Commentary on Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (Chapter 1)

What follows is my paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on the first chapter of Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology. If you look at how long it takes to read this post, then you might reasonably assume that I’ve lost my mind. Yes, I’m posting this sprawling madness in its entirety, but I don’t expect anybody to read all of this. A friend of mine is currently taking a course on The Sublime Object of Ideology and requested that I made my notes available. Maybe you’re also new to the book and find parts of chapter one to be difficult to understand. Hopefully, my notes will be of some help to you. I provide all of the text of chapter one here and you’ll be able to easily spot it, since it’s the only text in bold. All the rest is made up of my notes and quotes from other thinkers. I do think that this chapter is packed full of insights that are worth engaging with. My notes attempt to clarify these insights. My apologies for any annoying typos you might encounter, but give me a break on this one please.

Chapter I: How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?

Marx, Freud: the analysis of form

“According to Lacan, it was none other than Karl Marx who invented the notion of symptom” (p. 3). In this opening section, Žižek will argue, via Lacan, that Marx created the notion of the symptom, that is, that there is a structural or formal homology (likeness in form) between the commodity (political economy) and the symptom (psychoanalysis). In other words, while the content of the commodity and the symptom obviously differ, the two share a common form or structure. The commodity-form is homologous to the symptom-form/dream-form (dream-work). Lacan links Marx to the discovery of the symptom in ‘On the Subject Who is Finally in Question’ (Écrits) as well as in Seminar XXII: RSI. The (Kantian/transcendental) question is: how was it possible for Marx to formulate the concept of the symptom while working within the strict parameters of economics? “If Marx really articulated the notion of the symptom as it is also at work in the Freudian field, then we must ask ourselves the Kantian question, concerning the epistemological ‘conditions of possibility’ of such an encounter: how was it possible for Marx, in his analysis of the world of commodities, to produce a notion which applies also to the analysis of dreams, hysterical phenomena, and so on?” (p. 3). The answer is precisely the “fundamental homology” between how Marx and Freud interpreted the objects of their studies. It is the similarity in their methods of interpretation that allows us to see the formal likeness between commodities and symptoms. The latent content of commodities and symptoms/dreams is not their true secret. This secret is actually the structural mechanism (homology) that transform latent content into manifest content. “The answer is that there is a fundamental homology between the interpretative procedure of Marx and Freud — more precisely, between their analysis of commodity and of dreams. In both cases the point is to avoid the properly fetishistic fascination of the ‘content’ supposedly hidden behind the form: the ‘secret’ to be unveiled through analysis is not the content hidden by the form (the form of commodities, the form of dreams) but, on the contrary, the ‘secret’ of this form itself. The theoretical intelligence of the form of dreams does not consist in penetrating from the manifest content to its ‘hidden kernel’, to the latent dream-thoughts; it consists in the answer to the question: why have the latent dream-thoughts assumed such a form, why were they transposed into the form of a dream? It is the same with commodities: the real problem is not to penetrate to the ‘hidden kernel’ of the commodity — the determination of its value by the quantity of the work consumed in its production — but to explain why work assumed the form of the value of a commodity, why it can affirm its social character only in the commodity-form of its product” (pp. 3–4). There is a triadic schema employed here in the analysis of commodities and dreams: (1) manifest content, (2) latent content, (3) form. Both commodities and dreams have manifest and latent contents that greatly vary, but the formal structure which transform latent content into manifest content is homologous. The latent content of the dream is latent dream-thoughts and the manifest content is the literal text of the dream. The latent content of the commodity is the work (socially necessary labor time) that goes into the production of the commodity while the manifest content is the commodity’s value (usually represented in its price). But what is the homologous form of the commodity and of the dream?

Žižek goes on to point out that many of the criticisms launched against psychoanalysis, especially those of Hans-Jürgen Eysenck (the “pansexualism” of psychoanalysis, e.g., all dreams have a sexual latent content), rest upon a fundamental mistake, an error in understanding. This mistake being the theoretical identification of unconsious desire with latent content. The idea is that the latent content of a dream is always the unconscious desire or wish of the dream. Žižek convincingly argues that this is not so. The two are far from the same. For starters, the latent content is not unconscious or repressed content of a sexual nature. In fact, it’s merely preconscious material that is usually not sexual at all. “This kind of reproach is based on a fundamental theoretical error: the identification of the unconscious desire at work in the dream with the ‘latent thought’ — that is, the signification of the dream. But as Freud continually emphasizes, there is nothing ‘unconscious’ in the ‘latent dream­ thought’: this thought is an entirely ‘normal’ thought which can be articulated in the syntax of everyday, common language; topologically, it belongs to the system of ‘consciousness/preconsciousness’; the subject is usually aware of it, even excessively so; it harasses him all the time . . . Under certain conditions this thought is pushed away, forced out of the consciousness, drawn into the unconscious — that is, submitted to the laws of the ‘primary process’, translated into the ‘language of the unconscious’. The relationship between the ‘latent thought’ and what is called the ‘manifest content’ of a dream — the text of the dream, the dream in its literal phenomenality — is therefore that between some entirely ‘normal’, (pre)conscious thought and its translation into the ‘rebus’ of the dream. The essential constitution of dream is thus not its ‘latent thought’ but this work (the mechanisms of displacement and condensation, the figuration of the contents of words or syllables) which confers on it the form of a dream” (pp. 4–5). The essence of the dream is not its latent content, but, rather, the dream-work itself, which is the form of the dream. The form of the dream involves the mechanisms of displacement (metonymy) and condensation (metaphor), that is, how the contents of the dreams are organized and positioned. The form of the dream is that of displacement and condensation. Note that Žižek does say that latent content can come from the unconscious, but not necessarily so. Perhaps he doesn’t mean unconscious, properly speaking, but just preconscious. Maybe he’s not being very strict with his terminology. What is the primary process and the secondary process? PRIMARY PROCESS: produces a memory image of an object needed for gratification in order to reduce the frustration of not having been gratified yet. This develops as the id encounters frustrations of its desires, and it works because for the id, an image is the same as an object (“an identity of perception”). Primary process is preverbal and dreamlike, not rational as with the ego. It’s called “primary” because it comes first in human development: for Freud if not for later theorists, the baby is, so to speak, all id. SECONDARY PROCESS: the ego’s reality-testing and energy-binding capability. In other words, thinking and reasoning. “Herein, then, lies the basic misunderstanding: if we seek the ‘secret of the dream’ in the latent content hidden by the manifest text, we are doomed to disappointment: all we find is some entirely ‘normal’ — albeit usually unpleasant — thought, the nature of which is mostly non-sexual and definitely not ‘unconscious’” (p. 5). That’s all well and good, but what, then, is the relation between the latent content and the truly repressed desire (unconscious desire)? Žižek is now going to present us with the sticking point. “This ‘normal’, conscious/preconscious thought is not drawn towards the unconscious, repressed simply because of its ‘disagreeable’ character for the conscious, but because it achieves a kind of ‘short circuit’ between it and another desire which is already repressed, located in the unconscious, a desire which has nothing whatsoever to do with the ‘latent dream-thought’. ‘A normal train of thought’ — normal and therefore one which can be articulated in common, everyday language: that is, in the syntax of the ‘secondary process’ — ‘is only submitted to the abnormal psychical treatment of the sort we have been describing’ — to the dream-work, to the mechanisms of the ‘primary process’ — ‘if an unconscious wish, derived from infancy and in a state of repression, has been transferred on to it’! Žižek is quoting Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in this passage. The true unconscious desire of a dream piggybacks on the latent content (which is another desire that basically has nothing to do with the repressed one). We can represent the relations between the unconscious desire (UD), latent content (LC) and manifest content (MC) like this:

