In this series of lectures delivered in London in 1998, Slavoj Zizek
devotes the bulk of his efforts to unveiling the conceptual significance
of the cinematic corpus of director Krzysztof Kieslowski. In his prefatory
remarks, Zizek specifies that this exercise in film theory is not the performance
of mere exegetical commentary, a set of clever observations shedding light
on what these films mean. Rather, he proposes that Kieslowski’s work can
be employed as a medium facilitating the more fundamental labor of the
direct construction of philosophical theories of subjectivity-“in philosophy,
it is one thing to talk about, to report on, say, the history of the notion
of subject (accompanied by all the proper bibliographical footnotes), even
to supplement it with comparative critical remarks; it is quite another
thing to work in theory, to elaborate the notion of ‘subject’ itself” (pg.
9). So, consistent with the tenor of the author’s own caveat about his
interests here, this review will not spend time simply summarizing, in
encapsulated form, Zizek’s analyses of Kieslowski’s films (Zizek proceeds
in his familiar fashion of dissecting cinematic productions utilizing the
dual scalpels of Lacanian theory and the history of philosophy-his general
manner of procedure in interpreting cultural objects is also exhibited
in earlier texts such as Enjoy Your Symptom! and Looking Awry).
Instead, attention will be paid to an odd little occurrence, a strange
textual protuberance, surfacing in this volume, a moment that calls into
question the entire meaning of Zizek’s relation to what he refers to broadly
as “Theory” (i.e., a philosophical approach to socio-cultural phenomena
informed by properly dialectical sensibilities, as opposed to the brute
empirical efforts of “Post-Theory” [for example, various cognitive science
treatments of the individual’s physical, neurological responses to conscious
experiences]).

In the introduction, Zizek recounts a personal anecdote. He describes
a situation in which he found himself asked to provide an interpretation
of a piece of artwork, a piece for which he had no theoretical explanation
immediately ready at hand:

 

Some months before writing this, at an art round table, I was
asked to comment on a painting I had seen there for the first time. I did
not have any idea about it, so I engaged in a total bluff, which
went something like this: the frame of the painting in front of us is not
its true frame; there is another, invisible, frame, implied by the structure
of the painting, which frames our perception of the painting, and these
two frames do not overlap-there is an invisible gap separating the two.
The pivotal content of the painting is not rendered in its visible part,
but is located in this dislocation of the two frames, in the gap that separates
them. Are we, today, in our post-modern madness, still able to discern
the traces of this gap? Perhaps more than the reading of a painting hinges
on it; perhaps the decisive dimension of humanity will be lost when we
lose the capacity to discern this gap… To my surprise, this brief intervention
was a huge success, and many following participants referred to the dimension
in-between-the-two-frames, elevating it into a term. This very success
made me sad, really sad. What I encountered here was not only the efficiency
of a bluff, but a much more radical apathy at the very heart of today’s
cultural studies (pg. 5-6).

The misfiring (or, one could say, depressingly ironic success) of
Zizek’s joking bluff underscores a problem notoriously brought to light
by Alan Sokal’s Social Text hoax (Zizek himself mentions Sokal in
the introduction): what is usually designated under the heading of “continental
theory” (i.e., deconstruction, post-structuralism, cultural studies, and
so on) often appears to be intellectually bankrupt, since many of its representatives
are unwilling or unable to distinguish between conceptually rigorous philosophizing
and empty, jargon-laden posturing by a bunch of pretentious sophists. Some
pessimistically conclude that, because of this serious problem plaguing
professional academia, there is no difference between legitimate philosophy
in the continental tradition and, as it’s disparagingly-but-appropriately
designated, “fashionable nonsense.” In this context, Zizek reaffirms his
commitment to genuine theory against post-modern sophistry, and maintains
that an alternative exists to the false dilemma between the uncritical
embracing of the natural sciences by empiricist “Post-Theory” and the vacuous
babbling of many of today’s representatives of continental philosophy.
And, this commitment is seemingly underscored by Zizek’s consistently clear
and articulate deployment of concepts forged by such figures as Kant, Hegel,
Freud, and Lacan; his ability to render the highly abstract systems of
these thinkers as both concrete and relevant in contemporary milieus bears
witness to there being kernels of truthful insight in the continental tradition
of theorizing (despite detractors insisting otherwise).

