One of Slavoj Zizek’s favorite recent references is
a short 1997 book on Gilles Deleuze by Alain Badiou, Deleuze:  La clameur de l’ètre.  In this text, Badiou contends that the
typical first impressions arising from a reading of Deleuze’s works tend to
reinforce a misinterpretation of him as philosophically celebrating the
flourishing of heterogeneous multiplicities and the mad dance of "nomadic
rhizomes" chaotically branching out in every possible direction, with no
guiding trajectory either shaping this philosophical program or governing its
objects of descriptive inquiry.  Deleuze
is all too often cast as a theoretical anarchist of desire, as a schizophrenic
troublemaker disrupting the organized structures operative within both
political and libidinal economies.  In
short, much of Deleuzian thought is exegetically filtered through the lens of
his joint "anti-Oedipal" endeavor with Félix Guattari.  Badiou maintains that a pronounced
discrepancy exists, in Deleuze’s oeuvre, between, on the one hand, its
superficial style, whose baroque, ornate intricacies encourage the view that
this is a philosophy of explosive fragmentation, and, on the other hand, its
basic, underlying content, its endlessly reiterated thesis.  Beneath the scintillating stylistic façade
of a "rhizomatic" prose, Deleuze tirelessly and monotonously pursues
the same essential point again and again: 
everything exists on a single ontological level; everything is to be
situated on one sole "plane of immanence"–therefore, the temptation
to posit split tiers of existence (such as Plato’s division between the visible
and intelligible realms and Kant’s noumenal-phenomenal gap) must be decisively
resisted.  The heterogeneity of
appearances belies the homogeneity of being. 
Thus, according to Badiou, the frenzied multiplication of the
"Many" in Deleuze ultimately serves to better reveal the
all-inclusive "One" of an ontology of absolute immanence.

A similar observation should be made regarding
Zizek’s own corpus.  His frenetic
accumulation of an ever-growing number of cultural examples and his famed
forays into the twisting nooks and crannies of the popular imagination are
liable to mislead readers into viewing him as an anti-systematic thinker (a
thinker who seeks to compromise the ostensible purity of philosophical thought
by forcing it into being dialectically contaminated through a symbiotic fusion
with the disorganized domain of contemporary quotidian culture).  Faced with the "pyrotechnics" and
"fireworks" of his extended, theoretically elaborate asides
concerning literature, art, film, and daily life in late-capitalist societies, readers
are susceptible to being dazzled to the point of giddy, over-stimulated
incomprehension, of being stunned like the proverbial deer caught in the glare
of blinding headlights.  Zizek’s
rhetorical flare and various features of his methodology are in danger of
creating the same unfortunate sort of audience as today’s mass media (with its
reliance upon continual successions of rapid-fire, attention-grabbing sound
bytes), namely, consumers too easily driven to distraction.  The extent of this risk can be mitigated if
one keeps in mind that Badiou’s warnings about Deleuze (i.e., don’t let the
heterogeneous style distract from and thereby obscure the homogeneous content)
are equally applicable to Zizek himself. 
When Zizek declares that he employs, for instance, popular culture as a
subservient vehicle for the deployment of speculative theoretical
philosophy–the "Many" of Zizek’s examples ultimately serves the
"One" of a project aiming at the "reactualization" (as
Zizek himself puts it) of Kantian and German idealist thought through the
mediation of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology–he is quite
serious.  And yet, Sarah Kay challenges
this Zizekian self-portrait as an oversimplification.  Not only does she see a much more volatile co-dependence between
theory and culture at work in Zizek’s writings (she hesitates to accept at face
value Zizek’s claim that, for him, culture is subordinate to theory)–but, she
also argues that the central topic over which Zizek obsesses, the Lacanian
register of the Real, compels him to adopt non-systematic, fragmentary
procedures (as a series of "failed" or "missed" encounters
with the forever-elusive Real) for attempting to engage with this interminably
insistent-yet-inaccessible theoretical "object."  The Real, on Kay’s reading, shatters the
Zizekian oeuvre into a multitude of partial, "awry" perspectives on
an infinitely receding vanishing point that can only ever be approached in an
indirect, tangential manner.

