by Rex Butler
What is a Master-Signifier
Zizek begins his theoretical project in Sublime Object by taking up Laclau and Mouffe's notion of 'radical democracy'. As he admits in his Acknowledgements there, it is their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
that first oriented him in the use of the 'Lacanian conceptual
apparatus as a tool in the analysis of ideology' (SO, xvi). What is the
essential argument of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy? Its
fundamental insight, following the linguistics of Saussure, is that
there is no necessary relationship between reality and its symbolization
(SO, 97). Our descriptions do not naturally and immutably refer to
things, but - this is the defining feature of the symbolic order -
things in retrospect begin to resemble their description. Thus, in the
analysis of ideology, it is not simply a matter of seeing which account
of reality best matches the 'facts', with the one that is closest being
the least biased and therefore the best. As soon as the facts are
determined, we have already - whether we know it or not - made our
choice; we are already within one ideological system or another. The
real dispute has already taken place over what is to count as the facts,
which facts are relevant, and so on. For example, in 1930s Germany the
Nazi narrative of social reality won out over the
socialist-revolutionary narrative not because it was better able to
account for the 'crisis' in liberal-bourgeois ideology, but because it
was able to impose the idea that there was a 'crisis' - a 'crisis' of
which the socialist-revolutionary narrative was itself a part and which
must ultimately be explained because of the 'Jewish conspiracy' (TS,
179).
The same 'arbitrariness' applies not only to reality but to those
ideological systems by which we construct reality. That is, again
following the analogy of Saussure's conception of language, the meaning
of particular political or ideological terms is not fixed or unchanging
but given only through their articulation with other terms. For example,
the meaning of 'ecologism' is not the same in every ideological system
but shifts between several possible meanings: there is feminist ecology,
in which the exploitation of nature is seen as masculine; socialist
ecology, in which the exploitation of nature is seen as the product of
capitalism; conservative ecology, which urges us to get back to the
cycles of nature; and even capitalist ecology, which sees the free
market as the only solution to our current environmental problems (SO,
87). The same would apply to the terms 'feminism', 'socialism',
'conservatism' and 'capitalism' themselves. And ideology is the struggle
over which of these elements not only is defined by its relationship
with the others but also allows this relationship, is that medium
through which they are organized. It is the struggle not only to be one
of those free-floating ideological signifiers whose meaning is 'quilted'
or determined by another but also that signifier which gives those
others their meaning, to which they must ultimately be understood to be
referring.
This is Laclau and Mouffe's project of 'radical democracy', as elaborated in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.
But we might ask how what they propose there differs from the Marxist
concept of over-determination. It is a question Zizek considers at
several points throughout his work (TS, 100-3; CHU, 235). And in Sublime Object
too he takes it up. Traditional Marxism, he writes there, is defined by
two presuppositions. The first is that, running beneath the various
conflicts in society, there is a fundamental antagonism, which is their
truth and of which they are the expression. It is class struggle, the
economic exploitation of the workers (SO, 89). The second is that this
assumes a time - even if it is always actually deferred - when the
'objective conditions' would allow the possibility of resolving this
antagonism and ending the workers' exploitation in a totally transparent
society (SO, 3). Laclau and Mouffe's 'anti-essentialist' approach
differs from this - insofar as there is no necessary way of symbolizing
reality - in that there is no single struggle that automatically comes
first. As Zizek writes: 'Any of the antagonisms, which in the light of
Marxism appears to be secondary, can take on the role of mediator for
all the others' (SO, 4). And, because there is no natural,
pre-determined way to symbolize reality, there can be no definitive
resolution of this antagonism. As opposed to some finally transparent or
fully administered society, there is instead an ineradicable
'imbalance', an 'impossible-real kernel' (SO, 4), to which all
particular struggles can be seen as a response.
But, again, why do all these attempts to 'quilt' society fail? What is
this 'impossible-real kernel' that is a sign of their inability to
attain closure? It is not, Zizek insists, a matter of some imaginary
'fullness' of society that is unable to be taken account of, some
empirical 'richness' that is in excess of any attempt to structure it
(CHU, 215-6). Rather, it is because whatever it is that quilts the
social is itself only able to be defined, re-marked, stated as such,
from somewhere outside of it. This is Laclau and Mouffe's Saussurean
point that every ideological element takes on its meaning in its
articulation with others. And it is this that underlies their project of
'radical democracy', why - beneath the various attempted unifications
of the ideological field - society fundamentally remains open. It is
because any attempt to take over this field is also an attempt to stand
in for that empty signifier from which the identity of all those others
can be seen; and yet, of course, as soon as we do this, we necessarily
require another to see it. It is unable to be named as such, to transmit
whatever values it represents to others, except from another point of
view. This is why, as Laclau says, every hegemonic signifier aspires to a
kind of ideal emptiness, as it makes more and more signifiers
equivalent to it; but in the end it is unable to escape the original
context from which it comes, is always able to be shown to be too
'particular' by another (CHU, 56-8). And what Laclau and Mouffe's
'radical democracy' marks is this paradox whereby the very success of a
signifier in casting its light over others is also its failure, because
it can do so only at the cost of increasingly emptying itself of any
determinate meaning, or because in doing so it can always be shown not
to be truly universal, to leave something out.
What this means is that, because there is no underlying society to give
expression to, each master-signifier works not because it is some
pre-existing fullness that already contains all of the meanings
attributed to it, but because it is empty, just that place from which to
see the 'equivalence' of other signifiers. It is not some original
reserve that holds all of its significations in advance, but only what
is retrospectively recognized as what is being referred to. Thus, to
take the example of 'democracy', it is not some concept common to the
liberal notion of democracy, which asserts the autonomy of the
individual over the State, and the socialist notion of democracy, which
can only be guaranteed by a Party representing the interests of the
People. It is not a proper solution to argue either that the socialist
definition travesties true democracy or that the socialist alternative
is the only authentic form of democracy. Rather, the only adequate way
to define 'democracy' is to include all political movements and
orientations that legitimate themselves by reference to 'democracy' -
and which are ultimately defined only by their differential relationship
to 'non-democracy'. As Zizek writes:
The only possible definition of an object in its identity is that this
is the object which is always designated by the same signifier - tied to
the same signifier. It is the signifier which constitutes the kernel of
the object's 'identity'. (SO, 98)
In other words, what is crucial in any analysis of ideology is to
detect, behind the apparently transcendental meaning of the element
holding it together, this tautological, performative, fundamentally
self-referential operation, in which it is not so much some pre-existing
meaning that things refer to as an empty signifier that is
retrospectively seen as what is being referred to. This ideological point de capiton
or master-signifier is not some underlying unity but only the
difference between elements, only what its various mentions have in
common: the signifier itself as pure difference (SO, 99).
Laclau and Mouffe's 'radical democracy' is a recognition that
ideological struggle is an attempt to 'hegemonize' the social field: to
be that one element that not only is part of the social field but also
quilts or gives sense to all the others - or, in Hegelian terms, to be
that 'species which is its own universal kind' (SO, 89). But, if this is
the way ideology works, it is also this contingency, the notion that
the meaning of any ideological term is fundamentally empty, not given in
itself but able to be interpreted in various ways, that Laclau and
Mouffe argue for. That is, 'radical democracy' would be not only one of
the actual values within the ideological field, but also that in which
other values recognize themselves, that for which other values stand in.
It would be not only one of the competing values within the ideological
struggle, but would speak of the very grounds of this struggle. As
Zizek writes:
The dialectical paradox [of 'radical democracy'] lies in the fact that
the particular struggle playing a hegemonic role, far from enforcing a
violent suppression of differences, opens the very space for the
relative autonomy of particular struggles: the feminist struggle, for
example, is made possible only through reference to
democratic-egalitarian political discourse. (SO, 88-9)
It is with something like this paradox that we can see Zizek grappling in his first two books. In Sublime Object,
he thinks that it is only through the attempt to occupy the position of
metalanguage that we are able to show the impossibility of doing so
(SO, 156) and the phallus as what 'gives body to a certain fundamental
loss in its very presence' (SO, 157). In For They Know Not, he
thinks the king as guaranteeing the 'non-closure of the social' insofar
as he is the 'place-holder of the void' (TK, 267) and the 'name' as what
by standing in for the New is able to preserve it (TK, 271-3). And, in a
way, Zizek will never cease this complicated gesture of thinking the
void through what takes its place. In this sense, his work remains
profoundly indebted to the lesson of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.
But in terms of Laclau and Mouffe's specific project of 'radical
democracy', Zizek's work is marked by an increasing distance taken
towards it. In "Enjoyment within the Limits of Reason Alone", his
Foreword to the second edition of For They Know Not, he will
speak of wanting to get rid of the 'remnants of the liberal-democratic
stance' of his earlier thought, which 'oscillates between Marxism proper
and praise of 'pure democracy' (TK, xviii). And, undoubtedly, Zizek's
work becomes more explicitly Marxist after his first two books. But,
more profoundly, this change in political orientation is linked to
certain difficulties he begins to have with Laclau and Mouffe's notion
of 'hegemony' itself. They might be summarized as: if political struggle
is defined as the contest to put forward that master-signifier which
quilts the rest of the ideological field, then what is it that keeps
open that frame within which these substitutions take place? What is it
that 'radical democracy' does not speak of that allows the space for
their mutual contestation? As Zizek writes later in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality,
we need to 'distinguish more explicitly between
contingency/substitutability within a certain historical horizon and the
more fundamental exclusion/foreclosure that grounds this very horizon'
(CHU, 108). And this leads to Zizek's second major criticism of Laclau
and Mouffe: that for all of their emphasis on the openness and
contingency of signification, the way the underlying antagonism of
society is never to be resolved, nothing is really contemplated
happening in their work; no fundamental alteration can actually take
place. There is a kind of 'resignation' in advance at the possibility of
truly effecting radical change, a Kantian imperative that we cannot go
too far, cannot definitively fill the void of the master-signifier,
cannot know the conditions of political possibility, without losing all
freedom (CHU, 93, 316-7).