And yet, much later in The Fright of Real Tears, something disturbing
occurs. In the course of explaining specific features of Kieslowski’s films,
Zizek mentions certain techniques employed by modernist painting. He states:

 

One of the minimal definitions of a modernist painting concerns
the function of its frame. The frame of the painting in front of us is
not its true frame; there is another, invisible, frame, the frame implied
by the structure of the painting, which frames our perception of the painting,
and these two frames by definition never overlap-there is an invisible
gap separating them. The pivotal content of the painting is not rendered
in its visible part, but is located in this dislocation of the two frames,
in the gap that separates them (pg. 130).

This should at least raise the attentive reader’s eyebrows, if not
cause him/her to laugh out loud. In the introduction, the author cites
a post-modern sounding jumble of verbiage which he himself explicitly identifies
as a “bluff,” a means of pulling the collective legs of some gullible audience.
After tipping the reader off to the essentially “fake” nature of this notion
of “the dimension in-between-the-two-frames,” this very same material reappears
later in the text, ostensibly being offered as part of a “serious” theoretical
discussion. Is he parodying himself? Is he mocking his audience by rubbing
their noses in what he takes to be their inability to distinguish between
philosophy and its muddleheaded semblance, letting them know in advance
that he’s feeding them garbage and secretly snickering to himself while
they happily eat it up despite a fairly unambiguous announcement of his
intentions? Perhaps the decisive challenge represented by The Fright
of Real Tears is nothing other than the task of deciding in what sense
to take this case of reiteration on Zizek’s part.

At the broadest of levels, two interpretative possibilities present
themselves. On the one hand, there is the obvious-yet-boring alternative,
that is to say, the easy way out: the notion of the “double frame” is inapplicable
to the piece of artwork mentioned in the personal anecdote from the introduction,
but is indeed applicable and relevant in the context of the discussion
in which it reappears later in the text. In other words, Zizek’s bluff
amounts to nothing more than a misapplication of an interpretation by offering
a legitimate analysis of Malevich, Hopper, and Munch (these are the figures
referred to in the second occurrence of the “double frame” notion) out
of context in relation to another artist’s painting which this analysis
doesn’t quite fit (i.e., the mysterious, unnamed painting prompting the
use of the “frame within a frame” jargon as a cover-however, one should
observe that Zizek suspiciously avoids revealing anything specific about
the painting mentioned in the earlier anecdote).

The other alternative, the much more entertaining paranoid fantasy,
is to venture speculating that Zizek is really a “deep cover” version of
Alan Sokal. If successfully placing a single bogus article in an academic
journal is enough to violently ruffle the feathers of ivory tower “theorists”
everywhere, then publishing scores of well-received books which are retroactively
revealed to be part of a long-running joke had at the expense of numerous
readers might well be enough to destroy continental philosophy in its present
form. What if this reiteration of the “double frame” theme is the crack
in the façade, the slight, superficial anomaly indicating something
more disturbing than the simple misapplication of a cogent theoretical
notion? Maybe, many years ago, Zizek made a bet with some of his Slovenian
colleagues about how much post-modern sounding gibberish he could get contemporary
academics to swallow-keep in mind that, recently, he’s been trying to persuade
people to embrace as unproblematic the juxtaposition of Stalinist dialectical
materialism and Christian theology.

Perhaps a grand-scale version of the Sokal hoax would function much
like a Stalinist purge, wiping the slate clean of the tiresome sedimentation
of pseudo-philosophy characterizing much of today’s intellectual landscape.
One of the things that Zizek finds appealing about Christianity is the
motif of redemption, of starting again from ground zero through a gesture
of a radical break with the past. Pulling the plug, so to speak, on what
he refers to in The Fright of Real Tears as “Theory” might be one
way to clear the ground, to finally eliminate a lot of the nonsense that
all too often passes for thought. If nothing else, this would certainly
qualify as one of the funnier pranks played in the history of ideas. Zizek
truly deserves admiration if he’s been able to keep the lid on a “bluff”
of this magnitude for such a long period of time, if he’s been capable
of driving himself to crank out volume after volume of incredibly detailed
theoretical analyses, all the while patiently waiting to have a really
hearty laugh at the expense of a whole group of minor industries in institutionalized
academia. This might even qualify, according to the Lacanian-Zizekian definition,
as a species of genuine ethical act: the absolute, unconditional sacrifice
of an entire oeuvre, painstakingly constructed over the course of years,
for the fleeting, momentary pleasure of a humorous joke (Zizek’s love of
humor, his enjoyment taken in using the task of explaining abstract philosophical
theories as an excuse for telling dirty jokes, would thus make a Sokal-esque
gesture of sacrificing his entire corpus an autobiographical instance of
“not giving way on one’s desire”).