MC

— — — UD

LC

Why the hell would we place UD at the bar? We’ll get to that shortly. According to Žižek, the unconscious desire is necessarily a sexual one; it also has always only resided in the primary process of the unconscious/repressed, which is why it cannot be articulated in ordinary, everyday language. “It is this unconscious/sexual desire which cannot be reduced to a ‘normal train of thought’ because it is, from the very beginning, constitutively repressed (Freud’s Urverdrängung) — because it has no ‘original’ in the ‘normal’ language of everyday communication, in the syntax of the conscious/preconscious; its only place is in the mechanisms of the ‘primary process’. This is why we should not reduce the interpretation of dreams, or symptoms in general, to the retranslation of the ‘latent dream-thought’ into the ‘normal’, everyday common language of inter-subjective communication (Habermas’s formula). The structure is always triple; there are always three elements at work: the manifest dream-text, the latent dream­-content or thought and the unconscious desire articulated in a dream. This desire attaches itself to the dream, it intercalates itself in the interspace between the latent thought and the manifest text; it is therefore not ‘more concealed, deeper’ in relation to the latent thought, it is decidedly more ‘on the surface’, consisting entirely of the signifier’s mechanisms, of the treatment to which the latent thought is submitted. In other words, its only place is in the form of the ‘dream’: the real subject matter of the dream (the unconscious desire) articulates itself in the dream-work, in the elaboration of its ‘latent content’” (pp. 5–6). “Intercalate” means to to insert or position between or among existing elements or layers. If the unconscious desire is positioned between the latent and manifest content, then it’s “above” the latent content. More importantly, here we learn that unconscious desire is to be associated with the dream-work itself (“the signifier’s mechanisms”, the primary process). The unconscious desire can be said to be the Real of the dream, since is resists being articulated in inter-subjective communication (secondary process). For Lacan, the unconscious is not something buried deep down in the psyche, but, instead, right there on the surface of the analysand’s speech/communication. To locate the unconscious desire, therefore, would be to understand why the latent content has taken on the form of the manifest content. The unconscious, for Lacan and Žižek, is a linguistically sophisticated agency that expresses itself in the organization (form) of signifiers. However, there are S1s that make up the unconscious’ signifying-chain. The paradox of the dream: “This, then, is the basic paradox of the dream: the unconscious desire, that which is supposedly its most hidden kernel, articulates itself precisely through the dissimulation work of the ‘kernel’ of a dream, its latent thought, through the work of disguising this content-kernel by means of its translation into the dream-rebus” (p. 6). “Dissimulation” means concealment of one’s thoughts, feelings, or character; pretense. “Rebus” means a puzzle in which words are represented by combinations of pictures and individual letters; for instance, apex might be represented by a picture of an ape followed by a letter X. The “dream-rebus” is the puzzle of the dream embodied in the manifest content. In other words, the paradox of the dream is that unconscious desire unconceals itself in how it (form) conceals the latent content in the manifest content (again, this occurs via the mechanisms of displacement and condensation). Žižek goes on to quote Freud to show that he himself held this to be the case. As Freud said concerning a mistake on the part of psychoanalysts, “They seek to find the essence of dreams in their latent content and in so doing they overlook the distinction between the latent dream-thoughts and the dream-work. At bottom, dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dream-work which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming — the explanation of its peculiar nature” (The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 650). The essence of the dream is comprised of the form of the dream and the unconscious desire that gives rise to it. When you think of the essence of the dream, think of the dream-work (displacement/condensation) and the unconscious desire — this is the form of the dream. Keep in mind that the form of a particular dream is rooted in unconscious desire. It is unconscious desire that uses the mechanisms of the dream-work. Žižek now explains that this means that Freud’s hermeneutics (strategy of interpretation) has two crucial steps: (1) that the dream has a hidden meaning or “kernel of signification” (latent content) and that this “repressed” (preconscious) meaning can be revealed through a certain interpretative procedure. (2) We must go beyond our fascination with the secret meaning of this hidden signification and focus on the form of the dream itself, since this is where the truly repressed, unconscious desire of the dream is to be found. We must move past the latent content, what we tend to mistake for the essence of the dream, to its true essence, namely, unconscious desire/dream-work. So what’s the big take away, what’s the major connection to political economy? This is the exact same hermeneutical approach we find in Marx. “The crucial thing to note here is that we find exactly the same articulation in two stages with Marx, in his analysis of the ‘secret of the commodity­ form’” (p. 7). How so? According to Marx, we must (1) move past the surface “value” (manifest content) of the commodity produced by the dynamics of supply and demand to arrive at the hidden value (latent content) of the commodity, that is, to the “determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time”. The hidden “meaning” (value) of a commodity is the socially necessary labor time embodied in it. (2) We must not, like the classical political economists, remain fixated on the commodity’s hidden value, i.e., “labour as the true source of wealth”. Rather, we must push through and arrive at the true secret of the commodity — its form. The commodity-form (form) is what transforms socially necessary labor time (latent content) into the “value”/price (manifest content) of the commodity. The commodity-form is homologous to the dream-work. Thus, for both Freud and Marx, there are to crucial moves: (1) from manifest content to latent content, (2) from latent content to form. We basically explain nothing by arriving at the latent content — the real explanation resides in understanding the form. “Even after we have explained its hidden meaning, its latent thought, the dream remains an enigmatic phenomenon; what is not yet explained is simply its form, the process by means of which the hidden meaning disguised itself in such a form” (p. 8). The same goes for the commodity. But what is the commodity-form? We know what the dream-work is, namely, the mechanisms of displacement and condensation, but what is the commodity-work? “We must, then, accomplish another crucial step and analyse the genesis of the commodity-form itself. It is not sufficient to reduce the form to the essence, to the hidden kernel, we must also examine the process — homologous to the ‘dream-work’ — by means of which the concealed content assumes such a form, because, as Marx points out: ‘Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, as soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself’” (p. 9). Žižek seeks to explain the genesis of the commodity-form in what follows.

The unconscious of the commodity-form

First things first, the dream and the commodity share a common structure or form. As we just saw, the dream-work, the form of the dream, is a combination of condensation and displacement. In other words, the latent content gets turned into manifest content by way of condensation and displacement. And both these mechanisms together house the true secret of the dream, that is, the unconscious, repressed, sexual desire. Now, all of this equally applies to the commodity wherein labor power or socially necessary labor time (latent content) gets transformed into exchange value or price (manifest content). The true value of the commodity gets turned into exchange value. How? Through condensation and displacement, but Marx called this commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism involves both condensation and displacement. On the one hand, the price of the commodity condenses a whole vast array of social labor, all sorts of people doing all sorts of things. For example, it probably takes millions of people just to make a box of cereal. All of the machines used to make the cereal themselves had to be made and they were produced by yet other machines that had to be made. All of this is condensed in the immediate aura of the commodity. On the other hand, all of the social relations that produced the commodity get displaced onto the commodity itself (or, more accurately, on all commodities). This is why Marx said that in commodity fetishism social relations between humans take on the fetishistic appearance of relations between things (commodities) — this is a movement of displacement. Now, if the commodity secretly contains a hidden (unconscious, imperceptible, “repressed”, “sexual”) desire, then it is the desire of capital itself, that is, the desire to exploit the workers at all cost for the sake of capital accumulation. In fact, commodity fetishism (condensation and displacement) serves to keep the violent, ruthless, exploitative drive of capital out of sight. This is why capitalism can appear to be such a “free” system. More on this stuff below.

What’s the meaning of the name of this section? Following Sohn-Rethel, Žižek will argue that the commodity-form (the symbolic order of the commodity, i.e., economic relations) is the unconscious of abstract thought. The structure of economic exchange served as the condition and unconsious truth of the transcendental a priori framework of the Kantian-universal subject (the pure subject of objective knowledge). The unconscious of abstract thinking in general is the commodity-form. This sections has huge implications. It’s arguing that the commodity-form gives rise to our standard of knowledge as such, that is, to what Foucault called an “episteme”. This means that the commodity is not just responsible for our capitalist ideology (the presuppositional frame of political economy), but what we consider to be thought and knowledge. The commodity sets the very parameters of truth. We tend to think of ideology as false consciousness (viewing the world through bad ideas), but Žižek is saying that it’s at the heart of our modern-scientific concept of truth. The commodity is truth — what a terrible thought. In other words, the commodity-form is the unconscious of our the Kantian faculty. Just as one’s personal unconscious pulls the strings of the conscious self, so, too, does the economic unconscious, the structure of the commodity, pull the strings of epistemological consciousness. This is not your regular ol’ ideology — this is super-duper ideology. We are not directly aware of it at a conscious level, and that’s the point, but our very standard of truth validates and affirms the structure of the commodity. Sohn-Rethel and Žižek want us to ask ourselves a simple question: is it a mere coincidence that the concept of objective, scientific knowledge emerged in a society wherein the commodity served as its material foundation?

“Why did the Marxian analysis of the commodity-form — which, prima facie, concerns a purely economic question — exert such an influence in the general field of social sciences; why has it fascinated generations of philosophers, sociologists, art historians, and others? Because it offers a kind of matrix enabling us to generate all other forms of the ‘fetishistic inversion’: it is as if the dialectics of the commodity-form presents us with a pure — distilled, so to speak — version of a mechanism offering us a key to the theoretical understanding of phenomena which, at first sight, have nothing whatsoever to do with the field of political economy (law, religion, and so on). In the commodity-form there is definitely more at stake than the commodity-form itself, and it was precisely this ‘more’ which exerted such a fascinating power of attraction” (pp. 9–10). The Latin phrase prima facie means based on the first impression; accepted as correct until proved otherwise. Why did Marx’s analysis of the commodity (chapter one of Capital) have such a universal appeal to various types of thinkers in the humanities? It’s because Marx discovered a structure that holds sway far beyond the parameters of economics. The structure is that of the transformation of social-subjective relations betweens people into objective relations between things, i.e., reification. It was Marx that discovered the structure of all “fetishistic inversion” (fetishism, reification). But what is this inversion and how is it dialectical? If the commodity necessarily involves a fetishistic inversion, then the process that gives rise to it will be a dialectics of sorts, i.e., one thing transforming into its opposite (e.g., subjective relations between people into objective relations between things). Think about totemism: men are the makers of these objects, but, then, they turn right around (dialectico-fetishistic inversion) of worship them as if they were our makers. The same goes for the commodity insofar as the relations of the production (capitalists and wage laborers) that actualize the commodity become congealed within it in such a way as to make the commodity strike us phenomenologically as a special entity with a unique aura all on its own. In other words, relations among people get experienced as relations among objects. All of the economic relations between money and commodities ultimately get taken to be objective relations independent from relations among human beings when, in fact, they are really, at bottom, nothing but relations between people (capitalists and wage laborers). “As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities” (Capital, p. 165). Fetishistic inversion is a dialectics because it is a process through which one thing turns into its opposite, that is, gets inverted. There is more to commodity fetishism than just commodities (economics). We find this same type of inversion (subjective relations into objective relations) occurs in religion, law, etc.