But, again, what exactly are Zizek's objections to Laclau and Mouffe's
notion of 'radical democracy'? And why is Marxism seen as the solution
to them? As we have said, underlying the project of radical democracy is
a recognition that society does not exist, cannot be rendered whole. It
cannot be rendered whole not because of some empirical excess but
because any supposed unity is only able to be guaranteed from some point
outside of it, because the master-signifier that gathers together the
free-floating ideological elements stands in for a void. As with the
order of language, this empty signifier or signifier without signified
is the way for a self-contained, synchronic system, in which the meaning
of each element is given by its relationship to every other, to signify
its own outside, the enigma of its origin (TK, 198). This means that
any potential master-signifier is connected to a kind of hole or void
that cannot be named, which all the elements stand in for and which is
not defined by its relationship to others but is comparable only to
itself: object a. But for Zizek, finally, Laclau and Mouffe's 'radical
democracy' remains too much within an horizon simply defined by these
elements. It does not do enough to think that frame which allows their
exchangeability. More importantly, it does not do enough to change this
frame, to bring what is excluded from it inside. It is not, in other
words, that true 'concrete universality', in which the genus meets
itself amongst its species in the form of its opposite (CHU, 99-101).
For Zizek, it is not 'radical democracy' but only 'class struggle' that
is able to do this, that is able to signal this antagonism - void - that
sutures the various ideological elements. It is only 'class struggle'
that is at once only one of the competing master-signifiers - class,
race, gender - and that antagonism to which every master-signifier is an
attempt to respond (CHU, 319-20).
Of course, at this point several questions are raised, to which we will
return towards the end of this chapter and in Chapter 5. First of all,
how fair are Zizek's accusations against Laclau and Mouffe when, as we
have seen, radical democracy just is this attempt to think that 'void'
that allows all requiltings, including that of 'radical democracy'
itself? Is Zizek in his advocacy of 'class struggle' only continuing the
principle already at stake in 'radical democracy'? Is he not with his
insistence on 'class struggle' merely proposing another requilting of
'radical democracy', another renaming of the same principle? And yet,
Zizek insists, it is only in this way that we can truly bring out what
is at stake in 'radical democracy'. It is only in this way that we can
make clear that no master-signifier is final, that every attempt to
speak of the void is subject to further redefinition. It is only in this
way that the process of contesting each existing master-signifier can
be extended forever. (It is for this reason that Zizek will accuse
Laclau in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality of a kind of
Kantian 'formalism' (CHU, 111-2, 316-8), of excepting a transcendental,
ahistorical space from the consequences of his own logic.) And yet, if
Zizek challenges Laclau and Mouffe's 'radical democracy' on the basis of
'class', class is not exactly what he is talking about but would only
stand in for it. As we have already seen, class is not to be named as
such because the very effect of its presence is that it is always
missed. In this sense, class is both master-signifier and object a, both
master-signifier and what contests the master-signifier, both that void
the master-signifier speaks of and that void the master-signifier
covers over. Is there not therefore a similar 'resignation' or failure
in Zizek, a continual falling short of that act that would break with
the symbolic and its endless substitution? Or is this 'failure' only the
symbolic itself? Is Zizek finally not proposing an end to the symbolic
but rather insisting on the necessity of thinking its 'transcendental'
conditions, the taking into account of that 'outside' that makes it
possible?
Accordingly, in this chapter we look at how the master-signifier works.
We examine the ways in which Zizek takes it further than Laclau and
Mouffe's similar notion of the hegemonic 'universal signifier'. And how
he takes it further - to begin to head toward those issues we have
previously signalled - is that it is not a mere extension of an existing
concept tending towards emptiness, but is 'empty' from the very
beginning, a pure 'doubling' of what is. That is, implicit in the idea
of the master-signifier is that it is not so much an empirical
observation that comes out of the world or a formal structure that
precedes it as what at once makes the world over in its image and is the
secret explanation of the world just as it is; something that is
neither to be verified or refuted but, as we saw in Chapter 1 with
regard to class and the unconscious, is its own absence or difference
from itself. And it is for this reason that later in this chapter we
look at the relationship of this master-signifier to object a around two
privileged examples in Zizek's work: the figure of the 'shark' in the
film Jaws and the 'Jew' in anti-Semitism. In both cases, we can
see that object a that is behind the master-signifier and that allows us
to recoup its difference from itself, to say that all its variants
speak of the same thing. And this will lead us to the innovative aspect
of Zizek's treatment of ideology: his analysis of how a certain
'distance' - or what he calls 'enjoyment' - is necessary for its
functioning. It is a distance we already find with regard to Jaws
and Jews; but it can also be seen as a feature of ideological
interpellation, as analysed by Althusser. Finally, following on from
this, in the last section of this chapter, we pursue the idea that there
is always a certain necessary openness by which we are able to contest
any ideological closure, that the same element that sutures the
ideological field also desutures it, that we are always able to find a
species within it that is more universal than its genus. This again is
the ambiguity of object a as at once what indicates that void at the
origin of the symbolic constitution of society and what stands in for
it. And it is this that leads us towards Chapter 3, which raises the
question of object a as that act that would break or suspend the
symbolic order of the master-signifier.
Some examples of the master-signifier
So what is a master-signifier and how does it operate in ideology? In
order to answer this question, let us begin, perhaps surprisingly, with
three examples taken from the realm not of politics but of art. In the
chapter "The Wanton Identity" from For They Know Not, in the
middle of a discussion of what he calls the 're-mark', Zizek speaks of
the famous third movement of the Serenade in B flat major, KV 361, by
Mozart. In it, a beautiful introductory melody, played by the winds, is
joined by another, played by the oboe and clarinet. At first, this
second melody appears to be the accompaniment to the first, but after a
while we realize that this first is in fact the accompaniment to the
second, which as it were 'descends 'from above' (TK, 76-7). Zizek then
considers the well-known 'bird's eye' shot of Bodega Bay in flames
during the attack of the birds in Hitchcock's film The Birds. We
have what initially appears to be an unclaimed point of view, but at
first one bird, then another, and then another, enters the screen, until
there is a whole flock hovering there before us. We soon realize that
those birds, which originally appeared to be the subject of the shot,
much more disquietingly provide its point of view (TK, 77). Finally,
Zizek looks at what appears to be the reverse of this procedure, the
opening scene of Francis Ford Coppola's espionage thriller, The Conversation.
The film begins with a seemingly conventional establishing shot of
workers in a square during their lunch break, over which play random
snatches of conversation. It is not until the end of the film that we
realize that what we took to be mere background noise there holds the
key to the plot (and to the survival of the agent who recorded it): the
bugging of a furtive lunchtime liaison of an adulterous couple and their
plans to murder the woman's husband (TK, 77).
There is a surprising turnaround in each case here - close to what a
number of contemporary theorists have characterized as simulation - but
we should try to explain in more detail how this 'reversal' actually
occurs. In each case, we can see that it works neither by adding
something to the original, proposing some complement to it, nor by
inverting the original, suggesting some alternative to it. In Mozart,
that second melodic line is not a variation upon or even the
counterpoint to the first. In The Birds, we never see whose point of view the 'bird's eye' shot represents. In The Conversation,
no one is sure until the end of the film what the significance of the
conversation is. The 're-mark' does not so much 'add' as 'subtract'
something - or, more subtly, we might say that it adds a certain
'nothing'. What the addition of that second, 're-marking' element
reveals is that something is missing from the first, that what was
originally given is incomplete. That order we initially took to be
self-evident, 'unre-marked', is shown to be possible only because of
another. That place from which the world is seen is reflected back into
the world - and the world cannot be realized without it (TK, 13). Or, to
put this another way, the world is understood not merely to be but to
signify, to belong to a symbolic economy, to be something whose presence
can only be grasped against the potential absence or background of
another (TK, 22).
Thus, to return to our examples, the genius of Mozart in the third
movement of the Serenade is not that the second motif retrospectively
converts the first into a variant of it, but that it suggests that both
are ultimately variants of another, not yet given, theme. It reveals
that the notes that make up the first are precisely not other notes, for
example, but only for example, those of the second. This is the
'divine' aspect of Mozart's music: it is able to imply that any given
musical motif only stands in for another, as yet unheard one that is
greater than anything we could imagine. And this is the genius of
Hitchcock too in The Birds (of which The Conversation is
an aural variant), for in that Bodega Bay sequence the ultimate point of
view is not that of the birds but that of off-screen space itself, for
which the birds are only substitutes. Indeed, the French film theorist
Pascal Bonitzer speaks of this 'doubling' or 're-marking' of what is in
terms of the 'gaze' in the essay 'Hitchcockian Suspense' he writes for
the Zizek-edited collection Everything You Always Wanted to Know.
He begins by conjuring up that archetypal scene from early cinema, in
which we see a young nanny pushing a pram being courted by an amorous
soldier in a park. He then speaks of the way that, signalled by an
intervening crime, what at first seemed innocent and sentimental
becomes:
Troubled, doubled, distorted and 'hollowed out' by a second
signification, which is cruel and casts back every gesture on to a face
marked by derision and the spirit of the comic and macabre, which brings
out the hidden face of simple gestures, the face of nothingness. (H,
20)
That is, the soldier and the nanny can now be seen to be playing a
dangerous and ambiguous game: the nanny wishing to drown the baby, the
soldier dreaming of assaulting the nanny. But, again, the crucial aspect
here is that none of this actually has to happen, nor does the crime
even have to take place. The peculiar form of Hitchcockian 'suspense'
lies in what is left out of the scene, what does not happen; this other
place or possibility - which we might call the 'death's head' (H, 20) of
the gaze - for which what we do see stands in.
It is this reversal of meaning that we also have in Zizek's other examples of the master-signifier in For They Know Not,
which is that book of his where he deals most extensively, as he says,
'on the One' (TK, 7-60). The first is the notorious Dreyfus Affair,
which in 1898 saw an innocent Jewish captain of the French Army, Alfred
Dreyfus, sent to Devil's Island for being part of a plot to overthrow
the government of the day. It is an episode that even now has its
effects: the separation of Church and State in modern democracies,
Socialist collaboration in reformist governments, the birth of both
Zionism and right-wing populist political movements. The decisive
incident of the whole affair, argues Zizek, did not occur when we might
at first think, during that moment when Dreyfus was initially accused
and then vigorously defended by the writer Zola, when the facts were
weighed up and appeals made to the rule of law. Rather, the turning
point came later, when all was seemingly lost for the anti-Dreyfus
forces, when the evidence seemed most stacked against them. It was the
episode in which the Chief of French Intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel
Henry, who had just been arrested for forging documents implicating
Dreyfus, committed suicide in his cell. Of course, to an unbiased
observer, this could not but look like an admission of guilt.