This book contains other amusing and enlightening moments. In a lengthy
footnote (note 57, pages 204-205), Zizek offers a re-reading of the past
three hundred plus years of the history of philosophy
vis-à-vis
Lacan’s dictum (from the twentieth seminar) that “there is no sexual relationship”
(including Descartes’ “I fuck, therefore I am,” Fichte’s fucking as a self-positing
activity generating the complementary dyad of subject-fucker and object-fuckee,
Marx’s insistence upon a rejection of idealist “masturbation” and a return
to the real of material sex, Nietzsche’s “Will to Fuck” with its desire
for the eternal recurrence of the same copulation, and so on up through
Heidegger). Zizek also does a nice job demonstrating why Lacan’s recourse
to mathematics, logic, and topology isn’t simply another example of what
is claimed to be (sometimes with justification) continental philosophy’s
general misappropriation and abuse of science. For example, when Lacan
compares the psychoanalytic notion of the “phallus” with the mathematical
concept of an imaginary number, the point of the comparison isn’t to ridiculously
and untenably assert that psychoanalysis itself literally is a theoretical
discipline capable of exhaustive quantitative formalization
à
la physics. Rather, the square root of negative one (or the concept
of the number zero, a concept famously employed for Lacanian ends by Jacques-Alain
Miller in his 1966 essay “Suture”) is a specific example of a general structure
or much broader “signifying logic”: more specifically, an instance in which
a representation-concept (i as ·, or, alternatively, phallus
as F) designating a non-existent (non-)entity plays an indispensable role,
despite its lack of a substantial ontological status, in sustaining the
functioning of a signified, conceptually mediated reality of extant, existent
entities. In other words, Lacan means only to establish, for the sake of
clarity in analytic metapsychology, a structural parallel between, on the
one hand, mathematical equations essential to the sciences that require
imaginary numbers for the adequate expression of specific truths describing
real, material, “non-imaginary” reality, and, on the other hand, psychoanalytic
explanations concerning how conceptual illusions and fictive non-entities
(such as the phallus, the fantasy, objet petit a, and so on) are,
while being non-existent, absolutely crucial in the constitution of reality
as experienced by concrete, flesh-and-blood human beings, as part of the
“psychopathology of everyday life.”

Zizek proceeds to go on the counter-offensive against Sokal and “Post-Theory,”
arguing that the ontology implicit in the philosophical worldview of a
field like cognitive science is incredibly impoverished; it admits of (when
not simply reducing human reality to the random firings of bundles of neurons
internally and solipsistically generating all aspects of experiential reality
almost ex nihilo) only two basic ontological dimensions, namely,
the physical, material world (including the human body and brain) in conjunction
with the realm of subjective consciousness. For Zizek, an important “third
dimension” is missing here, a lack rendering deficient most quasi-scientific,
vaguely empiricist analyses of subjectivity: the Lacanian symbolic order,
the trans-subjective matrix of representations, meanings, and institutions
mediating between subjective consciousness and the material real. As with
his other books, The Fright of Real Tears underscores the importance
of the modern philosophical legacy (particularly, Kant, Schelling, and
Hegel, as filtered through the lens of Lacan) for addressing contemporary
concerns in the study of the human subject. Zizek once again makes a strong
case for why the temptation to cut the Gordian knots of the history of
ideas through physicalist, scientistic stances with respect to subjectivity
must be resisted, for why an adequate portrayal of the subject must continue
to rely upon a sophisticated combination of transcendental, material, as
well as structural levels of analysis. The fright of “real theory,” the
desire to disburden oneself of the painful obligation to wrangle with the
myriad complex details of systems of thought that sometimes feel unwieldy
and inconvenient to use, risks prompting a flight towards either one or
the other of two equally unsatisfying alternatives: either an abandonment
of the ground of philosophy in favor of a much simpler, “straightforward”
relationship to the ostensible immediacy of empirical data about human
beings qua neurological organisms, or a seductively easy relaxing
into the free associational flow of jargonized, très chic
post-modern nonsense that ultimately says nothing meriting anyone’s attention.
Taking into account Zizek’s anecdote about “the frame-within-a-frame” and
its later, seemingly serious resurfacing in his text, the question remains:
Is Zizek convinced that a form of theory can be deployed that avoids these
twin pitfalls of contemporary thought (the vast majority of his writing
suggests this), or, adopting a Derridean attitude of deconstructive suspicion
apropos of Zizek’s marginal little “slip,” is a darker tone about the silliness
and futility of theory as satirical “intellectual imposture” subtly signaled
here?

© 2001 Adrian Johnston

 

Adrian Johnston
recently completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy  at SUNY Stony Brook. His
dissertation was Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the
Drive.

Categories: Psychoanalysis

Tags: Psychoanalysis