Žižek goes on to say that Sohn-Rethel, in his book Intellectual and Manual Labour, did the most thorough job of analyzing the universal reach and application of the commodity-form (I suppose we could call this the fetish-structure). Sohn-Rethel’s main thesis: “The formal analysis of the commodity holds the key not only to the critique of political economy, but also to the historical explanation of the abstract conceptual mode of thinking and of the division of intel­lectual and manual labour which came into existence with it” (Intellectual and Manual Labour, p. 33). Sohn-Rethel’s main point is that studying the commodity-form allows us to understand how abstraction (abstract thinking) emerged in human history. It also explains how abstract thinking gave rise to the distinction between intellectual and manual labor. This is a huge claim and I take it that Žižek (qua Marxist) accepts it. However, Žižek interprets Sohn-Rethel’s thesis through a Kantian lens — he Kantianizes it by identifying the abstract conceptual mode of thinking with the transcendental subject/pure categories of the understanding. “In other words, in the structure of the commodity-form it is possible to find the transcendental subject: the commodity-form articulates in advance the anatomy, the skeleton of the Kantian transcendental subject — that is, the network of transcendental categories which constitute the a priori frame of ‘objective’ scientific knowledge. Herein lies the paradox of the commodity-form: it — this inner-worldly, ‘pathological’ (in the Kantian meaning of the word) phenomenon — offers us a key to solving the fundamental question of the theory of knowledge: objective knowledge with universal validity — how is this possible?” (p. 10). If abstraction is thought of as the Kantian subject/categories, and if the commodity enables us to arrive at abstraction, then ipso facto it gives us access to the transcendental subject/categories. The paradox of the commodity is that pathological (empirical) phenomena give us access to the transcendental-universal conditions of objective knowledge. For Kant, the word “pathological” refers to bodily appetites and emotional inclinations, that is, to our contingent, empirical motivators. The “pathological” refers to all of those contingent factors we consider to be in our self-interest. According to Kant, morality can’t be dependent on a contingent, empirical, pathological factors, but, instead, must be based on pure practical reason. A “pathological” feeling like empathy will not be sufficient to ground morality. The terms “pathological” and “empirical” are opposed to the transcendental. Žižek is utilizing an argument from Sohn-Rethel that paradoxically claims that our transcendental categories are actually rooted in the empirical phenomenon of the commodity-form (the structure of the commodity). This is a Marxist critique of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Now, Žižek also uses “pathological” in the standard psychoanalytic sense, which just refers to compulsive, obsessive aspects of a person. For example, Žižek refers to Lacan’s famous example of the pathologically jealous husband, which has nothing to do with the Kantian meaning of “pathological”.

“After a series of detailed analyses, Sohn-Rethel came to the following conclusion: the apparatus of categories presupposed, implied by the scientific procedure (that, of course, of the Newtonian science of nature), the network of notions by means of which it seizes nature, is already present in the social effectivity, already at work in the act of commodity exchange. Before thought could arrive at pure abstraction, the abstraction was already at work in the social effectivity of the market. The exchange of commodities implies a double abstraction: the abstraction from the changeable character of the commodity during the act of exchange and the abstraction from the concrete, empirical, sensual, particular character of the commodity (in the act of exchange, the distinct, particular qualitative determination of a commodity is not taken into account; a commodity is reduced to an abstract entity which — irrespective of its particular nature, of its ‘use­ value’ — possesses ‘the same value’ as another commodity for which it is being exchanged)” (pp. 10–11). Note: Baudrillard called this same value or universal dimension “general equivalence”. So Sohn-Rethel argued that Kant’s list of pure categories of the understanding are rooted in the commodity exchange (capitalism, commodity markets, etc.). Before we ever directly thought the concept of pure thought or abstraction (the Kantian a priori categories/subject), pure abstraction (pure categories) was functioning within the parameters of capitalist-economic activities. Commodity exchange involves a double abstraction: (1) abstraction from the fact that the commodity is subject to change, that is, wear and tear, and (2) the concrete, physical qualities that constitute the commodity’s use value. These two abstractions mean that the commodity is reduced to its pure, abstract aspect in commodity exchange, which is its exchange value. Two commodities can only be exchanged if they are the same, but this identity only resides on the side of abstract exchange value or general equivalence.

“Before thought could arrive at the idea of a purely quantitative determination, a sine qua non of the modern science of nature, pure quantity was already at work in money, that commodity which renders possible the commensurability of the value of all other commodities notwithstanding their particular qualitative determination. Before physics could articulate the notion of a purely abstract movement going on in a geometric space, independently of all qualitative determinations of the moving objects, the social act of exchange had already realized such a ‘pure’, abstract movement which leaves totally intact the concrete-sensual properties of the object caught in movement: the transference of property. And Sohn-Rethel demonstrated the same about the relationship of substance and its accidents, about the notion of causality operative in Newtonian science — in short, about the whole network of categories of pure reason” (p. 11). The phrase sine qua non means an essential condition; a thing that is absolutely necessary. The category of pure quantity, which is an essential condition of modern science, was operative in commodity exchange (concrete acts of human behavior) before thought itself was able to think it. The pure quantity of science is grounded by the pure quantity of economics. The transference (movement) of property is a pure movement that has nothing to do with the physical-empirical movement of the commodity in its physicality. Sohn-Rethel showed how the other pure categories are rooted in the commodity exchange in his Intellectual and Manual Labour.

“In this way, the transcendental subject, the support of the net of a priori categories, is confronted with the disquieting fact that it depends, in its very formal genesis, on some inner-worldly, ‘pathological’ process — a scandal, a nonsensical impossibility from the transcendental point of view, in so far as the formal-transcendental a priori is by definition independent of all positive contents: a scandal corresponding perfectly to the ‘scandalous’ character of the Freudian unconscious, which is also unbearable from the transcendental-philosophical perspective. That is to say, if we look closely at the ontological status of what Sohn-Rethel calls the ‘real abstraction’ [das reale Abstraktion] (that is, the act of abstraction at work in the very active process of the exchange of commodities), the homology between its status and that of the unconscious, this signifying chain which persists on ‘another Scene’, is striking: the ‘real abstraction’ is the unconscious of the transcendental subject, the support of objective-universal scientific knowledge” (p. 11). It is a very paradoxical turn of events that the transcendental condition of the pure subject/categories is an empirical object (the commodity). Žižek likens the commodity-form to the Freudian unconscious. What the abstract structure of commodity exchange is to the abstract-transcendental subject, the Freudian-Lacanian unconscious is to ego/self-consciousness. The unconsious is “another Scene” that conditions and structures the ego and its life-history; however, it’s totally different from the ego itself. This means, for Žižek, that the commodity-form is the unconscious of the transcendental subject and ipso facto is the very condition of all objective-scientific knowledge. The commodity is the unconscious of knowledge. The “real abstraction” is “the act of abstraction at work in the very active process of the exchange of commodities” and this is the “the unconscious of the transcendental subject, the support of objective-universal scientific knowledge”.

“On the one hand, the ‘real abstraction’ is of course not ‘real’ in the sense of the real, effective properties of commodities as material objects: the object-commodity does not contain ‘value’ in the same way as it possesses a set of particular properties determining its ‘use-value’ (its form, colour, taste, and so on). As Sohn-Rethel pointed out, its nature is that of a postulate implied by the effective act of exchange — in other words, that of a certain ‘as if’ [als ob]: during the act of exchange, individuals proceed as if the commodity is not submitted to physical, material exchanges; as if it is excluded from the natural cycle of generation and corruption; although on the level of their ‘consciousness’ they ‘know very well’ that this is not the case” (pp. 11–12). The real abstraction (the act of abstraction at work in the very active process of the exchange of commodities) is not real in the same way as the concrete, physical properties of a commodity are real. A commodity’s value (exchange value) has a different ontological status than that of its material qualities (use value). Sohn-Rethel claimed that the status of value is that of a postulate, i.e., an as if. We know very well that a commodity is susceptible to change, but we nevertheless behave (do) as if it is not, which means that the ideological illusion is on the side of our doing and not our knowing (Žižek will develop this line of thought in the sections to come). This implies a different structure of ideological illusion than the one presented by Marx. So the real abstraction, the postulate of value (quantitative identity or general equivalence) is operative in our behavior, but not in our immediate conscious experience. This best way to grasp the effectivity this postulate has on our behavior (concrete doing) is to view it through our relation to money.

