outside of the subject in the competing discourses, in, for example, the discourse of the unconscious or ideology. The subject is therefore determined or impelled by these discourses. It cannot determine itself but is subject to (or in a 'subject position' to) the dominant ideologies and histories of the day. In its bleakest form, therefore, the decentred subject is little more than a puppet of overwhelming forces with, as Žižek points out, its only individual outlet being the way in which it experiences life at the end of the strings:

In 'post-structuralism', the subject is usually reduced to so-called subjectivation, he is conceived as an effect of a fundamentally non-subjective process: the subject is always caught in, traversed by the pre-subjective process (of 'writing', of 'desire' and so on), and the emphasis is on the individuals' different modes of 'experiencing', 'living' their positions as 'subjects', 'actors', 'agents' of the historical process.

   (SOI: 174)

In other words, the post-structuralist subject is, as Derrida argues, merely 'a "function" of language' (Derrida 1973:145), a kind of Symbolic automaton doomed to ventriloquize the discourse of the big Other.

One of the problems with this model, of course, is that the objective world encroaches so far upon the subjective world of the individual that there is little or no subjectivity left. If everything is objective, if there is no subjective element to my character at all, I cease to have any particularity or any individuality: I am nothing but the point where the system, or the Symbolic, speaks. But this cannot be right either. How, for example, can I decide to drink coffee in the morning rather than tea if I am a decentred subject that is merely a puppet pulled by the strings of ideology, language, the unconscious and so on? Where is the 'I' that makes this decision or indeed any decision? Clearly, in a world of pure objectivity this 'I' does not exist, but equally clearly we do not live in such a world either because we do make such decisions.

Both of the models of subjectivity we have looked at so far, then, are hamstrung by forms of extremism, tending either to over-value the subjective or prize too highly the objective. A fully rounded subjectivity must maintain a productive harmony between the two, preserving the realm of the personal in order that we may exist at all and securing it upon the ground of the impersonal so that we may have somewhere to exist in. To find such a subject we must return to Žižek's reading of the cogito and examine how he understands it completely differently from the post-structuralists.

Madness

Žižek's reading of the cogito is rather more indebted to the method by which Descartes arrives at his famous pronouncement than just the cogito itself. Specifically, for Žižek, the method of Cartesian doubt affords us a telling insight into how we transform from beings immersed in nature (or objectivity) to beings supported by culture (or subjectivity). The works of philosophers, such as the Germans Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Hegel, are, according to Žižek, haunted by the question of this transformation. How is it that at one moment we are just part of nature, part of an objective world, and in the next moment we are speaking beings able to adopt a subjective attitude towards the rest of the world? Where does this distance come from? Unable to postulate that culture is magically conferred upon human beings, Hegel and Kant are forced to invent a creature that is not quite of nature but not yet of culture (or logos-the Word, as Žižek variously phrases it) either. In Hegel's work, for example, the place of this in-between being is occupied by what Hegel terms 'negroes', a people half in thrall to nature and half attempting to enthral it.

For Žižek, however, the missing link between nature and culture is to be found in the process of Cartesian doubt. Žižek describes the process of Cartesian doubt as a withdrawal into self-a withdrawal symbolized by Descartes's own physical withdrawal into the oven. Descartes cuts himself off from the world, systematically severing all links with his environs until all he is left with is the cogito. It is here, in the gesture of total withdrawal, that Žižek locates the hidden passage from nature to culture. This gesture is, for Žižek, one of madness-the specific madness of Hegel's 'night of the world':

This night, the inner of nature, that exists here-pure self-in phantas-magorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head-there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye-into a night that becomes awful.

   (quoted in CATU: 258)

It is only when reality is eclipsed by this 'night of the world', when the world itself is experienced only as loss, as absolute negativity, that it becomes possible, and indeed necessary (if we are to escape from madness), to construct a symbolic universe or a universe of culture. Descartes's withdrawal-into-self is precisely such an experience of radical loss. For Žižek, Descartes's cogito is not the substantial 'I' of the individual, but an empty point of negativity. This empty point of negativity is not 'nothing' but the opposite of everything, or the negation of all determinacy. And it is exactly here, in this empty space devoid of all content, that Žižek locates the subject. The subject is, in other words, a void.