Nevertheless, it was at this point that the decisive intervention
occurred. It was that of the little-known journalist Charles Maurras
who, outwitting his better credentialled opponents, argued that this
action by Henry was not evidence against the plot in which Dreyfus was
implicated but evidence for. That is, looked at in the right way - and
here the connection with Hitchcock's notion of the 'gaze' - Henry's
forgery and suicide were not an admission of guilt but, on the contrary,
the heroic actions of a man who, knowing the judiciary and press were
corrupt, made a last desperate attempt to get his message out to the
people in a way they could not prevent. As Zizek says of Maurras'
masterstroke: 'It looked at things in a way no one had thought or dared
to look' (TK, 28) - and, we might even say, what Maurras added, like
Hitchcock, is just this look itself; what he makes us see is that
Henry's actions were meant for our look and cannot be explained outside
of it.
We find the same sudden reversal of meaning - the same turning of defeat into victory - in our next example from For They Know Not.
It is that of St Paul, the founder of the Christian Church. How is it,
we might ask, that St Paul was able to 'institutionalize' Christianity,
give it its 'definitive contours' (TK, 78), when so many others had
tried and failed before him? What is it that he did to ensure that
Christ's Word endured, would not be lost and in a way could not be lost?
As Zizek writes, in a passage that should remind us of what we said in
our Introduction about how the messages of our great philosophers cannot
be superseded or distorted:
He (St Paul) did not add any new content to the already-existing dogmas -
all he did was to re-mark as the greatest triumph, as the fulfilment of
Christ's supreme mission (reconciliation of God with mankind), what was
before experienced as traumatic loss (the defeat of Christ's mundane
mission, his infamous death on the cross) . . . 'Reconciliation' does
not convey any kind of miraculous healing of the wound of scission; it
consists solely in a reversal of perspective by means of which we
perceive how the scission is already in itself reconciliation. To
accomplish 'reconciliation' we do not have to 'overcome' the scission,
we just have to re-mark it. (TK, 78)
We might say that, if St Paul discovers or institutes the word of Christ
here, it is in its properly Symbolic sense. For what he brings about is
a situation in which the arguments used against Christ (the failure of
His mission, His miserable death on the cross) are now reasons for Him
(the sign of His love and sacrifice for us). Again, as opposed to the
many competing prophets of the time, who sought to adduce evidence of
miracles, and so on, it is no extra dimension that St Paul provides
(that in fact Christ succeeded here on earth, proof of the afterlife).
Rather, he shows that our very ability to take account of these defeats
already implies a kind of miracle, already is a kind of miracle. Defeat
here, as understood through the mediation of Christ's love, is precisely
not a sign of a victory to come but already a form of victory. St Paul
doubles what is through the addition of an empty signifier - Christ's
worldly mission - so that henceforth the very lack of success is
success, the failure of proof is proof. Through this 're-mark', the very
fact that this defeat is seen means that it is intended to be seen,
that a lesson or strength is sought to be gained from it. This gaze on
to events becomes part of these events themselves. It is what Lacan in
his Seminar on
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis calls the 'point of
view of the Last Judgement' (S7, 294). And in this would lie the
'superiority' of Christianity over both atheism (St Paul) and Jewishness
(Maurras). Exactly like the figure of the king for Hegel, through
Christ we are able to bring together the highest and the lowest, the Son
of God and the poorest and most abject of men (TK, 85). Indeed, this is
what Hegel means by dialectical sublation - or this is what allows
dialectical sublation - not the gradual coming-together of two things,
but a kind of immediate doubling and reversal of a thing into its
opposite. Seen from another hitherto excluded perspective, the one
already is the other, already is 'reconciled' to the other (although, as
we have seen, it is also this that allows us to think their separation,
what cannot be taken up or sublated).
We might just offer here one more example of this kind of 'conversion' from
For They Know Not, which originally derives from Lacan's Seminar on
The Psychoses.
It is another instance, like St Paul, of the Symbolic power of speech,
or what Lacan calls 'full speech'; but it is a 'full speech',
paradoxically - and here again we return to the lesson of our great
philosophers - that is 'full' in being 'empty'. (Or, more accurately, it
is a speech that is able to bring about the effect of Imaginary
misrecognition, of always referring to present circumstances, through
its Symbolic ability to turn failure into success. That is, as Zizek
insists in
For They Know Not, the Imaginary and the Symbolic are
not two opposed registers, for within the Imaginary itself there is
always a point of 'double reflection' (TK, 10), where the Imaginary is
hooked on to the Symbolic.)
1 It is exactly in saying 'nothing' that the word lives on, is transmitted. This last example is from the play
Athalie
by Racine - and it too involves a certain 'plot'. The master-signifier
this time is to be found in the words of one of the play's characters,
the high priest Jehoiada, to the recent convert Abner who, despite his
brave actions, still fears what is being done to the Christians under
King Athaliah and is unsure as to the ultimate outcome of their
struggle. In response to Abner's doubts, Jehoiada replies:
The one who puts a stop to the fury of the waves
Knows also of the evil men how to stop the plots.
Subservient with respect to his holy will,
I fear God, dear Abner, and have no other fear. (TK, 16)
As Zizek emphasizes, faced with the anxiety and uncertainty of Abner,
who in fact is always waiting to be discouraged, Jehoiada does not
attempt logically to persuade him. He does not argue that Christianity
is winning or promise him heaven (both of which, as it were, would be
only the consequence of belief and not its explanation). Rather, he
simply states that all of these earthly fears and hopes are as nothing
compared to the fear of God Himself. Suddenly - and, again, it is the
notion of 'conversion' that Zizek is playing on - all of these worldly
concerns are seen in a different light. What allows religious conversion
is not the prospect of imminent success on earth or the future promise
of heaven, but the fear of God Himself, by comparison to which the worst
here is already like being in heaven. (At the same time - and this is
why Zizek is able to repeat Feuerbach's critique of religion as offering
a merely specular, reversed image of the world, secretly determined by
what it opposes (TK, 17) - it is through this impossible, virtual space
that we would be able to mark the failure of any actual heaven to live
up to its ideal, that we can know that any heaven we can actually grasp
is not yet it.) It is only at this point that the proper gesture of
'quilting' or
point de capiton takes place. Abner is transformed
from an uncontrolled zealot, whose fervour marks a deep insecurity, to a
true and faithful adherent, who is convinced of his mission and who
neither needs the reward of heaven nor is shaken by events that appear
to go against him.
This is, indeed, the suddenness or immediacy of Symbolic conversion, as
emphasized by Zizek (and intimated in various ways by St Paul and
Hegel). It does not properly work by reason, argument, persuasion. It
can never be grasped as such. We are always too late to catch it in
action because it has already erased itself, made it seem as though it
is merely describing things as they are. Any evidence or confirmation
would remain only at the level of the Imaginary, always in the form of
horoscopes, predictions, self-fulfilling prophecies. And, equally, it is
not even a matter of subjective belief, as all the great theologians
already knew. The Word, the Other, already believes for us, and we can
only follow. There is always a belief before belief. Self-knowledge and
self-reflection come about only afterwards. And all of this is why, if
St Paul is able to found an institution on the Word of God, he also
cannot, because there is always something about the master-signifier
that resists being fixed in this way. But this is what God, this is what
the institution, this is what the master-signifier, is. The
master-signifier is the name for its own difference from itself. The
master-signifier names its own difference from itself. And to go back to
Lacan's Seminar on
The Psychoses, in which he first begins to
formulate his theory of the master-signifier, this is just what the
psychotic is unable to do. As Lacan comments there, a little psychosis,
as seen in something like paranoia, is normal: the constitution of a
coherent symbolic reality requires a certain reading in of plots, of
hidden meanings, behind the apparent surface of things. And, of course,
what this suggests is the possibility of another plot behind this plot,
and so on. But what the psychotic is unable to do is stop at a certain
point and say that this infinite regress is what the plot is: the
symbolic closure of the Name-of-the-Father or master-signifier has been
foreclosed to them.
2
It is in this regard that the Church is necessarily in touch with
something that goes beyond it, a sort of performative miracle outside of
any institutionalization, which at once opens up and closes down the
difference of the master-signifier from itself: object a. As Lacan notes
admiringly of Christianity and its
point de capition: "You will
say to me - That really is a curate's egg! Well, you're wrong. The
curates have invented absolutely nothing in this genre. To invent a
thing like this you have to be a poet or a prophet." (S3, 267).
Jaws and Jews
But, despite all we have said so far, we have not perhaps spoken enough
about the master-signifier. Are not the examples we have given
far-fetched, not typical of the way contemporary society actually
operates? Do we really see such conspiracies as the Dreyfus case any
more? Can a situation suddenly be 'converted' and turned around, as in
St Paul and
Athalie? Do such
points de capiton as the
'Jewish plot' and the 'fear of God' truly exist in today's world? Is
there a single 'quilting' point that is effectively able to condense an
entire ideological field and make us see it in its terms? And, along
these lines, how are we to obtain any critical distance on to the
master-signifier? How are we to speak of its failure when it is just
this 'failure' that the master-signifier already takes into account,
that the master-signifier is? How to oppose anything to the
master-signifier when one of the first things affected by it is the
'very standard by means of which we measure alienation' (TK, 15)? How to
step outside of this ideological space when the very idea of some
non-ideological space is the most ideological illusion of all (MI,
19-20)? And what of the role of object a in all of this, as what allows
this differential structure according to which the master-signifier is
defined by what it is not, in which the outside is inside
(extra-ideological space is ideological) and the inside is outside (the
symbolic order works only insofar as there is some distance on to it)?