“The easiest way to detect the effectivity of this postulate is to think of the way we behave towards the materiality of money: we know very well that money, like all other material objects, suffers the effects of use, that its material body changes through time, but in the social effectivity of the market we none the less treat coins as if they consist ‘of an immutable substance, a substance over which time has no power, and which stands in antithetic contrast to any matter found in nature’. How tempting to recall here the formula of fetishistic disavowal: ‘I know very well, but still . . . ‘. To the current exemplifications of this formula (‘I know that Mother has not got a phallus, but still . . . [I believe she has got one]’; I know that Jews are people like us, but still . . . [there is something in them]’) we must undoubtedly add also the variant of money: ‘I know that money is a material object like others, but still . . . [it is as if it were made of a special substance over which time has no power)’” (p. 12). We know that money is just one material object among others, but our behavior towards it does not reflect this knowledge, since we treat money as if it were some sublime object not susceptible to the laws of nature. This means that we don’t have to have an inner belief in the sublimity of money in order to act as if it were sublime. This puts Žižek’s thinking (and Lacanian psychoanalysis) at odds with psychology, since the latter holds that all beliefs are intimate, internal phenomena belonging to the interiority of the mind. For Žižek, some beliefs are outside of our minds.

“Here we have touched a problem unsolved by Marx, that of the material character of money: not of the empirical, material stuff money is made of, but of the sublime material, of that other ‘indestructible and immutable’ body which persists beyond the corruption of the body physical — this other body of money is like the corpse of the Sadeian victim which endures all torments and survives with its beauty immaculate. This immaterial corporality of the ‘body within the body’ gives us a precise definition of the sublime object, and it is in this sense only that the psychoanalytic notion of money as a ‘pre-phallic’, ‘anal’ object is acceptable — provided that we do not forget how this postulated existence of the sublime body depends on the symbolic order: the indestructible ‘body-within-the-body’ exempted from the effects of wear and tear is always sustained by the guarantee of some symbolic authority” (pp. 12–13). According to Žižek, Marx was unable to fully understand the sublime materiality of money — its heavenly, eternal dimension. This is the “body within the body”. Here we get Žižek’s definition of the sublime object, which objet petit a will nicely link up with. In what sense is money (sublime object) a pre-phallic, anal object? This needs to be unpacked. What I can say is that it is pre-phallic only in one very precise sense (which needs elucidation). To be pre-phallic means to be pre-Symbolic, pre-Oedipal, pre-name-of-the-father, etc., and the sublime object depends on the Symbolic through and through. More precisely, it always depends on a certain Symbolic authority or guarantee (it is the father-figure that has Symbolic authority). In other words, the sublime object would be nothing without without the Symbolic order, which means it’s a phallic object. Žižek once again quotes Sohn-Rethel to support his position: “A coin has it stamped upon its body that it is to serve as a means of exchange and not as an object of use. Its weight and metallic purity are guaranteed by the issuing authority so that, if by the wear and tear of circulation it has lost in weight, full replacement is provided. Its physical matter has visibly become a mere carrier of its social function” (Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour, p. 59). All forms of currency bear the mark of the State, nation, royalty, etc., to which they belong and which guarantee their value (sublimity). If, then, the ‘real abstraction’ has nothing to do with the level of ‘reality’, of the effective properties, of an object, it would be wrong for that reason to conceive of it as a ‘thought-abstraction’, as a process taking place in the ‘interior’ of the thinking subject: in relation to this ‘interior’, the abstraction appertaining to the act of exchange is in an irreducible way external, decentred — or, to quote Sohn-Rethel’s concise formulation: ‘The exchange abstraction is not thought, but it has the form of thought’” (p. 13). The real abstraction (the act of abstraction at work in the very active process of the exchange of commodities), i.e., the sublime value of the commodity, is not merely a “thought-abstraction”, an idea stuck in our minds, but, rather, an external, decentred mechanism or structure that has concrete effects on our behavior without us having an inner belief in it. To me, this sounds quite similar to how Lacan envisioned the effectivity of his four discourses. We do not believe in the four discourses — we simply operate in them. The same is true of the sublimity of the sublime object, e.g., the value of money and commodities. It matters not if we no longer believe in commodities — they believe in themselves for us. When Sohn-Rethel says, “The exchange abstraction is not thought, but it has the form of thought”, he means the sublime object (value) is like a thought, but also that it is not some inner representation or concept — it is like a thought, but a thought without a mind or a thinker, which means its a thought out there in the world. It’s like how the Heideggerian das Man functions at a pre-representational level. Perhaps we could say that the real abstraction (the body of the body) is a thought-in-the-world — not in the mind. Again, it’s just a Symbolic mechanism that shapes our behavior without needing a psychological referent (a representation of itself in the interiority of the actor’s private consciousness). Thoughts without minds. Beliefs without believers. But does this not sound just like the Freudian-Lacanian unconscious? Yes. This form of thought that is not a thought is the Symbolic order. Think about how Heideggerian das Man “thinks” for us. It is as if the big Other has thoughts of its own that do not have correlates in the private mental spaces of individuals. The big Other is not a literal mind with thoughts, but it does have the form of thought, that is, it seems to operate in a way that is very similar to concrete human beings. The big Other is like an other. Ideologically speaking, we can say that what we believe doesn’t matter. It matters only what bodies do. I’d just add that Lacan/Žižek provided us with a way to think along these lines without falling into vulgar behaviorism (which totally neglects the virtual sway of the Symbolic order). There is a difference between ideas/beliefs and behaviors, but it’s just that the big Other itself thinks/believes for us at times. Of course, the notion of the big Other (das Man, objective spirit, etc.) would be totally lost on a classical behaviorist due to his naïve empiricism.

“Here we have one of the possible definitions of the unconscious: the form of thought whose ontological status is not that of thought, that is to say, the form of thought external to the thought itself — in short, some Other Scene external to the thought whereby the form of the thought is already articulated in advance. The symbolic order is precisely such a formal order which supplements and/or disrupts the dual relationship of ‘external’ factual reality and ‘internal’ subjective experience; Sohn-Rethel is thus quite justified in his criticism of Althusser, who conceives abstraction as a process taking place entirely in the domain of knowledge and refuses for that reason the category of ‘real abstraction’ as the expression of an ‘epistemological confusion’. The ‘real abstraction’ is unthinkable in the frame of the fundamental Althusserian epistemological distinction between the ‘real object’ and the ‘object of knowledge’ in so far as it introduces a third element which subverts the very field of this distinction: the form of the thought previous and external to the thought — in short: the symbolic order” (pp. 13–14). Žižek offers us a definition of the unconscious. It is a form of thought exterior to (conscious) thought itself. This is a great description of the Symbolic order. The Symbolic order escapes the dualism between subjectivity and objectivity. On the one hand, it is not reducible to the inner lives of human beings, but on the other, it would not exist if all humans ceased to be. It is some third thing, which is to say that its ontological status defies the binary between interiority and exteriority — neither inner nor outer. A subjective object and an objective subject. This third ontological (and/or topological) status was lost on Althusser. Althusserian epistemology only has room for the old dyad between inner and outer, between the “object of knowledge” and the “real object”. The real abstraction, the sublime object, the unconscious, the Symbolic order, etc., all subvert the field of Althusserian epistemology by exploding the simple binary at its foundation.

We are now able to formulate precisely the ‘scandalous’ nature of Sohn-Rethel’s undertaking for philosophical reflection: he has confronted the closed circle of philosophical reflection with an external place where its form is already ‘staged’. Philosophical reflection is thus subjected to an uncanny experience similar to the one summarized by the old oriental formula ‘thou art that’: there, in the external effectivity of the exchange process, is your proper place; there is the theatre in which your truth was performed before you took cognizance of it. The confrontation with this place is unbearable because philosophy as such is defined by its blindness to this place: it cannot take it into consideration without dissolving itself, without losing its consistency. Sohn-Rethel’s work on the commodity and its real abstraction poses a sort of identity crisis for philosophical thought (reflection). Why is this a scandal or philosophical, abstract thought? Because it holds that thought itself is derived from some concrete, mundane, paticular object (commodity). Thought is faced with the fact that its interiority (formal structure) is rooted in an exterior object. This is just like the relation of the conscious ego to the unconsious (which is why Žižek uses the term “staged”). The later Žižek would likely call this an instance of the parallax view. Thought cannot bring itself to identify its formal structure with that of the commodity just as we cannot bring ourselves to fully identify with our brains. Philosophical thought cannot make this identification without undermining its lofty self-image. “I am merely the offspring of the commodity? But I think Being!” We can say that the real abstraction, the commodity-form, is the Real (the repressed, the unconscious) of philosophical-theoretical consciousness. It is its blindspot.