It is this void that, for Žižek, enables the transition from a state of nature to a state of culture. This is because if there was no gap between a thing (or an object) and the representation of that thing (or word), then they would be identical and there would be no room for subjectivity. Words can only exist if we first 'murder' the thing, if we create a gap between them and the things they represent. This gap, the gap between nature and the beings immersed in it, is the subject. The subject, in other words, is the missing link, or 'vanishing mediator' as Žižek calls it, between the state of nature and the state of culture. Žižek's point here is that the transition from nature to culture is not a story that can be told in terms of an evolutionary narrative, such as that offered by Hegel. Rather, the withdrawal-into-self which culminates in the cogito has to be presupposed as the vanishing mediator between the two, the missing link around which the transition is organized. In other words, we have to 'get rid' of the Real before we can construct a substitute for it in the form of the Symbolic Order. Žižek reads this vanishing mediator as a passage through madness and, by so doing, he conceives the subject (which is the vanishing mediator) as mad. Madness, therefore, is for Žižek a prerequisite for sanity, that is, for the 'normalcy' of a civilized subject.

birth of God

Žižek's point of reference for this theory of the genealogy of the subject is the work of the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854). For Žižek, Schelling functions as a kind of vanishing mediator in the history of philosophy. His work is the invisible connection between idealism and materialism, maintaining the form of the idealism of previous philosophers while introducing the content of a materialism that is later taken up by Marx, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Freud. It is because Žižek reads Schelling as a vanishing mediator that he does not disregard what might otherwise appear to be the arcane religious mythology of his work. As Žižek comments, 'every attempt to discard the part or aspect considered "not true" inevitably entails the loss of the truth itself' (TIR: 7).

With this in mind, it is perhaps less surprising that Žižek expends most of his labour on analysing the second draft (of three) of Schelling's Die Weltalter (or Ages of the World), the text in which Schelling considers nothing less than the genesis of God. The origin of God, as Žižek reminds us, is well known from the Gospel according to St John: 'In the beginning was the Word'. Žižek designates this beginning with an upper case 'B'-it is the 'Beginning'. However, for Žižek, Schelling's philosophy is all about the fact that the Beginning is not at the beginning. Before the Beginning 'is the chaotic-psychotic universe of blind drives, their rotary motion, their undifferentiated pulsating' (TIR: 13). These drives are the ultimate Ground (Grund) of reality-the basis for everything. Nothing precedes them, except this 'nothing' itself, this abyss (or Ungrund).

The nature of this abyss, as the title of Žižek's book on the topic suggests, is one of unmitigated freedom. It is not a freedom that 'belongs' to anyone, it is not the predicate of a subject; it is, rather, 'a pure impersonal Willing (Wollen) that wills nothing' (TAOF: 15), the brute contingent fact which, for Schelling, must be presupposed to exist. In the beginning (which, remember, is prior to the Beginning) God is part of this Freedom-He is not yet the individual Being. He is a pure Nothingness enjoying the state of non-being. Such contentment, however, contains the seeds of an inherent discontent. This is because the blissful peace of pure freedom is based on the fact that it is an unassertive Will which wants nothing. Nevertheless, wanting 'nothing' is an assertion in itself, as Žižek explains:

The pure potentiality of the primordial Freedom-this blissful tranquillity, this pure enjoyment, of an unassertive, neutral Will which wants nothing-actualizes itself in the guise of a Will which actively, effectively, wants this 'nothing'-that is, the annihilation of every positive, determinate content.(TIR: 23)

Wanting nothing and wanting 'nothing' are two sides of the same coin, contractions and expansions which constitute the rotary motion of drives which precede the Beginning. The Will that wants something is the positive, expansive Will, while the Will that wants precisely nothing is the negative, contracting Will. The result is a recursive deadlock.

Žižek interprets this recursive deadlock, this rotary motion, as failed attempts to Begin, as so many false starts. It is a vicious circle in which God fails to differentiate between Himself and His Predicate. God, in other words, is merely part of the Grund, of the basis of reality, but not yet an independent Entity in His own right. For God to achieve His independence He has to disentangle Himself from the Grund. As Žižek explains:

In order to posit itself as an actual free Entity disengaged from blind necessity-in short as a person-the Absolute has to get things straightened out, to clear up the confusion in itself, by way of acquiring a distance towards what in it is not God Himself but merely the Ground of His existence-that is by ejecting the Ground from Himself.(TIR: 36)

It is here that we find the analogy with Descartes's own attempt to secure the first principle of philosophy-the solid ground of existence. For the only way that God can establish the Ground for His existence is, like Descartes, by destroying all determinate content, by withdrawing from the world, as it were, 'by ejecting the Ground from Himself'. Žižek characterizes this act as a form of divine insanity, one that can be identified as analogous to the madness of Hegel's 'night of the world'. In other words, as Žižek deftly phrases it: 'God himself was "out of his mind"' (TAOF: 11). He has to risk madness before He can exist. It is this lunacy which, for Žižek, constitutes the vanishing mediator between Nothingness and God Himself.

