In Defense of Lost Causes. Slavoj Žižek
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identified already by Hegel who wrote that, for us moderns, art and religion no longer obey absolute respect: we can admire them, but we no longer kneel down in front of them, our heart is not really with them—today, only science (conceptual knowledge) deserves this respect. “Postmodernity” as the “end of grand narratives” is one of the names for this predicament in which the multitude of local fictions thrives against the background of scientific discourse as the only remaining universality deprived of sense. Which is why the politics advocated by many a leftist today, that of countering the devastating world-dissolving effect of capitalist modernization by inventing new fictions, imagining “new worlds” (like the Porto Alegre slogan “Another world is possible!”), is inadequate or, at least, profoundly ambiguous: it all depends on how these fictions relate to the underlying Real of capitalism—do they just supplement it with the imaginary multitude, as the postmodern “local narratives” do, or do they disturb its functioning? In other words, the task is to produce a symbolic fiction (a truth) that intervenes into the Real, that causes a change within it.29
It is only psychoanalysis that can disclose the full contours of the shattering impact of modernity (in its two aspects: the hegemony of scientific discourse and capitalism) on the way our identity is performatively grounded in symbolic identifications, on the manner in which the symbolic order is counted on to provide the horizon that allows us to locate every experience in a meaningful totality. The necessary obverse of modernity is the “crisis of meaning,” the disintegration of the link—identity even—between Truth and Meaning. Since, in Europe, modernization was spread over centuries, we had the time to accommodate to this break, to soften its shattering impact, through Kulturarbeit, through the formation of new social narratives and myths, while some other societies—exemplarily the Muslim ones—were exposed to this impact directly, without a protective screen or temporal delay, so their symbolic universe was perturbed much more brutally, they lost their (symbolic) ground with no time left to establish a new (symbolic) balance. No wonder, then, that the only way for some of these societies to avoid total breakdown was to erect in panic the shield of “fundamentalism,” the psychotic-delirious-incestuous reassertion of religion as direct insight into the divine Real, with all the terrifying consequences that such a reassertion entails, up to the return with a vengeance of the obscene superego divinity demanding sacrifices. The rise of the superego is another feature that postmodern permissiveness and the new fundamentalism share; what distinguishes them is the site of the enjoyment demanded: our own in permissiveness, God’s own in fundamentalism.
From all sides, Right and Left, complaints abound today about how, in our postmodern societies composed of hedonistic solipsists, social bonds are progressively disintegrating: we are increasingly reduced to social atoms, as exemplified by the lone individual hooked on the computer screen, preferring virtual exchanges to contacts with other flesh-and-blood persons, preferring cyber sex to bodily contact, and so forth. However, this very example renders visible what is wrong with the diagnosis on suspended social ties: in order for an individual to immerse herself in the virtual space, the big Other has to be there, more powerful than ever in the guise of cyberspace itself, this directly universalized form of sociality which enables us to be connected with the entire world while sitting alone in front of a screen.
It may seem that Lacan’s doxa “there is no big Other” has today lost its subversive edge and turned into a globally acknowledged common-place—everybody seems to know that there is no “big Other” in the sense of a substantial shared set of customs and values, that what Hegel called “objective Spirit” (the social substance of mores) is disintegrating into particular “worlds” (or life styles) whose coordination is regulated by purely formal rules. This is why not only communitarians but even liberal leftists advocate the need to establish new ties of solidarity and other shared values. However, the example of cyberspace clearly demonstrates how the big Other is present more than ever: social atomism can only function when it is regulated by some (apparently) neutral mechanism—digital solipsists need a very complex global machinery to be able to persevere in their splendid isolation.
Was not Richard Rorty the paradigmatic philosopher of such an Other without a privileged link to others? His big Other is the set of neutral public rules which enable each of the individuals to “tell her own story” of dreams and suffering. These rules guarantee that the “private” space of personal idiosyncrasies, imperfections, violent fantasies, and so on, will not spill over into a direct domination of others. Recall one of the latest upshots of sexual liberation: the “masturbate-a-thon,” a collective event in which hundreds of men and women pleasure themselves for charity, raising money for sexual- and reproductive-health agencies, and—as the organizers put it—raising awareness and dispelling the shame and taboos that persist around this most commonplace, natural, and safe form of sexual activity. The ideological stance underlying the notion of the masturbathon is marked by a conflict between its form and content: it builds a collective out of individuals who are ready to share with others the solipsistic egotism of their stupid pleasure. This contradiction, however, is more apparent than real. Freud already knew about the connection between narcissism and immersion in a crowd, best rendered precisely by the Californian phrase “sharing an experience.” And what is crucial is the underlying symbolic pact which enables the assembled masturbators to “share a space” without intruding on each other’s space. The more one wants to be an atomist, the more some figure of the big Other is needed to regulate one’s distance from others. Perhaps this accounts for the strange, but adequate, impression it is difficult to avoid when one encounters a true hedonist solipsist: in spite of her unconstrained indulgence in personal idiosyncrasies, she strikes us as weirdly impersonal—what she lacks is the very sense of the “depth” of a person.
What, then, is missing in today’s social bond, if it is not the big Other?30 The answer is clear: a small other which would embody, stand in for, the big Other—a person who is not simply “like the others,” but who directly embodies authority. In our postmodern universe, every small other is “finitized” (perceived as fallible, imperfect, “merely human,” ridiculous), inadequate to give body to a big Other—and, in this way, preserves the purity of the big Other unblemished by its failings. When, in a decade or so, money will finally become a purely virtual point of reference, no longer materialized in a particular object, this dematerialization will render its fetishistic power absolute: its very invisibility will render it all-powerful and omnipresent. The task of radical politics is therefore not to denounce the inadequacy of every small other to stand in for the big Other (such a “critique” only reinforces the big Other’s hold over us), but to undermine the very big Other and, in this way, to untie the social bond the big Other sustains. Today, when everyone complains about dissolving social ties (and thereby obfuscating their hold over us, which is stronger than ever), the true job of untying them is still ahead of us, more urgent than ever.
Lacan’s standard notion of anxiety is that, as the only affect that does not lie, it bears witness to the proximity of the Real, to the inexistence of the big Other; such anxiety has to be confronted by courage, it should lead to an act proper which, as it were, cuts into the real of a situation. There is, however, another mode of anxiety which predominates today: the anxiety caused by the claustrophobia of the atonal world which lacks any structuring “point,” the anxiety of the “pathological Narcissus” frustrated by the fact that he is caught in the endless competitive mirroring of his fellow men (a-a’-a”-a”’ . . .), of the series of “small others” none of which functions as the stand-in for the “big Other.”31 The root of this claustrophobia is that the lack of embodied stand-ins for the big Other, instead of opening up the social space, depriving it of any Master-figures, renders the invisible “big Other,” the mechanism that regulates the interaction of “small others,” all the more all-pervasive.
Serbsky Institute, Malibu
With this shift towards the “atonal world,” the obscene solidarity between the Law and its superego underside is supplanted by the hidden solidarity between tolerant permissiveness and religious fundamentalism. A recent scandal in Malibu not only displayed the obscene pact between the biopolitical “therapeutic” approach and the fundamentalist