This does not mean, on the other hand, that everyday ‘practical’ consciousness, as opposed to the philosophical-theoretical one — the consciousness of the individuals partaking in the act of exchange — is not also subjected to a complementary blindness. During the act of exchange, individuals proceed as ‘practical solipsists’, they misrecognize the socio-synthetic function of exchange: that is the level of the ‘real abstraction’ as the form of socialization of private production through the medium of the market: ‘What the commodity owners do in an exchange relation is practical solipsism — irrespective of what they think and say about it’. Such a misrecognition is the sine qua non of the effectuation of an act of exchange — if the participants were to take note of the dimension of ‘real abstraction’, the ‘effective’ act of exchange itself would no longer be possible” (p. 14). Again, sine qua non means essential conditions. So philosophical-theoretical (abstract) thought has a blindspot (its origin in the commodity), but so, too, does practical consciousness (“the consciousness of the individuals partaking in the act of exchange”). But what is this complimentary blindness? In the act of exchange individuals are like solipsists. I take it that the point is that they think the act of exchange merely involves the two individuals — and not a third (social) mechanism or medium. The real abstraction (value) is socially constituted and is not reducible to the activity of private individuals. The real abstraction is that which socializes private production, that is, it is the medium through which private activities become measurably and quantitatively equivalent. However, the practical consciousnesses of the agents of exchange are totally blind to this and must be in order to proceed with the exchange. Why? Because for the practical consciousness of the agents the only thing that is of concern is the concrete, material aspects of the commodity. Just imagine how complicated things would be if we were actually fixated on the universal, abstract dimension of the commodity. If we focused on it, then we would realize we are merely exchanging the exact same thing (quantitative equivalence, identity in socially necessary labor time, etc.). And if we’re exchanging the exact same things (quantities), then why the exchange? So the agents of exchange must focus on use value (difference) and not value/exchange value (identity). The real abstraction is what makes exchange of equivalents possible, but must be excluded from practical consciousness in order to function. Again, Žižek quotes Sohn-Rethel to make the point: “Thus, in speaking of the abstractness of exchange we must be careful not to apply the term to the consciousness of the exchange agents. They are supposed to be occupied with the use of the commodities they see, but occupied in their imagination only. It is the action of exchange, and the action alone, that is abstract . . . the abstractness of that action cannot be noted when it happens because the consciousness of its agents is taken up with their business and with the empirical appearance of things which pertain to their use. One could say that the abstractness of their action is beyond realization by the actors because their very consciousness stands in the way. Were the abstractness to catch their minds their action would cease to be exchange and the abstraction would not arise” (Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour, pp. 26–27). In other words, the abstract mechanism of exchange depends on practical consciousness remaining blind to it. It only works as long as it is not conscious; its social effectivity works on condition of its invisibility qua non-knowledge. This means that the agents misrecognize the exchange, since they reduce it to themselves and the material aspects of the commodities, i.e., market empiricism.

This misrecognition brings about the fissure of the consciousness into ‘practical’ and ‘theoretical’: the proprietor partaking in the act of exchange proceeds as a ‘practical solipsist’: he overlooks the universal, socio-synthetic dimension of his act, reducing it to a casual encounter of atomized individuals in the market. This ‘repressed’ social dimension of his act emerges thereupon in the form of its contrary — as universal Reason turned towards the observation of nature (the network of categories of ‘pure reason’ as the conceptual frame of natural sciences). In reducing the act of exchange to its empirical dimension, practical consciousness cuts away its abstract, universal side (the real abstraction, value). This fissure of the act of exchange, which truly involves both the abstract and the concrete, involves the repression of the real abstraction with all of its categories (substance, causality, etc.). But as we know, the repressed always returns in another form, which, in this case, is that of abstract thought or the framework of the natural sciences (the Kantian subject). Notice that this theory does provide us with a historical account of the genesis of transcendental subjectivity, which means that it’s not as universal as Kant would argue. Also, what does “socio-synthetic” mean here? I think the synthetic (synthesis) part of the socialization of private productive activity has to do with how the Symbolic order itself is what organizes (synthesizes) private productions into universal equivalents. It is the social, not the private, that produces (synthesizes) the system of value that makes use values exchangeable as equivalent quantities. It is the social that synthesizes two different use values (different qualities) into exchange values (quantitative equivalents, identical values).

“The crucial paradox of this relationship between the social effectivity of the commodity exchange and the ‘consciousness’ of it is that — to use again a concise formulation by Sohn-Rethel — ‘this non-knowledge of the reality is part of its very essence’: the social effectivity of the exchange process is a kind of reality which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic; that is, a kind of reality whose very ontological consistency implies a certain non-knowledge of its participants — if we come to ‘know too much’, to pierce the true functioning of social reality, this reality would dissolve itself” (p. 15). The very consistency (stability, endurance, constancy, regularity) of capitalist society/reality depends on our non-knowledge of how exchange actually works, that is, capitalism is founded on a misrecognition, a blindspot, a distortion (like the ego in the mirror stage). This means that our reality itself is ideological. Ideology is at the heart of reality itself. Remember that Lacanians, like Žižek, use “reality” in a very specific way which is to signify the world of our Imaginary-Symbolic coordinates — not the physical reality that exists independently from our minds. Simply put, for Lacanians, “reality” essentially means social reality. Keep in mind that Žižek would place the “social effectivity” of exchange on the side of doing or reality — not on the side of knowing or consciousness. The concrete effectivity of exchange depends on our misrecognition (non-knowledge) of it. Therefore, non-knowledge grounds (social) reality. Ideology is not some marginal phenomenon in the social order used to control the disgruntled masses — it is its foundation. It’s not just a mere power strategy utilized by the capitalist class. To remove the glasses of ideology is not to perceive reality as it truly is, but, rather, to lose reality itself. Žižek will now offer a definition of his concept of ideology.

“This is probably the fundamental dimension of ‘ideology’: ideology is not simply a ‘false consciousness’, an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ‘ideological’ — ‘ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence — that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals ‘do not know what they are doing’. ‘Ideological’ is not the false consciousness’ of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness’. Thus we have finally reached the dimension of the symptom, because one of its possible definitions would also be ‘a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject’: the subject can ‘enjoy his symptom’ only in so far as its logic escapes him — the measure of the success of its interpretation is precisely its dissolution” (pp. 15–16). So here we reach the main point and main conclusion of this section — that Marx’s concept of the commodity-form (as elaborated on by Sohn-Rethel) gets us to the very structure of the symptom (the dream being just one instance of it). Žižek is able to bridge Marxism and psychoanalysis by recognizing the identity in structure between the commodity (capitalist ideology) and the symptom. Both of them can be said to be ‘a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject’. We can only enjoy commodity exchange and our symptoms as long as we fail to see an essential aspect of them. The point is that commodities are like symptoms and symptoms are like commodities. This means that psychoanalytic (Lacanian) theory can be applied outside of the four walls of the clinic. If we find psychoanalytic mechanisms at work in the social order itself, and not merely in the individual minds of analysands, then its application has a much broader reach than many analysts would say. While Sohn-Rethel is the one who developed how abstract thinking or scientific consciousness is derived from the commodity-form, it is Žižek who shows how this relates to psychoanalysis (this is where Žižek ‘s original contribution is located in the text). The reason why we can only enjoy the commodity is because of the fetishism that reduces it to its empirical qualities and its phenomenological aura. The second we start to see the exploitative social relations that undergird the universality (value) of the commodity, we cease to be able to enjoy it. Once the exploitative logic of the commodity is perceived, our enjoyment of it decreases. The same is true with most symptoms (the sinthome is the exception). Once we see how the symptom is a material signifier of an unconscious signifier-formation, we cease to enjoy it. If the symptom is properly interpreted, raised to conscious understanding, it vanishes along with its jouissance. Another key point to make is that commodity exchange is shot through with jouissance or libidinal investment; however, this enjoyment depends on our non-knowledge of the commodity — this non-knowledge being capitalist ideology. When it comes to ideology, there’s an essential connection between non-knowledge and jouissance — we can enjoy because we do not know. We can enjoy what we do only because we do not know what we do. Hence, ideology and the symptom function in the same manner. Ideology is symptomatic and the symptom is ideological.

The social symptom

The big takeaway here is that symptoms can be social, that is, they are not exclusive to individual psyches (subjects). The proletariat qua symptom is a symptom of the capitalist social order (the big Other) and not a symptom of the individuals who happen to find themselves in this social position or even of the capitalists as individuals. Žižek is showing that the symptom operates at the level of the Symbolic order itself.

“How, then, can we define the Marxian symptom? Marx ‘invented the symptom’ (Lacan) by means of detecting a certain fissure, an asymmetry, a certain ‘pathological’ imbalance which belies the universalism of the bourgeois ‘rights and duties’. This imbalance, far from announcing the ‘imperfect realization’ of these universal principles — that is, an insufficiency to be abolished by further development — functions as their constitutive moment: the ‘symptom’ is, strictly speaking, a particular element which subverts its own universal foundation, a species subverting its own genus. In this sense, we can say that the elementary Marxian procedure of ‘criticism of ideology’ is already ‘symptomatic’: it consists in detecting a point of breakdown heterogenous to a given ideological field and at the same time necessary for that field to achieve its closure, its accomplished form” (p. 16). So how did Marx invent the symptom? By spotting a species of the capitalist genus of freedom (bourgeois “rights and duties”), which, again, is the freedom of the individual (the owner of labor power) to sell his labor to the capitalist. This species of freedom intrinsically leads to wage slavery, which, in turn, undermines its very genus, i.e., Freedom (its concept in a liberal-capitalist society). The species of freedom is not a mere accident, something that can be solved through further development, but, rather, an essential structure of the universal notion of Freedom that holds sway in the world of capitalism. This means that the particular freedom that enslaves is a symptom, since it is “a particular element which subverts its own universal foundation, a species subverting its own genus.” The fact that Marx (his critique of ideology) was able to recognize this phenomenon means that his interpretive method (hermeneutics) was symptomatic (psychoanalytic), i.e, able to pinpoint and understand symptoms. Within a given ideology, Marx was able to detect the contradictory element that undermines it while being a necessary aspect of it, or, as Žižek puts it, Marx’s ideology critique “consists in detecting a point of breakdown heterogenous to a given ideological field and at the same time necessary for that field to achieve its closure, its accomplished form.” Ideology and the symptom both are grounds that intrinsically contain the point of their own ungrounding — grounds with ungrounds. When it comes to the individual subject, a symptom comes forth out of the “totality” of subjectivity, but, then, turns right around and disrupts that “totality”. For example, a person compelled to wash their hands two hundred times a day (the symptom) has their life totally problematized by it, and yet this symptom emerged from the heart of their subjectivity (unconscious).