What is crucial to recognize here-for it is a motif that runs throughout Žižek's oeuvre-is that the subject (in this case God) is constituted by a loss, by the removal of itself from itself, by the expulsion of the very Ground or essence from which it is made. The subject, in this sense, is always a nostalgic subject, forever trying to recover its loss. However, this Ground must remain outside of the subject for the subject to retain its consistency as a subject. The subject, in other words, must externalize itself in order to be a subject at all. What this means is that the subject is no longer opposed to the object, as it is in the other two models of subjectivity we have looked at; rather, subject and object are implicated in each other-the subject is the object outside of itself. The subject maintains what Žižek, following Lacan, calls a relation of extimacy towards itself. 'Extimacy' is a mixture of the two words 'external' and 'intimacy'. This external intimacy or extimacy designates the way in which the core of the subject's being is outside itself. If this sounds a little difficult to conceptualize, it is perhaps easiest to think of it in analogy to your eyeball. You can see everything except the part of you that does the seeing-your own eyeball. The only way you can see your eyeball is by looking in a mirror where it is outside of yourself. The subject is in an analogous position to this: it is a perspective on reality which cannot be grasped in itself but only in the 'mirror' of reality.

subjectivization

he place where the subject is externalized is the Word, the Word that announces the Beginning:

How, precisely, does the Word discharge the tension of the rotary motion, how does it mediate the antagonism between the contractive and the expansive force? The Word is a contraction in the guise of its very opposite, of an expansion-that is to say, in pronouncing a word, the subject contracts his being outside himself; he 'coagulates' the core of his being in an external sign. In the (verbal) sign, I-as it were-find myself outside myself, I posit my unity outside myself, in a signifier which represents me.(TIR: 43)

The problem with this is that if I find myself outside of myself, I am no longer self-identical. The signifier which represents me is just that, a representation, but it is not actually me. However, if I am to be a subject at all, I cannot avoid this irretrievable loss, for it is only on account of this loss that I actually become something rather than remain as nothing.

We can, perhaps, make more sense of Žižek's reading of Schelling by rendering it in Lacanian terms. In fact, at one point, Žižek observes that the passage from the closed rotary motion of the drives to the pronunciation of the Word is simply the passage from the Real to the Symbolic. The Real-or the Grund-is the world before it is carved up by language, and language-or the Word-is the medium of the Symbolic Order. One might also add that the rotary motion of the drives can be characterized as an Imaginary experience of the Real. The endless pulsating of the drives, their interminable contraction and expansion, is akin to the civil war that the ego visits upon itself in the mirror stage as it oscillates between identity and difference. God, at this stage, like the infant at the mirror, is a purely self-relating entity. He has no objective mooring for His Being-everything is just subjective, or 'inside' Him, as Žižek avers:

This God is not yet the Creator, since in creation the being (the contracted reality) of an Otherness is posited that possesses a minimal self-consistency and exists outside its Creator-this, however, is what God in the fury of his egotism is not prone to tolerate. (TAOF: 17)

It is only with the pronunciation of the Word (or a Symbolic experience of the Real), which introduces a cut into the Real and stands in for it, that God can establish His distance from it. In substantially the same way, although we, as bodies, are still part of the Real, we, as Symbolic subjects, are also differentiated from it. Which is to say that, although we are grounded in nature and can only survive within our bodies, simultaneously we are not merely our bodies; rather we have our bodies and can relate freely to them and it is language that enables us to do this.

Summary

Unlike almost all other kinds of contemporary philosophers

Slavoj Žižek reaffirms Descartes' cogito as the basis of the subject. The cogito is an empty space, what is left when the rest of the world is expelled from itself.

However, whereas most philosophers read the cogito as a substantial, transparent and fully self-conscious 'I' which is in complete command of its destiny,

The Symbolic Order is what substitutes for the loss of the immediacy of the world and it is where the void of the subject is filled in by the process of subjectivization. The process of subjectivization is where the subject is given an identity and also where that identity is altered or changed by the Self.