Consistent with the style of many of his recent works, Slavoj
Zizek’s On Belief is a frenetic tour rapidly ranging across
the varied landscapes of psychoanalytic metapsychology, Marxist
political theory, the history of philosophy, and popular culture.
Zizek’s trademark hybridization of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis,
German Idealism, and dialectical materialism guides his analyses
of diverse features of contemporary cultural phenomena: the human
being’s relationship to its body in light of the information age’s
“cyberspace,” the pervasive attitude of cynical resignation
exhibited by the members of late capitalist societies (i.e., a
pessimistic “realism” about the inherent corruption/degradation
of the political sphere and the diminishing prospects of genuine
social change), the differences displayed by the theosophical
structures of Judaism and Christianity (examined from both psychoanalytic
and political points of view), and, finally, as per the book’s
title, illustrations of how “belief” operates for subjects
in today’s socio-symbolic environment. Given the sheer breadth
of topics and references touched upon by Zizek, this review will
limit itself to selectively highlighting those aspects of his
text that are of the greatest interest either, in some cases,
from the perspective of a general reader or, in other cases, for
those familiar with the more intricate details of Zizek’s own
evolving theoretical itinerary.

A gem of psychoanalytic cultural analysis occurs quite early in
the book. Zizek mentions a Freudian concept all too frequently
used and abused by cultural commentators, literary theorists,
and the like: the “fetish” (usually an unremarkable
quotidian object invested, by the fetishist, with an extraordinary
quota of libidinal cathexis). Zizek posits a strict distinction
to be maintained between repression and fetishization as two separate
defensive strategies utilized by the psyche. In repression, the
subject bars a traumatic memory or ideational content from entering
the restricted domain of its conscious awareness. The correlate
of repression is the “symptom,” namely, a conspicuous-but-seemingly-nonsensical
feature of the individual’s experiential field and/or behavioral
patterns that results from the repressed material exerting a distorting
influence on the subject’s lived reality. Due to the censorship
of repression, the conscious individual is largely unaware of
the significance and function of the symptom qua pathological
return of the repressed. The fetishist, on the other hand, deliberately
and knowingly “enjoys his/her symptom” (as per the title
of a 1992 book by Zizek).

What’s more, Zizek claims, the fetishist, by clinging to some
object endowed with an excessive, disproportionate significance,
is able to appear to others, not as a delusional pervert lost
in the clouds of his/her idiosyncratic fantasy world, but, rather,
as a hardened, pragmatic realist: that is, someone who can accept
and tolerate the harshness and difficulty of daily existence without
complaint. However, if the fetish-object is taken away from the
fetishist, this cynical façade of pragmatic resignation
disintegrates, plunging the subject into depression, despair,
or even psychosis (in other words, the fetishist, bereft of his/her
fetish, undergoes what Lacan calls “subjective destitution”).
The upshot of all this is the proposal of a specific guideline
for a hermeneutics of suspicion to be exercised with respect to
all the manifest, fashionable attitudes of cynical resignation
and pessimistic realism prevalent amongst the denizens of today’s
capitalist polis–“So, when we are bombarded by claims
that in our post-ideological cynical era nobody believes in the
proclaimed ideals, when we encounter a person who claims he is
cured of any beliefs, accepting social reality the way it is,
one should always counter such claims with the question: OK, but
where is the fetish that enables you to (pretend to) accept
reality ‘the way it is?'” (pg. 15). Naturally, Zizek
reminds readers that Marx himself already understood the essentially
fetishistic nature of money and commodities (implying that, for
today’s late-capitalist, post-ideological subjects, if their small
salaries and various little techno-gadget toys were to be taken
away from them, their pretense to being realistically accepting
of the status quo would be immediately dropped).

Shortly after this discussion of the fetish as a notion useful
for contemporary socio-cultural interpretation, Zizek briefly
alludes to a theoretical incompatibility that his work has long
passed over in silence. In previous writings, he often speaks
of Marx and Lacan in one and the same breath, as though no tension
existed between, on the one hand, the herald of a dormant revolutionary
potential capable of radically transforming relations between
human beings, and, on the other hand, the Freudian prophet of
the ultimately conflictual and dysfunctional nature of the libidinal
economy and its attendant forms of subjectivity. Although there
is a pronounced “materialist” bent to the late Lacan’s
ruminations on desire and symptom formation, he nonetheless never
fully embraces Marxist thought. In fact, in a 1969 public response
to the student radicals involved in the May ’68 revolts, Lacan
heaps scorn upon his audience of idealistic young left-wing “revolutionaries.”
Making implicit reference to his then-new theory of the “four
discourses” (i.e., the elementary permutations on the basic
form of social link between “speaking beings”: the discourses
of the master, the hysteric, the university, and the analyst,
all elaborated in the seventeenth seminar of 1969-1970), Lacan
tells them, “What you, as revolutionaries, aspire to is a
Master. You will have one” (Jacques Lacan, “Impromptu
at Vincennes” [trans. Jeffrey Mehlman], Television/A Challenge
to the Psychoanalytic Establishment [ed. Joan Copjec], New
York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1990, pg. 127). This is not a man
who is very optimistic about human beings’ capacity for drastic
changes, for their accomplishing a genuinely revolutionary refashioning
of their own reality. As a true Freudian, Lacan is convinced that
the past always manages to insidiously reproduce itself in ever-anew
present circumstances, that there are specific features of the
human constitution and the structure of subjectivity that cannot
be vanquished by mere ideological, revolutionary fiat.