“This procedure thus implies a certain logic of exception: every ideological Universal — for example freedom, equality — is ‘false’ in so far as it necessarily includes a specific case which breaks its unity, lays open its falsity. Freedom, for example: a universal notion comprising a number of species (freedom of speech and press, freedom of consciousness, freedom of commerce, political freedom, and so on) but also, by means of a structural necessity, a specific freedom (that of the worker to sell freely his own labour on the market) which subverts this universal notion. That is to say, this freedom is the very opposite of effective freedom: by selling his labour ‘freely’, the worker loses his freedom — the real content of this free act of sale is the worker’s enslavement to capital. The crucial point is, of course, that it is precisely this paradoxical freedom, the form of its opposite, which closes the circle of ‘bourgeois freedoms’” (pp. 16–7). Marx’s procedure, his critique of ideology, is built on a logic of the exception — a break in the unity of an ideological Universal, e.g., Freedom. Žižek is crystal clear with his example of the freedom of the wage slave (which is the symptom of capitalist society). Notice that Žižek specifies that every “ideological Universal” is false insofar as it contains its own self-undermining point of tension. Question: is this true of just ideological Universals or does he think that it applies to all Universals, e.g., Dog, Tree, Triangle, etc.? What was Hegel’s take on Universals? The main point is for Žižek is that it is the most essential species that threatens the logical unity of its genus. There simply is no capitalism without the freedom/slavery of the proletariat.

“The same can also be shown for fair, equivalent exchange, this ideal of the market. When, in pre-capitalist society, the production of commodities has not yet attained universal character — that is, when it is still so-called ‘natural production’ which predominates — the proprietors of the means of production are still themselves producers (as a rule, at least): it is artisan production; the proprietors themselves work and sell their products on the market. At this stage of development there is no exploitation (in principle, at least — that is, if we do not consider the exploitation of apprentices, and so on); the exchange on the market is equivalent, every commodity is paid its full value. But as soon as production for the market prevails in the economic edifice of a given society, this generalization is necessarily accompanied by the appearance of a new, paradoxical type of commodity: the labour force, the workers who are not themselves proprietors of the means of production and who are consequently obliged to sell on the market their own labour instead of the products of their labour” (p. 17). It was only with the universalization of commodity production that a symptom (the wage salve) emerged in exchange (the market). The market only become exploitative when producers were “freed” from their means of production by the capitalists. Before that, exchange was fair. The universalization or generalization of commodity production brought with it the symptom: the commodity of labor power. I wish he said more about what universalization means here. Does it simply mean the becoming primary (default setting) of some marginal activity? Why does this type of universalization necessarily produce a symptom? How can commodity production and exchange of equivalents remain symptomless so long as they remain marginal?

“With this new commodity, the equivalent exchange becomes its own negation — the very form of exploitation, of appropriation of the surplus­ value. The crucial point not to be missed here is that this negation is strictly internal to equivalent exchange, not its simple violation: the labour force is not ‘exploited’ in the sense that its full value is not remunerated; in principle at least, the exchange between labour and capital is wholly equivalent and equitable. The catch is that the labour force is a peculiar commodity, the use of which — labour itself — produces a certain surplus­ value, and it is this surplus over the value of the labour force itself which is appropriated by the capitalist” (p. 17). Labor power qua new commodity is what makes equivalent exchange into its own negation. The wage paid to the laborer is equivalent to the labor power he sells (equivalence), but the catch lies in the fact his labor power (the new commodity) is capable of producing surplus value, which means that the equivalent exchange is not so equivalent. In principle, labor is paid its full value, but that’s not where the story ends. The usage of the use value (labor power) bought in equivalent exchange produces a surplus value, a value beyond the value of labor. The unequivalence of this equivalent exchange is its own intrinsic factor — this unequivalence comes straight out of the equivalence of exchange, that is, it follows from the very logic of the situation’s dynamics (a capitalist would never engage in this equivalence without its unequivalence, i.e., surplus value). This is how the capitalists walks away with more value than he started with, but this theft, this exploitation, this unequivalence, is the offspring of the exchange of equivalents (wage = value of labor). Couldn’t we challenge this take on the relation between the value of labor and the wage paid for it by simply arguing that people are nowhere paid an equivalent for their wage? Aren’t workers drastically underpaid nowadays? The answer is surely yes. However, Marx and Žižek might could argue that this systematic underpayment is a flat-out violation of the principles of exchange. Maybe what Žižek has in mind is what happens when the capitalist system is truly functioning in accordance with its principle of fair (equitable) exchange. This would mean that this unequivalence occurs even when the system if operating in perfect harmony with its fundamental principles. This is a more powerful argument.

“We have here again a certain ideological Universal, that of equivalent and equitable exchange, and a particular paradoxical exchange — that of the labour force for its wages — which, precisely as an equivalent, functions as the very form of exploitation. The ‘quantitative’ development itself, the universalization of the production of commodities, brings about a new ‘quality’, the emergence of a new commodity representing the internal negation of the universal principle of equivalent exchange of commodities; in other words, it brings about symptom. And in the Marxian perspective, utopian socialism consists in the very belief that a society is possible in which the relations of exchange are universalized and production for the market predominates, but workers themselves none the less remain proprietors of their means of production and are therefore not exploited — in short, ‘utopian’ conveys a belief in the possibility of a universality without its symptom, without the point of exception functioning as its internal negation” (pp. 17–8). The Universal of Fair Exchange ends up negating itself in the form of one of its species, namely, that of the equivalent exchange between labor for its wages. This equivalence is unequivalence. Žižek’s take on the interpretation of symptoms, his type of analysis, is dialectical (Hegelian) to its core. Žižek’s take on the symptom (especially, the social symptom) incorporates Marx, Freud/Lacan and Hegel. We also see the employment of the Hegelian mechanism of quantity to quality. The idea is that quantitative change can produce a qualitative change, e.g., if one keeps adding grains of sand together (quantitative change), then a pile of sand will eventually emerge out of this activity (qualitative change). This Hegelian mechanism is what produced the social symptom known as the proletariat. For Žižek, universality (an ideological Universal) always has a symptom, which is why utopian socialism is misguided. Why? Because it holds that in a symptomless universality (ideological Universal), that is, a social order without an intrinsic, self-undermining element of destabilization (“point of exception”). This is, therefore, an absurd type of utopian in Žižek’s eyes. It might as well be arguing for a triangle with eight sides.

“This is also the logic of the Marxian critique of Hegel, of the Hegelian notion of society as a rational totality: as soon as we try to conceive the existing social order as a rational totality, we must include in it a paradoxical element which, without ceasing to be its internal constituent, functions as its symptom — subverts the very universal rational principle of this totality. For Marx, this ‘irrational’ element of the existing society was, of course, the proletariat, ‘the unreason of reason itself (Marx), the point at which the Reason embodied in the existing social order encounters its own unreason” (p. 18). Žižek issue with utopian socialism claims that Marx’s critique of Hegel has the same form. For Marx, against Hegel, there cannot be a society qua rational totality, i.e., a society without internal contradictions (symptoms). For Marx, there is always an “irrational” element in society that makes a rational totality impossible — this is the unreason of reason itself. Here is one point at which Žižek sides with Marx and disagrees with Hegel. Every society (reason) has its symptom (unreason). I’d like to have some Hegel and Marx quotes to go along with this passage.

Commodity fetishism

This section explains how Marx invented the symptom through his understanding of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This transition involves the formation of a symptom, which, in this case, turns out to be commodity fetishism.

“In his attribution of the discovery of the symptom to Marx, Lacan is, however, more distinct: he locates this discovery in the way Marx conceived the passage from feudalism to capitalism: ‘One has to look for the origins of the notion of symptom not in Hippocrates but in Marx, in the connection he was first to establish between capitalism and what? — the good old times, what we call the feudal times.’ To grasp the logic of this passage from feudalism to capitalism we have first to elucidate its theoretical background, the Marxian notion of commodity fetishism” (pp. 18–9) Lacan claims that Marx’s invention of the symptom occurred precisely in his concept of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Lacan makes this claim in the Seminar XXII (RSI). It is in the connection between the two that the concept of symptom is to be found. Marx’s concept of the passage from feudalism to capitalism rests on his concept of commodity fetishism — it is on this foundation that we are able to perceive the difference, logic and relation between them (their symptomatic dynamic).