How does object a function to ensure that there is no outside to the
symbolic order, but only insofar as there is a certain 'outside' to it?
In order to answer these questions, let us begin by taking up
undoubtedly Zizek's best known example of the master-signifier in
action: the figure of the shark from
Jaws. Of course, like all
great movie monsters, the shark can be seen as representative of many
things, from the forces of nature fighting back (as humans increasingly
encroach on its territory), to the eruption of sexuality (it appears
after two teenagers attempt to have sex in the water), from the threat
of the Third World to America (the shark, like illegal immigrants,
arrives by the sea) to the excesses of capitalism (as revenge for the
greed of the town mayor and resort owners in refusing to close the beach
during a holiday weekend). In this sense, the shark can be understood
as allowing the expression of ordinarily repressed desires and impulses
within society, making explicit its usually unspoken ideologies and
beliefs. And it is into this interpretive milieu that the analyst enters
when they argue that it is their conception of the shark that best
offers an insight into the society that produced it. However, as we have
already seen with the 'rise' of the Nazi narrative in Germany in the
1930s, it is exactly here not a matter of deciding which account of the
shark best corresponds to the truth of contemporary society, for it is
the shark itself that each time constructs society in its image. Or, to
put it another way, the analyst already has something to say about
society (some point to make about the environment, sexuality or
capitalism), which they then attribute to the shark. In both cases, what
is not questioned - what the overwhelming physical presence of the
shark allows us to forget - is that this is only an interpretation of
society. What is not seen is that circularity according to which the
shark is seen as embodying certain tendencies that have already been
attributed to the shark. As Zizek says of what he calls this 'direct
content analysis': '(It) proceeds too quickly and presupposes as
self-evident the fantasy surface itself, the empty form/frame which
offers space for the appearance of the monstrous content' (E!, 133).
That is, the true ideological effect of the shark, how it functions as a
master-signifier, is to be found not in the way it represents certain
tendencies in society that are already recognized but in the way it
allows us to perceive and state these tendencies for the first time. It
is the shark itself that allows the various fantasies and desires of the
analyst - the true 'monstrous content' Zizek speaks of - to be
expressed as though with some evidence, as though speaking of something
that is actually there. As we saw with the re-mark, if the shark appears
merely the expression of social forces that already exist, these forces
would also not exist without the shark. If the shark appears simply to
put a name to things, these things could also not be perceived before
being named. (Zizek says the same thing about Hitchcock's
The Birds:
that if the film dramatizes certain pre-existing family tensions, these
tensions could not be seen without the birds (LA, 104-6).
3
But, again - this is the very 'fantasy frame' that allows these
'monstrous contents' to be registered - in this circularity something
new is brought about. If the shark expresses only what is already
attributed to it by various interpreters, it also appears to be what
they are all talking about, what they all have in common, even in their
very differences from and disagreements with each other. It is over the
meaning of the shark that they dispute, as though it is real, as though
it is more than others see in it. And it is in this way, finally, that
the shark acts as a master-signifier, as what various ideological
tendencies recognize themselves in, what 'quilts' them, makes them
equivalent. As the critic Fredric Jameson writes, in a passage cited by
Zizek:
The vocation of the symbol - the killer shark - lies less in any single
message or meaning than in its very capacity to absorb and organize all
of these quite distinct anxieties together. As a symbolic vehicle, then,
the shark must be understood more in terms of its essentially
polysemous function rather than as any particular content attributable
to it by this or that spectator. (E!, 133)
However, to try to draw out what Jameson is saying a little more, what
is implied here is that there is some 'real' shark behind all of the
various interpretations of it. It would be a shark that is not only what
is in common to all of these interpretations but what all of them try
(and fail) to take account of. It would be a shark that is more than any
of these interpretations and that is unable to be captured by any one
of them - something that in a sense cannot be named, and for which the
shark itself is only a substitute (TN, 149).
4
It is what Zizek calls in similar circumstances what is 'in shark more
than shark', the shark as object a. And it is what we have already seen
make it so hard to think outside of the master-signifier, because this
outside is what the master-signifier is. From now on, the very
differences or even incommensurabilities in interpretation (of society)
are only able to take place as though they are arguing over the 'same'
shark. But let us try to analyse how this object a works to allow the
master-signifier, and how, if it closes off any simple outside, it might
also open up a certain 'alternative' to it. As we say, the shark is
merely a tissue of differences. In a circular way, it is not what
various interpretations seek to describe but what is retrospectively
seen to fill out various interpretations. To this extent, there is a
kind of infinite regress implied in trying to speak the truth of the
various interpretations of the shark, insofar as they correspond to the
social, because this social can only be seen through the shark. As with
the system of language, the shark and these various interpretations of
the social are mutually defining. And yet, as with the system of
language, we must also try to find what all of these elements attempt to
stand in for, what initiates this process of definition. And this is
what Zizek calls the shark as object a: what holds the place of that
'pure difference' (SO, 99) that both the shark and its interpretations
seek to exchange themselves for.
We might put this another way - and begin to think what Zizek means when
he says that ideology today already incorporates its own distance from
itself. We have spoken of how the shark is never a neutral or natural
object but always from the beginning only a reflection or expression of
competing ideologies. And it is into this contested field that the
analyst necessarily enters. That is, even the first description of the
shark is already an attempt to speak of, displace, other
interpretations. Each description is not merely a description but as it
were a meta-description, an attempt to provide that
point de capiton
that quilts all the others. Thus, when it speaks of the shark, it also
wants to speak of what all those others that speak of it have in common,
what they all stand in for. And it is in this sense - it is just this
that we see in cultural studies-style analyses of such objects as
Jaws
- that each attempt not only is ideological but also attempts to break
with ideology, to take a certain distance from those other accounts
which it perceives as ideological, to speak of what they leave out. But
it is precisely in this way that the shark once again weaves its magic,
for we are only able to criticize others for being ideological by
assuming that there is some real shark that others - and perhaps, in a
final 'postmodern' twist, even we - get wrong. That is, in order to
criticize others for being ideological, for seeing the shark only as a
reflection of their own interests, we have to assume a 'true' shark that
they do not speak of, which can only be a reflection of us. As Zizek
writes: 'This tension introduces a kind of reflective distance into the
very heart of ideology: ideology is always, by definition, 'ideology of
ideology'... There is no ideology that does not assert itself by means
of delimiting itself from another mere 'ideology' (MI, 19).
To be more exact, what each master-signifier attempts to speak of is
that difference - that gap or void in the signifying order - that allows
others (and even itself) to speak of it. In a paradoxical way, at once
each master-signifier begins by attempting to displace the others, to
speak of that difference excluded to allow any of them to speak of the
others, and this difference would not exist until after it. This, again,
is Zizek's insight that the shark as master-signifier does not precede
the various attempts to speak of it, but is only the after-effect of the
failure to do so, is nothing but the series of these failures. However,
it is just this that provokes a kind of infinite regress, with a
certain lack - object a - always to be made up, as each successive
master-signifier attempts to speak of what precedes and allows the one
before. And in this context the anti-ideological gesture par excellence
is not at all to speak of what is left out of each master-signifier, of
how it 'distorts' reality, but to show how it structurally takes the
place of a certain void, is merely 'difference perceived as identity'
(SO, 99). But, again, this is very complex - and we return to those
questions we raised in our Introduction - in that this attempt to speak
of that void that precedes and makes possible the master-signifier can
only be another master-signifier. In that ambiguity that runs throughout
this book, that object a we speak of that allows this differential
structure of the master-signifier, as what all of these differences have
in common, at once is the only way we have of exposing the
master-signifier and is only another master-signifier, reveals the
emptiness that precedes the master-signifier and can do this only by
filling it up again.
All of this points towards the very real difficulties involved in the
analysis of ideology - not only, as Zizek often indicates, in so-called
'discourse analysis', whose presumption of a non-ideological space can
always be shown to be ideological, but even in Zizek's own project of
uncovering the 'sublime object' or object a of ideology. But in order to
consider this in more detail, let us turn to perhaps the privileged
example of the master-signifier (and of object a) in Zizek's work: the
anti-Semitic figure of the 'Jew'. We have already, of course, looked at
the notion of the 'Jewish plot' with regard to the Dreyfus case. It is
the idea that, behind the seemingly innocent surface of things, events
are secretly being manipulated by a conspiracy of Jews. More
specifically, as we see for instance in Nazism, it is the idea that the
series of different reasons for Germany's decline in the 1930s, reasons
that would require detailed social and historical - that is, political -
analysis, are ultimately to be explained by the presence of Jews. And
yet, as with the shark in Jaws, it is not as though these 'Jews' embody
any actual qualities, correspond to any empirical reality; or they are
only to be defined by their very 'polysemousness', their
contradictoriness - as Zizek says, Jews are understood to be both upper
and lower class, intellectual and dirty, impotent and highly sexed (SO,
125). This is why the anti-Semite is not to be discouraged by the lack
of empirical evidence, the appeal to facts, the way that Jews are not
really as they describe them. The notion of the 'Jewish plot', like all
of our master-signifiers, functions not directly but only indirectly,
incorporates our very disbelief or scepticism into it. It is for this
reason, as Zizek writes, that even when confronted with evidence of the
'ordinariness' of his archetypal Jewish neighbour, Mr Stern, the
anti-Semite does not renounce their prejudices but, on the contrary,
only finds in this further confirmation of them:
You see how dangerous they really are? It is difficult to recognize
their true nature. They hide it behind the mask of everyday appearance -
and it is exactly this hiding of one's real nature, this duplicity,
that is a basic feature of the Jewish nature. (SO, 49)
And this is why, behind the obvious conspiracy - that of the
master-signifier - there needs to be another, of which the
master-signifier itself is part. As Zizek writes in the essay "Between
Symbolic Fiction and Fantasmatic Spectre: Towards a Lacanian Theory of
Ideology":
This other, hidden law acts the part of the 'Other of the Other' in the
Lacanian sense, the part of the meta-guarantee of the consistency of the
big Other (the symbolic order that regulates social life). The
'conspiracy theory' provides a guarantee that the field of the big Other
is not an inconsistent bricolage: its basic premise is that, behind the
public Master (who, of course, is an imposter), there is a hidden
Master, who effectively keeps everything under control. (BS, 50)
But what exactly is wrong with the empirical refutation of
anti-Semitism? Why do we have the feeling that it does not effectively
oppose its logic, and in a way even repeats it (just as earlier we saw
the cultural studies-style rejection of competing interpretations of the
shark - 'It is not really like that!' - far from breaking our
fascination with the shark, in fact continuing or even constituting it)?
