In Defense of Lost Causes. Slavoj Žižek
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dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime.4
Would not thinkers as different as Popper, Adorno, and Levinas also subscribe to a slightly amended version of this idea, where the political crime is called “totalitarianism” and the philosophical crime is condensed in the notion of “totality”? A straight road leads from the philosophical notion of totality to political totalitarianism, and the task of the “philosophical police” is to detect in a book of Plato’s dialogues or a treatise on the social contract by Rousseau that a political crime will be committed. The ordinary political policeman goes to secret organizations to arrest revolutionaries; the philosophical policeman goes to philosophical symposia to detect proponents of totality. The ordinary anti-terrorist policeman tries to detect those preparing to blow up buildings and bridges; the philosophical policeman tries to arrest those about to deconstruct the religious and moral foundations of our societies . . .5
This position is that of “wisdom”: a wise man knows that one should not “enforce” reality, that a little bit of corruption is the best defense against great corruption. Christianity is in this sense a form of anti-wisdom par excellence: a crazy wager on Truth, in contrast to paganism which, ultimately, counts on wisdom (“everything returns to dust, the Wheel of Life goes on forever . . .”). The fateful limitation of this stance of wisdom resides in the formalism that pertains to the notion of balance, of avoiding the extremes. When one hears formulae such as “we need neither total state control nor totally non-regulated liberalism/individualism, but the right measure between these two extremes,” the problem that immediately pops up is the measurement of this measure—the point of balance is always silently presupposed. Suppose someone were to say: “We need neither too much respect for Jews, nor the Nazi Holocaust, but the right measure in between, some quotas for universities and prohibition of public office for the Jews to prevent their excessive influence,” one cannot really answer at a purely formal level. Here we have the formalism of wisdom: the true task is to transform the measure itself, not only to oscillate between the extremes of the measure.
In his otherwise admirable Holy Terror, Terry Eagleton seems to fall into the same trap when he deploys the pharmakos dialectic of the excess of the Sacred, of the Holy Terror as the excess of the Real which should be respected, satisfied, but kept at a distance. The Real is simultaneously generative and destructive: destructive if given free rein, but also destructive if denied, since its very denial unleashes a fury which imitates it—again a case of the coincidence of opposites. Eagleton here perceives freedom as such as a pharmakos, which becomes destructive when unhindered. Is, however, this not all too close to a conservative form of wisdom? Is it not a supreme irony here that Eagleton, arguably the sharpest and most perspicuous critic of postmodernism, displays here his own secret postmodern bias, endorsing one of the great postmodern motifs, that of the Real Thing towards which one should maintain a proper distance? No wonder that Eagleton professes his sympathy for conservatives such as Burke and his critique of French Revolution: not that it was unjust, and so on, but that it exposed the founding excessive violence of the legal order, bringing to light and re-enacting what should be at all costs concealed—this is the function of traditional myths. Rejection of these myths, reliance on pure Reason critical of tradition, thereby necessarily ends up in the madness and destructive orgy of Unreason.6
Where does Lacan stand with regard to this complex topic referred to by the tiresome and stupid designation “the social role of intellectuals”? Lacan’s theory, of course, can be used to throw new light on numerous politico-ideological phenomena, bringing to the fore the hidden libidinal economy that sustains them; but we are asking here a more basic and naive question: does Lacan’s theory imply a precise political stance? Some Lacanians (and not only Lacanians), such as Yannis Stavrakakis, endeavor to demonstrate that Lacanian theory directly grounds democratic politics. The terms are well known: “there is no big Other” means that the socio-symbolic order is inconsistent, no ultimate guarantee, and democracy is the way to integrate into the edifice of power this lack of ultimate foundation. Insofar as all organic visions of a harmonious Whole of society rely on a fantasy, democracy thus appears to offer a political stance which “traverses the fantasy,” that is, which renounces the impossible ideal of a non-antagonistic society.
The political theorist who serves as a key reference here is Claude Lefort, who was himself influenced by Lacan and uses Lacanian terms in his definition of democracy: democracy accepts the gap between the symbolic (the empty place of power) and the real (the agent who occupies this place), postulating that no empirical agent “naturally” fits the empty place of power. Other systems are incomplete, they have to engage in compromises, in occasional shake-ups, to function; democracy elevates incompleteness into a principle, it institutionalizes the regular shake-up in the guise of elections. In short, S(barred A) is the signifier of democracy. Democracy here goes further than the “realistic” nostrum according to which, in order to actualize a certain political vision, one should allow for concrete unpredictable circumstances and be ready to make compromises, to leave the space open for people’s vices and imperfections—democracy turns imperfection itself into a notion. However, one should bear in mind that the democratic subject, which emerges through a violent abstraction from all its particular roots and determinations, is the Lacanian barred subject,
Democracy as empty place means for us: the subject of democracy is a barred subject. Our small algebra enables us to grasp immediately that this leaves out the small (a). That is to say: all that hinges on the particularity of enjoyments. The empty barred subject of democracy finds it difficult to link itself to all that goes on, forms itself, trembles, in all that we designate with this comfortable small letter, the small (a). We are told: once there is the empty place, everybody, if he respects the laws, can bring in his traditions and his values. [. . .] However, what we know is that, effectively, the more democracy is empty, the more it is a desert of enjoyment, and, correlatively, the more enjoyment condenses itself in certain elements. [. . .] the more the signifier is “disaffected,” as others put it, the more the signifier is purified, the more it imposes itself in the pure form of law, of egalitarian democracy, of the globalization of the market, [. . .] the more passion augments itself, the more hatred intensifies, fundamentalisms multiply, destruction extends itself, massacres without precedent are accomplished, and unheard-of catastrophes occur.7
What this means is that the democratic empty place and the discourse of totalitarian fullness are strictly correlative, two sides of the same coin: it is meaningless to play one against the other and advocate a “radical” democracy which would avoid this unpleasant supplement. So, when leftists deplore the fact that today only the Right has passion, is able to propose a new mobilizing imaginary, and that the Left only engages in administration, what they do not see is the structural necessity of what they perceive as a mere tactical weakness of the Left. No wonder that the European project which is widely debated today fails to enflame the passions: it is ultimately a project of administration, not of ideological commitment. The only passion is that of the rightist reaction against Europe—all the leftist attempts to infuse the notion of a united Europe with political passion (such the Habermas—Derrida initiative in the summer of 2003) fail to gain momentum. The reason for this failure is that the “fundamentalist” attachment to jouissance is the obverse, the fantasmatic supplement, of democracy itself.
What to do, then, once one draws the consequences of this Unbehagen in democracy? Some Lacanians (and not exclusively Lacanians) endeavor to attribute to Lacan the position of an internal critic of democracy, a provocateur who raises unpleasant questions without proposing his own positive political project. Politics as such is here devalued as a domain of imaginary and symbolic identifications, as the self, by definition, involves a misrecognition, a form of self-blinding. Lacan is thus a provocateur, in the tradition extending from Socrates to Kierkegaard, and he discerns democracy’s illusions and hidden metaphysical presuppositions. The outstanding advocate of this second position is Wendy Brown who, although not a Lacanian, deploys an extremely important and perspicuous Nietzschean critique of the politically correct politics of victimization, of basing one’s identity on injury.