“In a first approach, commodity fetishism is ‘a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things’. The value of a certain commodity, which is effectively an insignia of a network of social relations between producers of diverse commodities, assumes the form of a quasi-’natural’ property of another thing-commodity, money: we say that the value of a certain commodity is such-and-such amount of money. Consequently, the essential feature of commodity fetishism does not consist of the famous replacement of men with things (‘a relation between men assumes the form of a relation between things’); rather, it consists of a certain misrecognition which concerns the relation between a structured network and one of its elements: what is really a structural effect, an effect of the network of relations between elements, appears as an immediate property of one of the elements, as if this property also belongs to it outside its relation with other elements” (p. 19) Žižek’s definition of commodity fetishism is found here. Most importantly, he points out that its essential feature is not that we take relations between people to be relations between things (“replacement of men with things”), but, rather, that we misrecognize an element/effect of a network of relations for an immediate property — a quality that exists in and of itself outside any network of relations. Commodity fetishism is a misrecognition of the relation between a “structured network and one of its elements” (i.e., one of its effects). This type of misrecognition is mirrored at the end of The Wizard of Oz wherein Oz attempts to represent himself as spectacular being when, in fact, this substantial image (element) is simply the effect of system of technological relations (network). We do see Žižek utilizing the old structuralist binary between structure and element right here (this is not to say that he is a structuralist — he, qua Lacanian, is not). But hold up a second, what was Žižek getting at with his reference to value and money? The value of a commodity, its socially necessary labor time, is determined by a whole network of social relations between humans, but takes on the appearance of a quasi-”natural” property through its relation to money, e.g., the value of a commodity is x amount of money. Instead of seeing the value of a commodity as an effect of a system of social relations, we misrecognize it (in the form of its price, i.e., reflection in money) as an intrinsic quality that the commodity possesses all on its own.

“Such a misrecognition can take place in a ‘relation between things’ as well as in a ‘relation between men’ — Marx states this explicitly apropos of the simple form of the value-expression. The commodity A can express its value only by referring itself to another commodity, B, which thus becomes its equivalent: in the value relationship, the natural form of the commodity B (its use-value, its positive, empirical properties) functions as a form of value of the commodity A; in other words, the body of B becomes for A the mirror of its value. To these reflections, Marx added the following note: In a sort of way, it is with man as with commodities. Since he comes into the world neither with a looking-glass in his hand, nor as a Fichtian philosopher, to whom ‘I am I’ is sufficient, man first sees and recognizes himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind. And thereby Paul, just as he stands in his Pauline personality, becomes to Peter the type of the genus homo” (pp. 19–20). The misrecognition at the heart of commodity fetishism can occur with both relations between things and relations between men. In other words, an effect of a certain relation between two things (or more) takes on the guise of an intrinsic property. This can happen in a relation between things (commodities) and a relation between humans. Žižek nicely uses Marx’s work on the relationality between commodities (Capital, chapter one) to illustrate this point. The Marx quote shows that he was ahead of Lacan in perceiving the secret relationality of the ego, which Žižek will now discuss.

“This short note anticipates in a way the Lacanian theory of the mirror stage: only by being reflected in another man — that is, in so far as this other man offers it an image of its unity — can the ego arrive at its self-identity; identity and alienation are thus strictly correlative. Marx pursues this homology: the other commodity (B) is an equivalent only in so far as A relates to it as to the form-of-appearance of its own value, only within this relationship. But the appearance — and here in lies the effect of inversion proper to fetishism — the appearance is exactly opposite: A seems to relate to B as if, for B, to be an equivalent of A would not be a ‘reflexive determination’ (Marx) of A — that is as if B would already in itself be the equivalent of A; the property of ‘being­-an-equivalent’ appears to belong to it even outside its relation to A, on the same level as its other ‘natural’ effective properties constituting its use-value. To these reflections, Marx again added a very interesting note: Such expressions of relations in general, called by Hegel reflex-categories, form a very curious class. For instance, one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is king” (p. 20). Žižek points out that Marx’s theory of fetishization ends up foreshadowing Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage. Men only have identities on the basis of alienation. Identity and alienation are two sides of the same ego. The ego is the effect of the correlation between identity and alienation. Here we get the fetishistic mechanism of “reflexive determination” (determination via mirroring). This mechanism is found both in the determination of a commodity’s value and the ego’s identity. So commodity A and commodity B mutually determine each other, but we take B to be the equivalent of A in and of itself, i.e., that B has the intrinsic quality of being equivalent to A even outside of any relation to A. However, B is only equivalent to A because A is equivalent to B — both of their values are determined through a mutual act of mirroring (relationality). The property of being-an-equivalent that B has is taken to be intrinsic to it instead of being recognized as emerging from the relation between A and B. We invert a relational effect into into a non-relational (intrinsic) property — this is Marxian fetishism. Perhaps this mistake happens so often due to the ongoing influence of substance-accident ontology. This gets us to the king who mistakenly thinks he’s really a king.

‘Being-a-king’ is an effect of the network of social relations between a ‘king’ and his ‘subjects’; but — and here is the fetishistic misrecognition to the participants of this social bond, the relationship appears necessarily in an inverse form: they think that they are subjects giving the king royal treatment because the king is already in himself, outside the relationship to his subjects, a king; as if the determination of ‘being-a-king’ were a ‘natural’ property of the person of a king. How can one not remind oneself here of the famous Lacanian affirmation that a madman who believes himself to be a king is no more mad than a king who believes himself to be a king — who, that is, identifies immediately with the mandate ‘king’? (pp. 20–1) The king who thinks he is a king — the inversion of fetishism (structural effect becomes intrinsic cause). The king is only the king because of a network of social relations. The Symbolic position of king is just that — a Symbolic position. Kingship is an effect of the structure of a certain society’s set of social relations. But people mistook kingship for an essential property of particular individuals, which is what caused them to subject themselves to his authority. Fetishism: the effect becomes the cause. Where does Lacan actually say this?

“What we have here is thus a parallel between two modes of fetishism, and the crucial question concerns the exact relationship between these two levels. That is to say, this relationship is by no means a simple homology: we cannot say that in societies in which production for the market predominates — ultimately, that is, in capitalist societies — ‘it is with man as with commodities’. Precisely the opposite is true: commodity fetishism occurs in capitalist societies, but in capitalism relations between men are definitely not ‘fetishized’; what we have here are relations between ‘free’ people, each following his or her proper egoistic interest. The predominant and determining form of their interrelations is not domination and servitude but a contract between free people who are equal in the eyes of the law. Its model is the market exchange: here, two subjects meet, their relation is free of all the lumber of veneration of the Master, of the Master’s patronage and care for his subjects; they meet as two persons whose activity is thoroughly determined by their egoistic interest, every one of them proceeds as a good utilitarian; the other person is for him wholly delivered of all mystical aura; all he sees in his partner is another subject who follows his interest and interests him only in so far as he possesses something — a commodity — that could satisfy some of his needs” (p. 21). While there is a similarity between the two types of fetishism, there is also a certain incompatibility between them. Žižek’s point is that where relations between men are fetishized, relations between men are not, and vice versa. In modern capitalist society, our relations to each other are not fetishized like they were in feudal society.We recognize each other as “free” and “equal” agents before the (bourgeois) Law and in the market — not as royalty and servants in essence. We can say that capitalism did defetishize the relations between men (lordship and bondage).

“The two forms of fetishism are thus incompatible: in societies in which commodity fetishism reigns, the ‘relations between men’ are totally defetishized, while in societies in which there is fetishism in ‘relations between men’ — in pre-capitalist societies — commodity fetishism is not yet developed, because it is ‘natural’ production, not production for the market, which predominates. This fetishism in relations between men has to be called by its proper name: what we have here are, as Marx points out, ‘relations of domination and servitude’ — that is to say, precisely the relation of Lordship and Bondage in a Hegelian sense; and it is as if the retreat of the Master in capitalism was only a displacement: as if the de­fetishization in the ‘relations between men’ was paid for by the emergence of fetishism in the ‘relations between things’ — by commodity fetishism. The place of fetishism has just shifted from inter-subjective relations to relations ‘between things’: the crucial social relations, those of production, are no longer immediately transparent in the form of the interpersonal relations of domination and servitude (of the Lord and his serfs, and so on); they disguise themselves — to use Marx’s accurate formula — ‘under the shape of social relations between things, between the products of labour’.” (pp. 21–2) So while both types of fetishism are similar in structure (structural effect becomes essential property), they are nevertheless incompatible, since they do not coexist in a given society — you can have one or the other. Žižek identifies the feudal-style fetishization of the relations between men with Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic: the master is a Master in essence and a slave is a Slave in essence. While feudal fetishism was explicitly exploitative, capitalism masks its relations of exploitation under the guise of commodity fetishism (social relations between things). The fact that there are no Masters (Masters in essence) in capitalism is actually just a displacement of Lordship (Masterhood). The capitalists are still our masters even if we do not ascribe to them the essence of Master (human fetishism). In capitalist society, the fetishism as shifted from that of men to that of things. The fact that the “interpersonal relations of domination and servitude” disguise themselves under the appearance of social relations between things only makes the exploitation more powerful and pervasive. Capitalism hides exploitation beneath commodities. Therefore, we can say that fetishized relations between things is a symptom of the repressed relations of exploitation. Commodity fetishism is the return of the repressed (exploitative and defetishized relations between people). In feudal society, exploitation was right there on the surface of the fetishization of human relations — its hidden now in capitalist society.