Why are we always too late with regard to the master-signifier, only
able to play its interpretation against the object or the object against
its interpretation, when it is the very circularity between them that
we should be trying to grasp? Undoubtedly, Zizek's most detailed attempt
to describe how the master-signifier works with regard to the Jew is
the chapter "Does the Subject Have a Cause?" in
Metastases of Enjoyment.
As he outlines it there, in a first moment in the construction of
anti-Semitic ideology, a series of markers that apparently speak of
certain 'real' qualities is seen to designate the Jew, or the Jew
appears as a signifier summarizing - Zizek's term is 'immediating,
abbreviating' - a cluster of supposedly effective properties. Thus:
(1) (avaricious, profiteering, plotting, dirty . . .) is called Jewish.
Then, in a second moment, we reverse this process and 'explicate' the Jew with the same series of qualities. Thus:
(2) X is called Jewish because they are (avaricious, profiteering, plotting, dirty . . .).
Finally, we reverse the order again and posit the Jew as what Zizek
calls the 'reflexive abbreviation' of the entire series. Thus:
(3) X is (avaricious, profiteering, plotting, dirty . . .) because they are Jewish (ME, 48-9).
In this third and final stage, as Zizek says, Jew 'explicates' the very
preceding series it 'immediates' or 'abbreviates'. In it, 'abbreviation
and explication dialectically coincide' (ME, 48). That is, within the
discursive space of anti-Semitism, Jews are not simply Jews because they
display that set of qualities (profiteering, plotting . . .) previously
attributed to them. Rather, they have this set of qualities because
they are Jewish. What is the difference? As Zizek emphasizes, even
though stage (3) appears tautological, or seems merely to confirm the
circularity between (1) and (2), this is not true at all. For what is
produced by this circularity is a certain supplement 'X', what is 'in
Jew more than Jew': Jew not just as master-signifier but as object a. As
Zizek says, with stage (3) we are not just thrown back on to our
original starting point, for now Jew is 'no longer a simple abbreviation
that designates a series of markers but the name of the hidden ground
of this series of markers that act as so many expression-effects of this
ground' (ME, 49). Jew is not merely a series of qualities, but what
these qualities stand in for. Jew is no longer a series of differences,
but different even from itself. But, again, what exactly is meant by
this? How is the Jew able to move from a series of specific qualities,
no matter how diverse or even contradictory, to a master-signifier
covering the entire ideological field without exception? How is it that
we are able to pass, to use an analogy with Marx's analysis of the
commodity form that Zizek often plays on, from an expanded to a
'general' or even 'universal' form of anti-Semitism (ME, 49)?
The first thing to note here is that stages (1) and (2) are not simply
symmetrical opposites. In (1), corresponding perhaps to that first
moment of ideological critique we looked at with
Jaws, a number
of qualities are attributed to the Jew in an apparently immediate,
unreflexive way: (profiteering, plotting . . .) is Jew. In (2),
corresponding to that second moment of ideological critique, these same
qualities are then attributed to the Jew in a mediated, reflexive
fashion: Jew is (profiteering, plotting . . .). In other words, as with
the shark in Jaws, we do not so much speak directly about the Jew, but
about others' attempts to speak of the Jew. Each description before all
else seeks to dispute, displace, contest others' attempts to speak of
the Jew. Each description is revealed as a meta-description, an attempt
to say what the Jew and all those others have in common. Each
description in (1) is revealed to be an implicit explication in (2).
Each attempts to name that difference - that 'Jew' - that is left out by
others' attempts to speak of the Jew. Each attempts to be the
master-signifier of the others. And yet - this is how (3) 'returns' us
to (1); this is how the Jew is not just a master-signifier but also an
object a - to the very extent that the Jew is only the relationship
between discourses, what allows us to speak of others' relationship to
the Jew, there is always necessarily another that comes after us that
speaks of our relationship to the Jew. Jew in this sense is that
'difference' behind any attempt to speak of difference, that
'conspiracy' behind any named conspiracy. That is, each description of
the Jew can be understood as the very failure to adopt a meta-position
vis-ŕ-vis the Jew. Each attempt to take up a meta-position in (2) is
revealed to be merely another in an endless series of qualities in (1).
That master-signifier in (2) that tries to name what all these different
descriptions have in common fails precisely because we can always name
another; the series is always open to that difference that allows it to
be named. And 'Jew', we might say, is the name for this very difference
itself: object a.
We might put this another way in thinking how we finally get to the
master-signifier in its 'universal' form, the master-signifier as where
'abbreviation and explication dialectically coincide'. As we have
already said, each description of the master-signifier is before all
else an attempt to stand in for the other, to take the place of that
void which the Jew and its previous descriptions have in common. And yet
each description necessarily fails. For any attempt to say what a Jew
is we can always find an exception; we can always be accused once again
of leaving out the Jew. Indeed, in a certain way, our own list is made
up of nothing but exceptions, attempts to say what those previous
descriptions left out. We ultimately have only an endless series of
predicates with nothing in common or, as Zizek says, a "never-ending
series of 'equivalences', of signifiers which represent for it [the
master-signifier] the void of its inscription' (TK, 23). Nevertheless,
as we say, each new predicate, if it attempts to stand in for this void,
also opens it up again. It too will require another to say what it and
all those others have in common. As before, we can never finally say
what all those descriptions share, what is behind them all. There is no
way of saying what a Jew is or even how this sequence began in the first
place. The only way out of this impasse - this, again, is how the
master-signifier comes to be supplemented by object a - is to reverse
this, so that the Jew just is this difference, the void of its
inscription, what allows us to speak of the failure to symbolize the
Jew. As Zizek says, the only way out is to 'reverse the series of
equivalences and ascribe to one signifier the function of representing
the object (the place of inscription) for all the others (which thereby
become 'all' - that is, are totalized). In this way, the proper
master-signifier is produced." (TK, 23)
However, to put all of this in a more Hegelian perspective - in which
scission is already reconciliation - it is not as though this reversal
actually has to take place. Rather, our very ability to mark these
attempted descriptions as failures, as exceptions, that is, our very
ability to re-mark them at all (close to the idea that there is not a
'crisis' until the narrative of Nazism or that those various ideological
forces cannot be articulated until the arrival of the shark), already
indicates that they stand in for an absent signifier. We cannot even
have this endless series of predicates unless they are all speaking
about the 'same' Jew. If we can never say what the Jew is, then, this is
only because, as Zizek says of the letter (SO, 160) - and the Jew is
only a letter or a signifier (TN, 150)- we have already found it. The
Jew is nothing else but this endless series of predicates, this
perpetual difference from itself. Crucially, however, if the Jew cannot
be made into a 'figure' (named as such), neither can it be designated a
'ground' (that for which things stand in). For, in that way we have just
seen, any attempt to say what a Jew is, even as a series of qualities,
is only to open up an exception, raise the necessity for another ground
against which this can be seen. Rather, the 'Jew' as object a, the
'sublime object' of ideology, is what allows (and disallows) the
relationship between ground and figure, is that void for which both
stand in. If in one way, that is, the Jew can only be seen as either (1)
or (2), figure or ground, in another way, as we have seen with the
shark, it is the very circularity between them. And in speaking of the
Jew as the 'dialectical coincidence' of 'abbreviation' (figure) and
'explication' (ground), Zizek does not mean that they become the same or
are ever finally reconciled, but that each exchanges itself for the
other, holds the place of the other. The description of the empirical
Jew in (1) is only possible because of the underlying Jew of (2). And
every attempt to say what the Jew as master-signifier is in (2) fails,
reveals itself only to be the Jew of (1). (1) is only possible because
of (2) and (2) can only be seen as (1), but this only because of the Jew
of (3), the Jew not only as the various signifiers of (2), what they
all have in common, but the very difference between them, what they all
stand in for. It is Jew as the name for this difference, as what is
always different from itself. It is Jew not only as present in its
absence but absent in its presence, as what everything, including any
named Jew, tries and fails to represent: the Jew as truly 'universal'.
5
Identification with the master-signifier
We see the same thing in terms of how we identify with the
master-signifier. Just as Zizek shows the necessity of something outside
of the symbolic order (object a) for the constitution of the
master-signifier, so he will show the necessity of something outside of
meaning (what he will call 'enjoyment') for ideological identification
to occur. It is by means of this 'enjoyment' that ideology can take its
failure into account in advance, that deliberate ignorance or cynicism
(pre- or post-ideology) is not outside of ideology but is the very form
it takes today. And it is by theorizing this 'self-reflexive' aspect of
ideology, the way it is able to incorporate its own distance from
itself, that Zizek has been able to revivify and extend the traditional
categories of ideology-critique. But a complex question is raised at
this point, close to the one Zizek puts to Laclau in Contingency,
Hegemony, Universality:
is what is being described here a new, post-modern variant upon
ideological identification, or has it always been the case? Is this
addition of what appears to be 'beyond ideology' only what is required
for it to work in a time of widespread disbelief, or has it always been
necessary? And another series of questions is further suggested: if this
'distance' returns us to ideology, is part of its operation, might it
not also offer a certain admission by ideology of its weakness? Might
not this 'distance', if it closes off any simple alternative to
ideology, also open up an internal limit on to it, the fact that it can
operate only through this 'outside'? And would this not point to - to
use a 'feminine' logic we will return to throughout what follows - not
an exception allowing a universal but the ambiguity of the entire system
of ideology, in which every element at once reveals and attempts to
cover over this 'outside'?
Zizek's most extensive explanation of ideological identification is to be found in the chapter
Che Vuoi? of
Sublime Object.