In the opening of her introduction, Kay correctly identifies
Zizek’s intellectual agenda as involving the task of elevating Lacan to the
dignity of philosophical modernity–"Zizek’s… main philosophical
contention is that Lacan’s thought is heir to the Enlightenment, but represents
a seismic shift forwards.  For Zizek,
Lacan both continues and radicalizes the trajectory of European transcendental
metaphysics" (pg. 1).  As is well
known, the two main poles/components of his work are modern philosophy (from
Descartes to Marx, with special emphasis on Kant, Schelling, and Hegel) and
Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis.  A few
of the minor problems with Kay’s introduction to Zizek arise from the fact
that, as she has the merit of openly and honestly admitting, she isn’t a specialist
in either area, being neither an expert on the late modern German philosophical
tradition nor a psychoanalyst or scholar of Lacan’s works (thus, when
discussing Hegel, for instance, she seems unaware that his use of the term
"understanding" [Verstand] has a precise technical meaning related
to the Kantian distinction between understanding and "reason" [Vernunft],
and that this isn’t to be taken in a loose, everyday sense as a catch-all
designation for the conceptual as opposed to the utterly non-conceptual–see
page forty-two).  Consequently, details
of the particular slant of her interpretation might be the result of trying to
make a virtue out of the necessity of this constraining limitation:  as far as the philosophical dimension is
concerned, Kay says very little about Kant, Schelling, and Badiou (these three
are central figures in Zizek’s more recent texts–Kay covers each in a couple
of pages), putting a perhaps disproportionate amount of emphasis on Hegel; and,
as far as the psychoanalytic dimension is concerned, Kay explicitly (and
questionably) downplays Freud’s role in Zizek’s endeavors, claiming that Lacan
alone is the sole analytic authority to which he appeals.

The five chapters of Kay’s book (not including the
introduction) cover the following areas of Zizek’s work:  philosophy, culture, sexuality, ethics, and
politics (she also offers readers a glossary at the end to aid in deciphering
Zizek’s terminology).  In
"Dialectic and the Real:  Lacan,
Hegel and the Alchemy of après-coup," Kay advances several
claims.  First, she portrays Lacan’s
fidelity to Freud as bringing him into conflict with Hegel.  Although she admits that Lacan, in various
places, favorably invokes Hegel, she nonetheless opts to highlight the former’s
disagreements with and criticisms of the latter (Kay extracts these Lacanian
objections to Hegelian philosophy mostly from the 1960 ecrit "The
subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian
unconscious").  Of course, the
Hegel that Lacan is said to reject is the straw man caricature of the philosopher
of "absolute knowledge," the pretentious, self-anointed prophet of
the end of philosophical and political history.  Then, Kay argues that Zizek counters Lacan’s criticisms of Hegel
one-by-one, recasting Hegel as a thinker of radical contingency, rather than as
the herald of a final static closure qua outcome of some pre-ordained
teleological movement.  Kay justifiably
asserts that this Zizekian recasting of Hegel is intimately bound up with his
philosophical deployment of the Freudian-Lacanian temporal model of retroactive
causality (i.e., Freud’s Nachtraglichkeit and Lacan’s apres-coup)–"Another
crucial aspect of Zizek’s argument is his insistence that Hegel is a
philosopher of contingency, not teleology. 
It is only in retrospect that the outcome of the dialectic appears
to have been necessary.  But, when
looked at prospectively, it is always open to chance" (pg. 25).  As Kay notes, this heterodox portrait of
Hegel enables Zizek to argue that true universality emerges out of the
immanent, concrete domain of historical particularity–"it is only the
particular which can become universal… 
Far from diminishing its universality, historical specificity is the
reflective key to it" (pg. 44). 
The apparent necessity and inevitability of the march of Hegelian Geist
is a perspectival après-coup effect: 
instead of being an eternal, always-existent blueprint prefiguring the
materialization of historical configurations, Geist only appears in its
necessity and inevitability for the gaze of subjective hindsight, for those
embedded within a contingent series of events rendered retroactively
comprehensible vis-à-vis the formulation of such "spiritual"
structures (Kay would be well served here by referring to Lacan’s discussion of
cybernetics and binary code in the postface to the "Seminar on ‘The
Purloined Letter’" as illustrating certain central aspects of Zizek’s
recasting of Hegel).  However, one of
Kay’s main claims in this chapter is a bit questionable.  She argues that the Zizek seeks to raise the
level of Hegel’s importance for Lacanian thought specifically at Freud’s
expense.  As is well known, Lacan never
tires of emphasizing that his own work rests upon Freud, that his teachings
represent a "return to Freud." 
Kay seems to imply that Zizek, perhaps signaled by the relative dearth
of references to Freud in his writings (as compared with other figures), aims
to replace Freud as the primary historical forerunner of Lacan.  Just because Zizek, in the interests of his
own theoretical purposes, doesn’t refer to Freud as much as to Hegel doesn’t
necessarily entail that he actively downplays Freud’s importance for the inner
workings of Lacan’s conceptual apparatus. 
Zizek, although heavily influenced by Lacan, is motivated by a different
set of intellectual agendas, practices, and contexts than his so-called
"master."  His deployment of
Lacanian theory in conjunction with philosophy reflects these different
concerns, rather than indicating a desire to internally revise Lacan’s corpus.