Zizek is even more specific about the gap separating psychoanalytic
metapsychology and revolutionary politics, suggesting a possible
Lacanian critique of the Marxist vision of the politico-economic
transition from capitalism to communism. Marx imagines the possibility
of, through the communist revolution, unleashing the full productive
forces of economic activity, forces supposedly no longer fettered
by the intermittent economic crises necessarily generated by the
inherent structure of the capitalist order. But, Zizek contends,
a Lacanian diagnosis of this Marxist vision of a perfectly and
harmoniously functioning economy as a “fantasy” would
state the following: there is no retention of the forces of economic
productivity without the multitude of obstacles and barriers posed
to this same productivity by economic crises (that is to say,
the removal of capitalism, as an impediment to production, results
in the dissolution of production itself). Is Zizek here insinuating,
in technical psychoanalytic terms, that the deadlocks of the individual
subject’s libidinal economy–Lacan’s concept of “desire”
is the dynamic implicitly invoked contra Marx’s expectations
of a future removal of the capitalist obstacle to an anticipated
state of (utopian) affairs–set limits upon what is and isn’t
possible at the collective levels of political and economic systems?
Is this a veiled concession that, as the usual observation goes,
Marxism, despite its merits as a critical assessment of capitalism,
is incapable of furnishing a viable, “real world” alternative
(due to what Freud himself, in 1929, refers to as Marx’s unrealistic
assessments of human nature)? How should this vaguely sketched
Lacanian objection to Marx be viewed with respect to Zizek’s otherwise
enthusiastic endorsements (later in the same text) of a “return
to Lenin,” of a revival of a revolutionary stance in the
face of the hegemonic liberal democratic/technocratic “third
way?”

Not only does Zizek’s vacillating balancing act between Marxism
and psychoanalysis provoke a degree of uncertainty in readers
about how to interpret his own theoretical approach (given that
it consists, in part, of a fusion of Marx and Lacan), but, additionally,
another major theoretical conflict rears its head in On Belief:
the antagonism between transcendentalist and historicist approaches
to theoretical problems. In his 1993 book Tarrying with the
Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, Zizek
announces his intention to rescue Lacan from the clutches of post-modernists
and post-structuralists, to install his work in its proper position
in relation to the history of ideas: Lacan is to be viewed as
a transcendental philosopher, proposing a “critique of pure
desire” centered on the invariant role of objet petit
a. More recently, in the 1999 text The Ticklish Subject
and the 2000 Contingency, Hegemony, Universality anthology
(a three-way exchange between Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and
Zizek), Zizek continues to defend the legitimacy of the transcendental
stance, despite it having fallen out of fashion with the majority
of practitioners of contemporary continental philosophy (who,
under the influence of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and others,
reject Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and similar modern “logocentrists”
as outmoded). He indicts a historicism unsupplemented by a prior
delineation of relevant trans/non-historical “conditions
of possibility” participating in the interpretation of given
historical phenomena as intellectually bankrupt.

As Lacan himself, in the unpublished thirteenth seminar (The
Object of Psychoanalysis, 1965-1966), says, “historical
things are not historical simply because an accident happened,
they are historical because it was necessary for a certain shape,
a certain configuration, to come to light” (session of June
15^th, 1966). From a Lacanian perspective, a transcendental
investigation into those aspects of the structure of subjectivity
necessitating a certain pattern to emerge in the unfolding of
otherwise contingent, empirical circumstances (an investigation
conducted, at specific levels, by psychoanalytic metapsychology)
has explanatory precedence over any historicist analysis of these
same facts. At various points in On Belief, Zizek has indirect
recourse to this general dimension of Lacanian theory, speaking
of “the ‘transcendental illusion of desire'” (pg. 68)
and “the internal, inherent obstacle constitutive of desire
as such” (pg. 76). And yet, perplexingly, in both his recent
writings as well as public lectures, Zizek sometimes violently
repudiates the transcendental reading of Lacan. In a presentation
delivered in New York in March of 2001 (this paper appears as
part of the second chapter in Of Belief), he sets about
attacking one of the principle proponents of this brand of Lacanian
theory (Bernard Baas, who elucidates various connections between
Kant and Lacan in his 1992 Le désir pur and his
1998 De la chose à l’objet). He also goes on to
suggest that the shifting evolution of Lacan’s conceptual edifice
should be understood against the background of broader social,
economic, and political currents in post-war France (he draws
a series of parallels between crucial turning points in Lacan’s
intellectual development and chronologically isomorphic changes
in French public life).