He offers there a three-part account of the workings of ideology that
in many regards corresponds to the three stages in the constitution of
the master-signifier. In a first, instinctive conception of
identification, we see it as taking place on the level of the Imaginary,
in which we identify with the image of the Other. It is an image in
which 'we appear likeable to ourselves, with the image repeating 'what
we would like to be' (SO, 105). It is an image that we feel potentially
reflects us: movie stars, popular heroes, great intellectuals and
artists. However, as Zizek emphasizes, not only is this not factually
true - we often identify with less-than-appealing characters - but this
Imaginary identification cannot be grasped outside of Symbolic
identification. In Symbolic identification, we identify not with the
image but with the look of the Other, not with how we see ourselves in
them but with how we are seen by them. We see ourselves through the way
that others see us. We do not identify directly with ourselves but only
through another. Zizek provides an example of this in
Sublime Object
when he speaks of religious belief. Here we do not believe directly but
only because others do. We do not believe ourselves, but others believe
for us. As Zizek writes: 'When we subject ourselves to the machine of a
religious [we might also say social] ritual, we already believe without
knowing it; our belief is already materialized in the external ritual;
in other words, we already believe unconsciously' (SO, 43).
We find another example of this Symbolic identification in Woody Allen's film
Play it Again, Sam,
in which a neurotic and insecure intellectual (played by Allen) learns
life lessons from a fictitious Bogart figure, who visits him from time
to time. At the end of the film, in a replay of the famous last scene of
Casablanca, after an affair with his best friend's wife, Allen
meets her at an airport late at night and renounces her, thus allowing
her to leave with her husband. When his lover says of his speech: 'It's
beautiful', he replies: "It's from
Casablanca. I've waited my
whole life to say it." And it is at this point that the Bogart figure
appears for the last time, saying that, by giving up a woman for a
friend, he has 'finally got some class' and no longer needs him' (SO,
109). Now, the first point to realize here is that the Allen character
is not so much speaking to the woman in this final scene as to Bogart.
He is not acting selflessly in forsaking her but in order to impress
Bogart. That is, he does not identify with Bogart on the Imaginary level
- with whatever qualities he possesses - but with the Symbolic position
he occupies. He attempts to see himself from where he sees Bogart. As
Zizek writes: "The hero realizes his identification by enacting in
reality Bogart's role from
Casablanca - by assuming a certain
'mandate', by occupying a certain place in the intersubjective symbolic
network" (SO, 110). More precisely, he identifies with Bogart's seeming
position outside of the symbolic order. It is his apparent difference
from other people that changes everything about him and converts those
qualities that would otherwise be unattractive into something unique and
desirable. It is just this that we see at the end of the film, when
Allen has his last conversation with Bogart, telling him that he no
longer needs him insofar as he has become like him: "True, you're not
too tall and kind of ugly but what the hell, I'm short enough and ugly
enough to succeed on my own" (SO, 110).
However, this Symbolic is still not the final level of identification.
Like every other master-signifier (freedom, democracy, the environment),
Bogart always falls short, proves disappointing, fails to live up to
his promise. As a result, we are forced to step in, take his place,
complete what he is unable to. (It is this that we see at the end of the
film when the Allen character says that he no longer needs Bogart.) And
yet this is not at all to break with transference but is its final
effect. (It is just when Allen is most 'himself' that he is most like
Bogart.) As we have already seen in 'Why is Every Act?', it is not
simply a matter of identifying with some quality or gaze of the Other as
though they are aware of it. Rather, the full effect of transference
comes about through an identification with something that the Other does
not appear aware of, that seems specifically meant for us, that comes
about only because of us. To use the language of the previous section,
we do not so much identify with the Other as holder of the symbolic (as
differentially defined from others, as master-signifier) as with what is
in the Other 'more than themselves' (with what is different from
itself, object a). If in the Imaginary we identify with the image of the
Other, and in the Symbolic with the look of the Other, here in this
final level we return almost to our original look upon the Other. Or it
is perhaps the very undecidability as to whether the Other is looking at
us or not that captivates us and makes us want to take their place.
To put this another way, because symbolic authority is arbitrary,
performative, not to be accounted for by any 'real' qualities in its
possessor, the subject when appealed to by the Other is always unsure
(SO, 113). They are unsure whether this is what the Other really does
want of them, whether this truly is the desire of the Other. And they
are unsure of themselves, whether they are worthy of the symbolic
mandate that is bestowed upon them. As Zizek writes:
The subject does not know why he is occupying this place in the symbolic network. His own answer to this Che vuoi?
of the Other can only be the hysterical question: "Why am I what I'm
supposed to be, why have I this mandate? Why am I... [a teacher, a
master, a king...]?" Briefly: "Why am I what you [the big Other] are
saying that I am?" (SO, 113)
And this is an ambiguity, a 'dialectic' (SO, 112), that Zizek argues is
ineradicable. It is always possible to ask of any symbolic statement,
like Freud's famous joke about a man telling another man he is going to
Cracow when he is in fact going to Cracow (SO, 197): what does it mean?
What is it aiming at? Why is the Other telling me this? It is always
possible to find another meaning behind the obvious one. It is never
possible to speak literally, to occupy the Symbolic without remainder,
to have the empty place and what occupies it fit perfectly. It is a
mismatch that Zizek associates with a certain enunciation outside of any
enunciated. As he writes:
The question mark arising above the curve of 'quilting' thus indicates
the persistence of a gap between utterance [the enunciated] and its
enunciation: at the level of utterance you are saying this, but what do
you want to tell me with it, through it? (SO, 111),/p>
In other words, there is always a certain 'gap' or 'leftover' in any
interpellation - but it is not a gap that can be simply got rid of, for
it is just this that makes interpellation possible, that is the place
from where it speaks. It is a gap that is not merely an empirical
excess, something that is greater than any nomination - this is the very
illusion of the master-signifier - but a kind of internal absence or
void, a reminder of the fact that the message cannot be stated in
advance but only after it has been identified with, is only a stand-in
for that differentiality which founds the symbolic order. It is not
something 'outside' or 'beyond' ideology, but that 'difference' that
allows the master-signifier's naming of its own difference. (That is -
and this is brought out by Zizek's successive parsing of Lacan's 'graph
of desire' (SO, 100) in Che Vuoi? - if the Symbolic makes the
Imaginary possible, so this other dimension, that of the Real, makes the
Symbolic possible.) As Zizek says of this relationship between ideology
and what appears 'outside' of it:
The last support of the ideological effect (of the way an ideological
network of signifiers 'holds' us) is the non-sensical, pre-ideological
kernel of enjoyment. In ideology, 'all is not ideology (that is,
ideological meaning)', but it is this very surplus which is the last
support of ideology. (SO, 124)
There is thus always a gap between interpellation and any defined
symbolic meaning. Any named cause can only come up short; there is
always a difference between enunciation and utterance. And yet, as we
saw with the master-signifier, interpellation works best when it appears
mysterious, nonsensical, incomplete, not only to us but even to the
Other. For it is just this that appears to open it up to us, allow us to
add to it, make it our own. It is just in its lack and unknowability
that it calls upon us to realize it, take its place, say what it should
be saying. However, as we saw in our Introduction, whatever we do in
response to it will always in retrospect be seen to be what it was
already about. It is in its 'emptiness' that it is able to speak to all
future interpretations of it, that any 'going beyond' is able to occur
only in its name. It is not so much a match between a subject entirely
contained within the Symbolic and a master-signifier that quilts the
entire social field without remainder that we have here, but a match
between a subject that feels themselves outside of the Symbolic and a
master-signifier that is always different from itself. We identify not
so much with any enunciated as with the position of enunciation itself.
The fact that the Other does not have it, is divided from itself, is not
a barrier to identification but its very condition, for just as we are
completed by the Other, so this Other is completed by us. As Zizek
writes:
This lack in the other gives the subject - so to speak - a breathing
space; it enables him to avoid total alienation in the signifier not by
filling out his lack but by allowing him to identify himself, his own
lack, with the lack in the other. (SO, 122)
This is the ambiguity of that fantasy with which Zizek says we fill out
the gap in interpellation, just as that 'sublime object' fills out what
is missing in the master-signifier. And, as with the master-signifier,
the particular fantasy that Zizek takes up in order to analyse this is
the anti-Semitic one. That is, in terms that almost exactly repeat what
we said earlier about a certain 'in Jew more than Jew' that supplements
the master-signifier of the Jew, so here with interpellation there is a
kind of fantasy that behind any actual demand by Jews there is always
another, that there is always something more that they want (SO, 114).
But, again, the crucial aspect of this fantasy - as we have seen earlier
with our mythical Jewish neighbour, Mr Stern - is that Jews themselves
do not have to be aware of this. This is the meaning of Zizek's argument
connecting Jews as the privileged target of such racist fantasies and
the particular form of their religion. He is precisely not making the
point that there is anything actually in their beliefs that would
justify or explain these fantasies, but rather that the Jewish religion
itself 'persists in the enigma of the Other's [that is, God's] desire'
(SO, 115), that this Other is also a mystery to Jews themselves, that to
paraphrase Hegel the mystery of the Jews is a mystery to Jews
themselves. Nevertheless, it is this fantasy that Jews somehow do know
what they want that operates as a supplement to interpellation. It
attempts to fill out the void of the question
Che vuoi? with an
answer. And even if we have to speak for the Other ourselves, admit the
knowledge they do not recognize, this is not to break the anti-Semitic
fantasy but only to render it stronger. The very incompleteness of our
interpellation, the fact that things make no sense to us or that we can
take a cynical distance on to the values of our society, is not at all
to dispel the promise of some underlying meaning but only to make us
search for one all the more.
And yet, if this distance from society and our positing of the Other are
how we are interpellated, all this can also be read another way, as
opening up a certain 'outside' to the system. It is not simply a matter
of doing away with the ideological fantasy but of thinking what makes it
possible. For if the Jew as fantasy, just as the Jew as object a, is
able to recoup otherness and return it to the system, it also points to
something else that would be required to make this up. That is, if the
Jew as object a or fantasy allows the master-signifier or interpellation
to be named as its own difference, it also raises the question of what
allows it to be named. And it is this, finally, that Lacan means by his
famous statement that 'There is no Other of the Other' (E, 311). It does
not mean that there is no guarantee to the Other but that there is no
final guarantee, that any such guarantee would always have to be
underwritten in turn from somewhere else. It means that the same element
that closes off the system also opens it up, in a kind of infinite
regress or psychotic foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father. And it is at
this point, as we say, that the entire system becomes ambiguous, that
the same element that provides an answer to the
Che vuoi? also restates the question (SO, 124).
