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{{ZA}}==AGAINST THE POLITICS OF * [[The Liberal Utopia I: Against the Politics of Jouissance|The Liberal Utopia I: Against the Politics of ''JOUISSANCEJouissance''==]]. 8 January 2008. ''[http://www.lacan.com Lacan.com]''. <http://www.lacan.com/zizliberal.htm>
Yannis Stavrakakis' <i>The Lacanian Left</i>, <ref> Yannis Stavrakakis, <i>The Lacanian Left</i>, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2007. The numbers in brackets refer to pages in this book.</ref> an attempt to supplement Laclau's and Mouffe's project of "radical democracy" with Lacanian theory, develops a harsh critique of my work - no wonder that, in a blurb on the cover, Dany Nobus wrote: "Zizek is dead!" The basic reproach to my work is that (not me personally, but) my writing displays a perverse structure: I practice the fetishist disavowal, clinging to a religious notion of act as the miraculous positivity of pure Real, ignoring negativity and the symbolic contextualization of every act... i.e., ignoring all the things that I know very well:
Stavrakakis' political vision is vacuous: it is not that his call for more passion in politics is in itself meaningless (of course today's Left needs more passion), the problem is rather that it resembles all too much the joke quoted by Lacan about a doctor asked by a friend for a free medical advice - reticent to render his service without payment, the doctor examines the friend and then calmly states: "You need a medical advice!" Paradoxically, with all his (justified) critique of Freudo-Marxism, Stavrakakis' position can be designated as "Freudo-radicaldemocracy": he remains within Freudo-Marxism, expecting from psychoanalysis to supplement the theory of radical democracy in the same way Wilhelm Reich, among others, expected psychoanalysis to supplement Marxism. In both cases, the problem is exactly the same: we have the appropriate social theory, but what is missing is the "subjective factor" - how are we to mobilize people so that they will engage in passionate political struggle? Here psychoanalysis enters, explaining what libidinal mechanisms the enemy is using (Reich tried to do this for Fascism, Stavrakakis for consumerism and nationalism), and how can the Left practice its own "politics of <i>jouissance</i>." The problem is that such an approach is an ersatz for the proper political analysis: the lack of passion in political praxis and theory should be explained in its own terms, i.e., in the terms of political analysis itself. The true question is: what is there to be passionate about? Which political choices people experience as "realistic" and feasible?<br>
==Notes==
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