It simply cannot be the case that Zizek, possessing such an intimate
and nuanced familiarity with Lacanian thought, is suggesting that
Lacan’s oeuvre be reduced to the status of a refined, epiphenomenal
manifestation, deceptively couched within Freudian parlance, of
twentieth century France’s familiar socio-historical dramas. Assuming
that this isn’t the gist of his suggestions, could Zizek be interpreted
as subtly hinting that the progression of Lacanian theory is,
viewed from a certain angle, a microcosmic reflection of the unfolding
of a macrocosmic geo-political structure–a structure which Lacan
himself, from within his “subordinate,” “overdetermined”
position in relation to this enveloping, macro-level historical
movement, nonetheless provides the very conceptual tools for identifying
and understanding? Is this to imply that Lacan is the intellectual
equivalent of Hegel’s Napoleon (if Napoleon is, as Hegel dubs
him, “An Idea riding on a horse,” Lacan would be “An
Idea sitting behind a couch”), an individual crystallization/embodiment
(i.e., a determinate Particularity) of a trans-individual, dialectical
dynamic (i.e., the Universality of, in this case, a Gallic Geist),
a moment of culmination that self-reflexively reflects, within
itself, the actual movement producing it? Would this be, at the
broadest of levels, to set the stage for an eventual proclamation
of a properly conceived Hegelianism as the key to breaking out
of today’s sterile, seemingly antinomic impasse between transcendentalism
and historicism?

Given Zizek’s musings later in this book on historicity in Alain
Badiou’s conception of “event” and Francis Fukuyama’s
trumpeting of the imminent arrival of Hegel’s “end of history,”
the answer to the above questions is far from clear. In proposing
that historicity per se be defined as the occurrence of sudden
ruptures/breaks (akin to Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm shifts”),
Zizek refrains from explicitly stating either whether a certain
decisive break has indeed occurred (i.e., whether Fukuyama is
right, which would be consistent with his earlier mention of a
Lacanian critique of Marx-history is over because the shift/rupture
marked by capitalism really is the last genuine change, after
which an overall structural stability sets in due to a certain
symbiosis achieved by capitalism’s arrangement of relations between
the plurality of libidinal economies and the overarching, mediating
socio-symbolic economy) or whether the “true and real end”
has yet to arrive (his concluding remarks about Christian theology
indicate that he now sees Christianity as containing within itself,
when coupled with Marx and Lenin, the potential for engendering
further breaks and revolutionary transformations, thus reconfiguring
the historical field in a way unforeseen by those trapped within
the confining closure of the capitalist ideological status
quo-Zizek’s three most recent books all flirt with this messianic
perspective, and he alludes to the need to overcome Lacan’s own
cynical, pessimistic conservatism in favor of an optimistic, exuberant
commitment to some as-yet-unspecified form of concrete praxis).

Finally, Zizek’s clarifications concerning the Lacanian concept
of the Real–these clarifications are prompted, in part, by Jacques-Alain
Miller’s article “Paradigms of Jouissance” (published
in Lacanian Ink number 17 [Fall 2000])–will be satisfying
to anyone who has found themselves vexed by the apparent vagueness
and ambiguity of Lacanian uses of this concept. Zizek contends
that there are three primary senses of the Real, correlated with
Lacan’s three structural categories: an Imaginary Real (the je
ne sais quoi of sublimity that makes an ordinary object into
“the Real thing,” the libidinal Ding an sich),
a Symbolic Real (the brute materiality of the signifying chain,
divested of the ephemeral ideality of meaning accompanying conscious
employments of representations), and a Real Real (exhibited in
horrific images of corporeality, sexuality, and death). Although
not exhaustive of the plurality of senses that the Real has throughout
the full expanse of Lacan’s oeuvre, this schematic outline elegantly
encapsulates the basic parameters of theoretical significance
that this concept/category takes on in its various contexts of
employment.

Overall, one gets the feeling, in reading On Belief, that
Zizek is in the midst of a transitional phase, a period during
which he’s stepping back from his earlier work and sorting out
the dense, tangled web of philosophico-intellectual commitments
he’s enmeshed himself in over the past twelve or so years of intense
publishing activity. Although one would be hard pressed to claim
that he succeeds in resolving, in this particular book, the various
problems that have come to occupy center stage in his own emerging
theoretical system (most notably, the issue of how to rethink
the rapport between Marxism and psychoanalysis as well as the
struggle to strike a balance between transcendentalism and historicism),
he continues to distinguish himself as a genuinely original philosophical
mind, a writer capable of achieving novel, unprecedented breakthroughs
in the context of contemporary thought. One hopes that, out of
the volatility of the tensions and difficulties rising to the
surface of his recent texts, Slavoj Zizek will, in the near future,
succeed in pointing the way towards a reconfiguration of the very
terrain against whose background he is presently laboring.

© 2001 Adrian Johnston

This review first appeared online Sept 4, 2001

Categories: Psychoanalysis, Philosophical

Tags: Psychoanalysis