6
And what this in turn raises - in a theme we pursue throughout this
book - is that, beyond thinking of the Jew as an exception that allows
the universal to be constituted, we have the Jew as the
sinthome
of a drive: the universal itself as its own exception (ME, 49). It is
close to the ambiguity of Zizek's own work, in which the critique he
proposes of the system almost repeats the system's own logic; but in
repeating the system in this manner he also opens it up to something
else. Again, taking us back to questions we first raised in our
Introduction - that we can reveal the 'emptiness' at the heart of the
Symbolic only by filling it in; that it is never to be seen as such but
only as a retrospective effect - we would say that not only is any act
or positing of the Symbolic only a repetition of it, but that it is only
through such a repetition that we might produce an 'act'.
Concrete universality
As we have seen, the master-signifier is always different from itself
and is the name for this difference. It both reveals the void for which
everything stands in and covers over this void. But in order to try to
explain this in more detail, let us turn to Zizek's analysis of the
difficult Hegelian concepts of 'concrete universality' and 'oppositional
determination' in
For They Know Not. 'Concrete universality'
stands as the high point of the Hegelian thinking of identity - what
Hegel calls 'identity-with-itself' after 'identity-in-itself' and
'identity-for-the-other' - but it is identity as the very 'impossibility
of predicates, nothing but the confrontation of an entity with the void
at the point where we expect a predicate, a determination of its
positive content' (TK, 36). To take Hegel's example of 'God is God',
which repeats that tautology we find in the master-signifier, in a first
stage certain predicates are attributed to Him, while in a second stage
He is seen as exhibiting just these attributes (but only in the form of
their absence or opposite). As Hegel writes:
Such identical talk therefore contradicts itself. Identity, instead of
being in its own self truth and absolute truth, is consequently the very
opposite; instead of being the unmoved simple, it is the passage beyond
itself into the dissolution of itself. (TK, 35)
And it is this that - as part of a general attack on deconstructionism -
distinguishes Hegel from Derrida for Zizek. It is - again, as part of
the general question of how to think 'outside' of the master-signifier -
only through the self-contradiction involved in identity that we are
able to grasp its limit, and not through its simple impossibility or
deferral. As Zizek writes:
Derrida incessantly varies the motif of how full identity-with-itself is
impossible; how it is always, constitutively, deferred, split . . . Yet
what eludes him is the Hegelian inversion of identity qua impossible
into identity itself as the name for a certain radical impossibility.
(TK, 37)
But, before we develop the consequences of this, what is 'concrete
universality'? How do we see it in practice? Zizek provides an example
of it in Marx's classic analysis in 'The Class Struggles in France' of
how in the 1848 Revolution Republicanism emerged as the surprise outcome
of the struggle between the two competing Royalist factions, the
Orléanists and the Legitimists. As he outlines the situation there, each
faction was confronted with a problem: how best to win the battle with
the other? How to speak not merely for their own particular
interpretation of the proper royal lineage but for their opponent's as
well? That is, as we have previously seen, how not so much to refute the
other empirically as to win by proposing the very grounds of the
dispute, so that no matter how the other side argued they would
ultimately be agreeing with them? And the extraordinary thing, as Marx
shows, was that each side of the Royalist split sought to prevail by
putting forward Republicanism as their common ground. As Zizek
summarizes:
A royalist is forced to choose between Orléanism and Legitimism - can he
avoid the choice by choosing royalism in general, the very medium of
the choice? Yes - by choosing to be republican, by placing himself at
the point of intersection of the two sets of Orléanists and Legitimists.
(TK, 34)
In other words, both Orléanism and Legitimism attempt to quilt the field
by claiming that they are seen even in their difference or absence.
Each argues that it is not so much either 'Orléanism' or 'Legitimism',
or even that 'Republicanism' they have in common, as the very
relationship between these. It is what would be different from every
statement of itself, even as 'Republicanism'. As Zizek goes on:
'Republican' is thus, in this logic, a species of the genus royalism;
within the level of species, it holds the place of the genus itself - in
it, the universal genus of royalism is represented, acquires particular
existence, in the form of its opposite. (TK, 34)
Or let us take another example of this 'concrete universality', this
time starting with G.K. Chesterton's famous aphorism from "A Defence of
Detective Stories": 'Morality is the most dark and daring of
conspiracies' (TK, 29). At first, we might understand law (morality)
here simply as opposed to crime; law as what regulates crime from the
outside, as though it could know what it is in advance. But, as Zizek
says, paraphrasing Hegel, this would be law only in its 'abstract'
identity, in which 'all actual, effective life remains out of reach'
(TK, 33). And what this means is that, as opposed to the supposed
opposition between them, the law cannot be known outside of crime; that
not only (as the advance of common law attests) can we not know all
crime in advance, but that the very institution of law allows crime,
opens up the possibility of further crime. This would be law in its
'concrete' identity, which includes crime as a 'sublated moment of the
wealth of its content' (TK, 33). And this would be a little as we saw
with the second stage in the constitution of the master-signifier, in
which the law is never to be grasped as such but only as crime, as what
all various crimes have in common. Law is never to be seen as such but
only as its exception; and yet this is what the law is. Law is the name
for its own exception, its difference from itself. However, we have
still not got to the final 'concrete universal' - like that third stage
of the master-signifier - until we understand that no statement of the
law, even as its own exception, even as what all crimes have in common,
can ever take anything but the form of another crime or exception. Law
is not merely the difference between crimes, but is always different
from itself. The very relationship between law and crime - the ability
of law to be the genus of the species crime - can only take the form of a
crime, an exception. The universal (law) itself is only another crime.
As Zizek writes:
Law 'dominates' crime when some 'absolute crime' particularizes all
other crimes, converts them into mere particular crimes - and this
gesture of universalization by means of which an entity turns into its
opposite is, of course, precisely that of point de capiton. (TK, 33)
To put this another way, 'concrete universality' is that 'uncanny point
at which the universal genus encounters itself within its own particular
species' (TK, 34) - and encounters itself in the form of its opposite.
And two conclusions can be drawn from this dialectical 'coincidence' of
genus and species. First, any attempt to speak of this genus only turns
it into another species; and, second, this occurs because of the
opposite of this genus, or that of which this genus is the opposite, the
very difference between genus and species, which both stand in for. And
the final 'identity-with-itself' of this universal genus is that it is
the void of its inscription in this sense. The universal just is this
problem of being able to relate to itself only in the form of the
particular. It is only its impossibility, the fact that any statement of
it can only be particular. The universal is at once what ensures that
there are only particulars and what means that the particular is never
merely particular, but always stands in for something else, is the
failure to be universal (CHU, 216-7). However, what this implies is that
there is a kind of infinite regress at stake in concrete universality,
in a continual 'doubling of the universal when it is confronted with its
particular content' (TK, 34). Any statement of the universal is only to
stand in for that void that would allow it, is only the real
universal's absence or opposite. And, again, this infinite regress, this
failure of identity, would be what the master-signifier is; but this
itself cannot be stated without a certain 'remainder'; there is always
left out that difference or 'empty place' (TK, 44) that allows this to
be said. We never actually have that final 'reconciliation' between
figure and ground or species and genus, for there is always something
excluded - the place of enunciation - that enables this.
This is the complexity - to return to those issues we raised at the
beginning of this chapter - of Zizek's attempt to think antagonism
(object a) outside of the master-signifier. As we have already seen, in
the early part of his career, at the time of Sublime Object,
Zizek follows Laclau and Mouffe's project of 'radical democracy': the
elevation of one particular term from the ideological field and making
it the master-signifier of the rest. But the decisive
'anti-essentialist' gesture - this is how it differs from Marx's and
Althusser's concept of over-determination - is that it is not one
element given in advance that quilts the others, but that any one of
them might be it (SO, 4). And yet, as Zizek's work goes on - and this is
perhaps made most explicit in his dialogue with Laclau in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality
- he begins to take a distance from this 'radical democracy' for not
properly taking into account what he calls 'external difference' (CHU,
92), which is not that difference between competing signifiers within
the existing symbolic horizon but what is excluded to allow this
horizon. That is, Zizek wants to think not how one master-signifier
speaks for others, but what allows the master-signifier as such. He
wants to think not the master-signifier as that void for which others
stand in, but that void for which the master-signifier itself stands in
(CHU, 108). And it is at this point that Zizek unexpectedly turns to the
once-rejected notion of 'class' as the best way of thinking this
difference outside of the symbolic, this void which allows the
master-signifier. As he writes, citing Marx against Laclau's argument
against 'class' as the ultimate master-signifier:
One should counter [Laclau's objections] by the already-mentioned
paradox of 'oppositional determination', of the part of the chain that
sustains its horizon itself: class antagonism certainly appears as one
in the series of social antagonisms, but it is simultaneously the
specific antagonism which 'predominates over the rest, whose relations
thus assign rank and influence to the others'. (CHU, 320)
But, in this context, what exactly does Zizek mean by 'class'? What is
at stake in conceiving the constitution of the social not in terms of
'radical democracy' but 'class'? As we suggest, it is for Zizek a way of
thinking not so much the universality allowed by the master-signifier
as what allows this universality. It is a way of thinking the underlying
'antagonism' of society, which is not some empirical excess outside of
the social but a kind of impossibility within it. In other words, what
Zizek fundamentally accuses Laclau of is that he does not think the
third and final stage of the master-signifier: that 'concrete
universality' in which a thing includes itself, is not merely that
difference that allows the identity or equivalence of others but is
always different from itself (CHU, 130-1). Class is, in that contest of
hegemonization that Laclau speaks of, that which explains the values of
'radical democracy' and all those other signifiers and quilts them
together. But it is also an attempt to speak of the void that allows any
master-signifier, that any master-signifier only stands in for. And it
is just this, again, that 'radical democracy' does not do in operating
only within the horizon of an already-existing universality. It is
unable to imagine a truly radical social 'act', the realization or
incorporation of this 'antagonism' in making the universal and
particular the same, but only an endless series of substitutions within
this universality. As Zizek will say in his collection Revolution at the Gates,
in pointing out the status of 'class' as the impossible 'coincidence'
of species and genus, particular and universal, internal and external
difference:
For Marx, of course, the only universal class whose singularity
(exclusion from the society of property) guarantees its actual
universality is the proletariat. This is what Ernesto Laclau rejects in
his version of hegemony: for Laclau, the short circuit between the
Universal and the Particular is always illusory, temporary, a kind of
'transcendental paralogism'. (L, 297)
But to make the ambiguity of Zizek's gesture of thinking 'class' clearer, he will go on to speak of it as a 'symptom' in
Revolution at the Gates
(L, 254-6, 267-8, 332). It is a symptom that, as we have seen when we
looked at the Jew, is the sign for a certain impossibility of society.