The next chapter, "’Reality’ and the Real:  Culture as Anamorphosis," is devoted to
elucidating the details of a Zizekian understanding of culture.  One of the most decisive factors
contributing to Zizek’s present fame is his witty, playful employment of
numerous examples plucked from popular culture.  He humorously blends the "high" (extremely complex
bodies of ideas, such as those propounded by Hegel and Lacan) with the
"low" (in some cases, the lowest of low brow Hollywood blockbuster
entertainment).  Unlike many ivory tower
academics, he’s refreshingly averse to the sort of snobbery that dictates
illustrative references being limited to Greek tragedies or Proust;  he treats the entire range of cultural
products, from Mozart to "The Matrix," as all equally capable of
serving as grist for the mill.  In fact,
time and again, Zizek produces surprising moments when the reader realizes
that, in being dragged through the murky mud of popular culture,
intricate-yet-ephemeral theoretical notions (rather than, for all that, losing
their clarity) are rendered almost impossibly crystalline and concrete–this
is, along with jarring Nietzschean reversals of perspective ("You usually
think it’s this way, but, in reality, the opposite is actually the
case!"), his trademark flourish. 
Zizek sometimes insists that his recourse to various cultural objects is
merely engaged in for the sake of attaining a better grasp of a given set of
philosophical and/or psychoanalytic concepts, namely, that these objects are
mere props or vehicles for more abstract ideas.  However, Kay doubts this. 
As noted, she contends that Zizek’s grasp of theory is informed and
contaminated by his detours through the socio-cultural domain.  In order to organize what risks potentially
being a completely disorganized and haphazard chapter–Zizek’s cultural
references are all over the map–Kay wisely sticks to a guiding thread:  she examines the Zizekian cultural field as
the reality within which "sublime objects" appear (as per the title
of his first book in English, the 1989 Sublime Object of Ideology).  Kay, following Lacan, exploits the semantic
link between "sublime" and "sublimation."  Lacan, in the seventh seminar, defines
sublimation as the process whereby "an object is raised to the dignity of
the Thing" (a formula also echoing Hegelian "sublation" [Aufhebung]).  So, Kay accordingly notes that an object (die
Sache) becomes "sublime" when it occupies the forever-vacant
place of the "Real Thing" (das Ding) as the primordially
missing, jouissance-laden center of gravity for the entire libidinal
economy.  A "sublime object" (objet
petit a) is something situated at the interstices of Lacan’s three
registers:  the Real, the Symbolic, and
the Imaginary (the later Lacan places objet a at the center of his
tripartite Borromean knot).  Or, more
succinctly put, these privileged objects situated within the sphere of culture
are the loci where the Real sublimely shines through the cracks in the fabric
of otherwise mundane reality.  As Kay
aptly expresses it, these Lacanian-Zizekian objects "communicate something
of the jouissance at their centre and, at the same time, hold it at
bay.  By providing the co-ordinates for
actual, real-world objects, they… serve to support our sense of ‘reality,’
but they also trouble it with the uncanny menace of the real" (pg.
57).  As a "theorist of the
Real," Zizek scours the surface of culture looking for those moments where
these alluring-yet-threatening flashes pop into view, and he finds them in a
bewildering array of places.