It is what allows us to think an 'outside' to the social, what has to be
excluded from it in order for it to be constituted. And yet we can see
the 'virtuality' of this symptom, the difficulty of speaking in its
name, in another example of it that Zizek discusses in Sublime Object:
the notion of 'freedom', as analysed by Marx (SO, 21-3). In bourgeois
society, we have a number of freedoms, including the freedom to sell our
labour - but this last is a freedom that leads to the enslavement of
the worker and the negation of all those other freedoms. Here, as Zizek
puts it, in a 'concrete' as distinct from an 'abstract' freedom, the
genus of (bourgeois) freedom meets its opposite in the form of one of
its species: the freedom to sell our labour. And it is now this freedom
that becomes the true universal, of which bourgeois freedom is only a
particular. That is, the various bourgeois freedoms (the freedom of
speech, of assembly, of commerce) are only guaranteed within capitalism
by this other freedom: the freedom to sell our labour. It is this
'freedom' that makes all the others possible, for which they all stand
in. But, of course, this leads to the problem that we cannot really say
that this freedom to sell our labour is a distortion of some 'true'
quality of freedom, because this freedom is only possible because of it.
And this is to say that antagonism is not really outside of the
master-signifier because it can only be expressed in terms of it. If it
can only be experienced in a 'distorted' way - as with 'freedom' here -
this is not because we actually see it as distorted, but because we see
it as a master-signifier. Antagonism is not so much the failure of the
master-signifier as it is the master-signifier itself. Just as the
master-signifier is seen in its very absence or impossibility, so this
antagonism exists as what it is not: the master-signifier. Antagonism is
not some opposition or alternative to what is; but what is arises only
in response to antagonism.
7
As Zizek says, antagonism as the true difference, as what is more
universal than any universal, is only those 'particular differences
internal to the system' (CHU, 92).
So, to return to class, what really is at stake in thinking of
antagonism in terms of class? We might begin here with Zizek's
description of class as the 'properly temporal-dialectical tension
between the universal and the particular' (L, 298) (terms which are,
incidentally, almost exactly the same as those he uses to describe the
Jew in
Metastases). In one sense, then, it is impossible to bring
the universal and the particular together: as Laclau says, any
attempted equivalence between them is always illusory. And Zizek in his
early work agrees with this: it is what he means by the 'king as the
place-holder of the void' (TK, 267) revealing the locus of power to be
empty. But, in another sense, we must keep on trying to make the
universal and the particular the same. It is only through this attempted
making-equivalent that we can reveal the true universal, which is not
some empty frame that the particular seeks to fill (as it is for
Laclau), but only that place from where this equivalence is stated. (And
this is what Zizek can already be understood to mean by the 'king as
the place-holder of the void': that it is only through the king's
filling out of this empty place that we are able to see that void which
allows it.) It is a question no longer of an exception (what cannot be
spoken of or filled in) that allows a universal, but of a
sinthome
connected to a drive (in which any universal is always revealed as an
exception). And it is this that Zizek means by class: not a
master-signifier that is proved by its exception (by its own absence or
impossibility), but - only the slightest twist - this constant process
of self-exception itself, in which at once there is no exception to this
process and we cannot exactly say what this process is because it is
its own exception.
This is why, to conclude, if Zizek speaks of 'class', he insists that it
is not to be thought of in the old scientific, objectivist way. He
agrees with Laclau on this, and even goes further than him (CHU,
319-20). That is, if he speaks of class, it is not finally to go back to
the notion of over-determination, or even to say what is excluded from
society, as though this could be named. Rather, it is to argue that the
social is complete only because of class (struggle), takes the place of
class (struggle). The social is explained by class, just as with any
master-signifier; but class is not some exception that would render it
whole, precisely because it does not stand outside of it. Instead, class
renders the social 'not-all' (TK, 44): there is at once no exception to
the social and the social (as represented by the proletariat) is its
own exception. To put this another way, one of Hegel's arguments - this
is his concept of 'concrete universality' - is that, if a certain notion
does not add up to itself, this lack is reflected back into the notion
and the notion itself changes (CHU, 99-100). And we could say the same
about class: unlike 'radical democracy', which ultimately wants to take
its own failure into account from somewhere outside of it, with the
'failure' of class the notion itself changes. Class - as universal - is
nothing but its own failure. And this is what Hegel means by the
Absolute Spirit: not the panlogist sublation of every difference but
simply the 'succession of all dialectical transformations, the
impossibility of establishing a final overlapping between the universal
and the particular' (CHU, 60). And this is indicated by the fact that in
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality Zizek has several names for
this 'class' as universal: sexual difference, the Real, even capital
itself. And perhaps even 'behind' all of these, as another word for it,
is the subject (just as the proletariat is the universal 'subject' of
history). It is subject in that sense we spoke of in Chapter 1 as the
only true topic of philosophy. Class as split between the
master-signifier and object a is exactly like that 'split subject' we
looked at there. This is the final ambiguity of the master-signifier: it
is its own opposite (object a); but it is an opposite - this is perhaps
what Zizek does not pay enough attention to in "Why is Every Act?" -
that leads only to another master-signifier, that can be seen only
through another master-signifier. And in our next chapter, we turn to
the 'other' side of this in trying to think this object a as that 'act'
that allows or results from the master-signifier.
Footnotes
1 As an example of this we might think of George Orwell's novel
1984.
In a first (Imaginary) reading, it is about another, totalitarian
country (Russia); but in a second (Symbolic) reading, it is actually
about us. It is the liberal, democratic West that is already the
dystopia Orwell describes; it is this world that is seen through
1984.
2
As for historical instances of this 'paranoia', we might think of the
necessity for the Khmer Rouge incessantly to rewrite its origins (T?,
97-9) or the infamous spy within the CIA, James Jesus Angleton, whose
job was to look for spies within the CIA (TK, xxxvi-vii). This
'paranoia', indeed, is close to that drive Zizek wants, in which we
always try to find that void or enunciation behind any enunciated; not
simply the Other to the Other, but the Other to the Other to the Other .
. . And yet Zizek in the end does not advocate this paranoia, which
remains a kind of Hegelian 'bad infinity' in its simple denial of
symbolic closure (in this regard, deconstruction is perhaps more like
paranoia). Rather, Zizek's challenge is somehow to produce this
'openess' through closure, not to say that the Symbolic is impossible
but that the Symbolic is its own impossibility (TK, 87-8).
3 The point here is that the birds in
The Birds
are precisely not 'symbolic', suggesting different readings of the
film, for example, cosmological, ecological, familial (LA, 97-8).
Rather, the birds as master-signifer allow all of these different
readings at once. The birds of
The Birds would lose their power
if they were reduced to any one of these possibilities - and it is part
of the effect of the master-signifier that it is able to cover up their
radical inconsistency, the fact that they cannot all equally be true
(PF, 158).
4
In fact, this is why so many movie monsters are already shape-shifting,
'second degree' creatures, not so much any content in particular as
able to move between guises and forms: Howard Hawks' and John
Carpenter's
The Thing, Stephen King's
It, Woody Allen's
Zelig
(who was also Jewish). All this, as Zizek suggests in his essay on the
subject, "Why Does the Phallus Appear?", is exactly like the phallus
itself, which is the ultimate 'monster' and what all monsters ultimately
resemble (E!, 128-9).
5
Undoubtedly, the greatest example of the master-signifier and its
accompanying object a in literature is to be found in Borges' essay
'Kafka and His Precursors', in which he lists Kafka's various
antecedents: 'If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have
enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them
resemble each other', Jorges Luis Borges, 'Kafka and His Precursors', in
Labyrinths, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981, p. 236. The first
point to be understood here is that Kafka is not simply something in
common to his various precursors - because they do not all have
something in common - but the very difference between them. The second
point is that Kafka is in fact less 'Kafkaesque' than some of his
precursors: 'The early Kafka of
Betrachtung is less a precursor
of the Kafka of sombre myths and atrocious institutions than is Browning
or Lord Dunsany' (p. 236). That is, every attempt to say what Kafka is
only reduces him to the status of one of his precursors; any attempted
meta-statement concerning Kafka becomes merely another statement. Here,
if Kafka's precursors are 'immediated-abbreviated' by Kafka, and Kafka
'explicates' them, the true 'Kafkaesque' quality Borges is trying to put
his finger on is the relationship between these: that 'nothing' Kafka
and his various precursors have in common. 'Kafka' is the relationship
between Kafka and his precursors.
6
See on this Robert Pfaller's essay "Negation and its Reliabilities: An
Empty Subject for Ideology?" (CU, 225-46), which criticizes Zizek's
quoting of the line from the film
Bladerunner, 'I am a
replicant', as an extra-ideological statement. Pfaller's point is not
that Zizek is simply incorrect, but that he does not make that extra
turn and ask from where his statement is being said.
7
This is Zizek's point: not that there is no freedom, but that any
expression of freedom is only a distortion of it; that freedom is only
what allows us to speak of its distortion. And this is the meaning of
Zizek saying that the worker is exploited even when he is fully paid
(TS, 179-80). Here class or class struggle is a kind of 'symptom' that
is present in its absence, that is manifest only in its distortion.