"The Real of Sexual Difference:  Imagining, Thinking, Being" tackles
Zizek’s heavily Lacanian handling of sexual difference.  Kay observes that, when speaking of sex,
Zizek oscillates between two modes: 
either crass, offensive vulgarities (usually involving dirty jokes) or
incredibly abstract formalities (a la Lacan’s logical "mathemes of
sexuation").  In other words, he
either wallows in base crudeness or indulges in disembodied theoretical
speculations.  Kay’s contention here is
that this seesawing of Zizek’s discourse apropos of the topic of sexuality is a
performative instantiation of yet another aspect of the Real (i.e., sexual
difference as an impossible "stumbling block" for the Symbolic).  More specifically, just as Zizek moves back-and-forth
between "too much" (an almost pornographic portrayal of sex) and
"not enough" (a level of theoretical abstraction seemingly too far
removed from the embodied tangibility of sex), so also, "Sex… is the
domain of the ‘too much’ or the ‘not enough’" (pg. 101).  The first half of the chapter is principally
occupied with outlining the fundaments of Lacan’s account of sexual difference
as offered in his famous twentieth seminar (Encore, 1972-1973).  After laying this groundwork, Kay, in the
latter half of the chapter, proceeds to focus on two issues:  Zizek’s disagreements with Judith Butler and
his particular redefinition of the psychoanalytic notion of the
"fundamental fantasy." 
Against Butler’s accusations that Lacanian theory erroneously reifies
contingent socio-historical conflicts into apriori, transcendent(al)
structures, Zizek demonstrates how her critique is founded upon a confused
misapprehension of the status of Lacan’s three registers–"Butler, Zizek
observes, systematically reads the real as if it were the symbolic, and the
symbolic as if it were the imaginary. 
At each stage she semanticizes Lacan’s thought, substituting symbolic
difference for real antagonism and then confusing symbolic difference with
ideological content" (pg. 93). 
Regarding the fundamental fantasy–such fantasies are "vanishing
mediators" between the primordially repressed Real of unbearable trauma
and the tame, domesticated surface of Imaginary-Symbolic reality–Kay sees
Zizek’s crucial, innovative contribution as residing in the discernment of a
foundation to the being of the subject beyond, behind, or beneath
sexuality.  The sexualization of the
unconscious is a secondary after-effect of a prior tension-ridden dynamic
involving the drives and the difficult, disturbing entrance into the mediated
realm of the symbolic order (as per Lacan’s concept of "symbolic
castration").  Sexuality isn’t, in
Zizek’s account, a primary, indissoluble given, an axiomatic starting
point.  Rather, as Kay accurately notes,
the Lacanian-Zizekian position here is that sexuality and the formation of
gender identities are after-the-fact responses to an underlying and
unrepresentable trauma involving the archaic conflict, in the individual’s
forever-lost ontogenetic prehistory, between the libidinal economy and its
enveloping matrices of mediation.

The last two chapters, "Ethics and the
Real:  The Ungodly Virtues of
Psychoanalysis" and "Politics, or, The Art of the Impossible,"
are closely tied together.  "Ethics
and the Real" can be read as, in part, a supplement to the first
chapter.  Whereas the first chapter’s
summary of Zizek’s engagement with philosophy focuses almost exclusively on
Hegel, this later chapter somewhat makes up for this lop-sidedness by providing
a series of short summaries of various other Zizekian philosophical references:  Pascal, Kant, Schelling, Kierkegaard,
Althusser, and Badiou.  Kay maintains
that one of Zizek’s primary objectives in passing through the works of these
various philosophers is the forging of, as she puts it, a "godless
theology" (pg. 103).  Like Badiou
(in his reading of Saint Paul), Zizek turns to Christianity, seeking, through a
secular, atheistic appropriation, to extract from it valuable insights into
pressing matters of practical as well as theoretical concern (of course, a key
precursor of this is Hegel’s treatment of Christianity as an unconscious set of
precious philosophical-dialectical insights, insights that he, the
philosopher-dialectician, seeks to "raise to the dignity of their
Notion").  The conclusion of
"Ethics and the Real" segues into the subsequent chapter on politics
with the claim that, "Radical politics, Zizek is asserting, is the
materialist atheist equivalent of Protestant fundamentalism" (pg.
126).  In other words, what Zizek is looking
for in thinkers ranging from Pascal to Badiou is a viable bulwark against the
ethically suspect symptoms of postmodern, late-capitalist society:  covertly conformist cynicism and a pervasive
relativism that does nothing but tacitly justify the reigning status quo.

In "Politics, or, The Art of the Impossible,"
Kay asserts that Zizek’s entire theoretical endeavor is political from top to
bottom.  Given that the Lacanian subject
is "decentered" and "outside of itself"–such subjectivity is
inextricably intertwined with the grand Autre of the symbolic order–its
very nature is inseparable from the polis in which it’s embedded.  The bulk of Zizek’s socio-political analysis
centers on the workings of ideology in relation to psychoanalytically
delineated mechanisms structuring the subject’s relation to reality (especially
fetishistic disavowal and its sustenance of unconscious belief in the social
system).  However, Kay describes a
recent shift away from a Lacanian "critique of ideology"–as Kay
notes, Lacan himself is hardly sympathetic to extreme leftist politics–and
towards a more Marxist political program based on Lacan’s notion of the
"Act" (as defined chiefly in the fifteenth seminar, L’acte
psychanalytique, 1967-1968). 
Whereas an "action" is something unproblematic for and
compatible with a governing state of affairs, an Act per se is a violent
gesture shattering the Symbolic framework in which it occurs.  Zizek’s recourse to the Act as the
foundation for a renewal of radical politics testifies to "a striking
combination of optimism and pessimism… pessimism about the situation as it
is, optimism that it could be transformed" (pg. 154).  In describing capital itself as functioning
at the level of a Real materiality underpinning the Imaginary-Symbolic reality
of the socio-political order, Zizek makes it seem as if this vampiric
monstrosity is a foe so insidiously powerful that only a miraculous event could
bring about its defeat.  And, his
affirmation of the eternal possibility of the emergence of genuine Acts expresses
his belief that such miracles can still grace those subjected to today’s
lamentable political circumstances.

Despite the fact that his writing is quite lucid,
people often complain that Zizek is difficult to access:  his discussions jump too quickly from topic
to topic and he draws on too diverse a range of figures and areas.  It’s indeed true that a full appreciation of
Zizek’s oeuvre requires of the reader that he/she acquire familiarity with,
among other thinkers, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan, and
Badiou.  Attempting to decipher his
texts without this background, although tempting given the amount of material,
is an effort doomed from the start. 
However, Kay’s introduction, while no substitute for this labor, is a
helpful guide for those trying to find their initial bearings amidst the
frenzied whirlwind of Zizek’s hyper-kinetic prose.  She clearly and concisely summarizes some of the themes and ideas
to which Zizek repeatedly recurs. 
Similarly, the organization of her book is well thought out, managing to
productively touch upon the most essential areas of Zizekian concern.  Ironically enough, the success of Kay’s
struggle to exegetically lend a degree of stable coherence to Zizek’s writings
cuts against her claim, advanced in the book’s introduction, that Zizek is an
anti-systematic theorist, a theorist whose theories are prevented from ever
achieving internal consistency due to the disrupting effects of his chosen
object of inquiry, namely, the Real itself. 
Thanks to her introduction, previously disoriented and confused readers
of Zizek now have a chance of discerning the contours of a fairly integrated
set of arguments and strategies.

© 2003 Adrian Johnston

Adrian Johnston, Ph.D. holds a position
as interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at Emory.

Categories: Philosophical, Psychoanalysis