“This is why one has to look for the discovery of the symptom in the way Marx conceived the passage from feudalism to capitalism. With the establishment of bourgeois society, the relations of domination and servitude are repressed: formally, we are apparently concerned with free subjects whose interpersonal relations are discharged of all fetishism; the repressed truth — that of the persistence of domination and servitude — emerges in a symptom which subverts the ideological appearance of equality, freedom, and so on. This symptom, the point of emergence of the truth about social relations, is precisely the ‘social relations between things’ — in contrast to feudal society, where ‘no matter what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people themselves in this society, the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between things, between the products of labour’.” (p. 22) The last quote in this passage is from Capital. Here we get to the connection between commodity fetishism and Marx’s invention of the symptom. Commodity fetishism is the symptom that emerges from the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The truth about the repressed social relations of exploitative only shows itself in the appearance of the commodity (commodity fetishism). If we really interpret fetishized commodities, if we work our way to the source of them, then we realize that capitalist society is not nearly as free and equal as its official ideology properties it to be. In other words, commodity fetishism is a “symptom which subverts the ideological appearance of equality, freedom, and so on”. The (unconscious/repressed) truth of our social relations between people is contained in the fetishistic aura of commodities. Of course, this truth is not immediately apparent. Again, in feudal society, this type of concealment of exploitative relations was not displaced or repressed, which makes capitalist society more complicated.

‘Instead of appearing at all events as their own mutual relations, the social relations between individuals are disguised under the shape of social relations between things’ — here we have a precise definition of the hysterical symptom, of the ‘hysteria of conversion’ proper to capitalism. (p. 22) Main point: commodity fetishism has the same structure as a hysterical symptom (there is a homology between the commodity and the symptom). This means that a similar method of interpretation (ideology critique/psychoanalysis) can be applied to both. The homology between the commodity and the symptom is the marriage of Marxism and psychoanalysis.

Totalitarian laughter

This section seems to be largely unconnected to what has come before it. How does it relate to the previous section? In the last section, we learned that the “symptom” of commodity fetishism emerged from a dialectical inversion, that is, from fetishism occurring in relations between humans (feudalism) to being located in relations between things (capitalism) — fetishism turned into its opposite. The dialectics of commodity fetishism, the dialectical inversion it involves, can be used to understand how we can go from a totalitarianism that is without humor, one that takes itself very seriously, to one that laughs at itself. However, the reference to totalitarianism can be expanded to all forms of ideology as it now functions, which is why Žižek will follow up this section with a discussion of cynical ideology. This section is what gets us from the dialectics of commodity fetishism (symptom) to cynical ideology (it shows us how the dialectics of commodity fetishism are still relevant and provides a pivot into the concept of cynical ideology). If we used to take ideology seriously at the conscious level of thought and subjectivity (classical ideology), then it finds even more power in taking hold, not in our hearts and minds, but in our behavior, action and objectivity. The fact that we consciously reject ideology allows it to have an even greater hold on us (in the objectivity of our behavior), since we are already convinced that we are free from it. In this sense, cynicism is the becoming-symptom of ideology itself. Just as we do not have to have fetishized human relations in order for oppression and exploitation to function in the social body, so, too, we no longer have to take our official ideologies seriously in order to live by them — ideologies are bullshit, but still we operate according to them all the more because of our conscious rejection of them (this is dialectical inversion within ideology: from seriousness to irony/cynicism). Put differently, the displacement of fetishized relations, the process of going from fetishized human relations to fetishized object-commodity relations, actually serve to make social power and exploitation all the more powerful. The same goes in the transition from serious totalitarianism (classical ideology) to laughing totalitarianism (cynical ideology) — it only serves to make totalitarianism (ideology as such) more effective. The “dialectics of commodity fetishism” explains how power can become more powerful through the transformation of x (fetishized relations) into its opposite, and so this logic remains relevant by explaining why the turn towards cynicism actually makes the ideology it consciously mocks even more powerful — cynicism strengthens ideology.

“Here Marx is more subversive than the majority of his contemporary critics who discard the dialectics of commodity fetishism as outdated: this dialectics can still help us to grasp the phenomenon of so-called ‘totalitarianism’. Let us take as our starting point Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, precisely because there is something wrong with this book. This criticism does not apply only to its ideology, which might be called — on the model of spaghetti Westerns — spaghetti structuralism: a kind of simplified, mass-culture version of structuralist and post-structuralist ideas (there is no final reality, we all live in a world of signs referring to other signs . . . ). What should bother us about this book is its basic underlying thesis: the source of totalitarianism is a dogmatic attachment to the official word: the lack of laughter, of ironic detachment. An excessive commitment to Good may in itself become the greatest Evil: real Evil is any kind of fanatical dogmatism, especially that exerted in the name of the supreme Good” (p. 23). Lots of theorists have decided that Marxian dialectics (as exemplified in the analysis of the emergence of commodity fetishism) is outdated or anachronistic, but Žižek shows how it still allows us to make sense out of certain social changes (the new style of ideology, e.g., laughing totalitarianism, cynical ideology). We begin with Eco’s basic thesis in Name of the Rose: “the source of totalitarianism is a dogmatic attachment to the official word: the lack of laughter, of ironic detachment”. The idea is that totalitarianism is an ideology that can only function with the utmost seriousness and stern commitment — this is no laughing matter! Žižek rewords this thesis like this: “An excessive commitment to Good may in itself become the greatest Evil: real Evil is any kind of fanatical dogmatism, especially that exerted in the name of the supreme Good”. For Eco, dogmatic belief, even dogmatic belief in the Good, is the great threat, the true Evil. Thus, laughter is always a force of real Good because it disrupts and undermines dogmatic belief (the ruling system) and the hold it has on us. Žižek will argue, contra Eco, that cynicism (laughter) towards the ruling ideology is exactly what strengthens the hold it has on us.

“This thesis is already part of the enlightened version of religious belief itself: if we become too obsessed with the Good and with a corresponding hate for the secular, our obsession with Good may itself turn into a force of Evil, a form of destructive hatred for all that fails to correspond to our idea of Good. The real Evil is the supposedly innocent gaze which perceives in the world nothing but Evil, as in The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, in which the real Evil is, of course, the gaze of the storyteller (the young governess) herself . . .” (p. 23). Even enlightened or modern versions of various religions claim that it is dangerous to take one’s beliefs too seriously, since we know where that can lead, e.g., Spanish Inquisition, Salem witch trials, abortion clinic bombing, terrorism, etc. Dogmatic belief in the Good can dialectically invert itself into the Evil.

“First, this idea of an obsession with (a fanatical devotion to) Good turning into Evil masks the inverse experience, which is much more disquieting: how an obsessive, fanatical attachment to Evil may in itself acquire the status of an ethical position, of a position which is not guided by our egoistical interests. Consider only Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the end of the opera, when he is confronted with the following choice: if he confesses his sins, he can still achieve salvation; if he persists, he will be damned for ever. From the viewpoint of the pleasure principle, the proper thing to do would be to renounce his past, but he does not, he persists in his Evil, although he knows that by persisting he will be damned for ever. Paradoxically, with his final choice of Evil, he acquires the status of an ethical hero — that is, of someone who is guided by fundamental principles ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ and not just by the search for pleasure or material gain” (pp. 23–4). However, dialectically speaking, a dogmatic belief in Evil can turn into the Good (this is really troubling). But what’s the point of all of this? I take it that Žižek is using this talk of the relation between the Good and the Evil to highlight the mechanism of dialectical inversion at the heart of commodity fetishism and cynical ideology. Extremes produce their opposites: dogmatic belief in Good can get you to Evil and dogmatic belief in Evil can lead to the Good. Main takeaway (parallel): cynicism toward ideology can lead to greater submission and adherence to it; the rejection of ideology is our total embrace of it. Also, coming to face the hard fact that we, in all of our ironic detachment and cynicism, are still ideological puppets can be just what we need in order to begin to truly challenge ideology.

“What is really disturbing about The Name of the Rose, however, is the underlying belief in the liberating, anti-totalitarian force of laughter, of ironic distance. Our thesis here is almost the exact opposite of this under­ lying premiss of Eco’s novel: in contemporary societies, democratic or totalitarian, that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are, so to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally. Perhaps the greatest danger for totalitarianism is people who take its ideology literally — even in Eco’s novel, poor old Jorge, the incarnation of dogmatic belief who does not laugh, is rather a tragic figure: outdated, a kind of living dead, a remnant of the past, certainly not a person representing the existing social and political powers” (p. 24). Eco sets up laughter (cynical distance) as the greatest threat to totalitarianism (ideology in general), when, in fact, it is precisely what makes ideology function all the more efficiently. This is a dialectical inversion similar to the one involved in commodity fetishism: the defetishization of human relations only served to make oppression and exploitation have greater functionality, since they are now converted into and concealed under the relations between things. Ideology has even more effective power because we no longer take it seriously. This is the parallel between commodity fetishism and cynical ideology. Even Eco understood, implicitly, at least, that the person who completely identifies with ideology, who takes it as an absolute, is an outmoded figure. Cynical ideology can itself be seen as a type of symptom. Why? Because whereas the connection between our dogmatic (conscious) belief in official ideology and our submission to it used to be right there on the surface, they are now separated from one another. Now, it is precisely because we do not take ideology seriously (at the conscious level) that we go on living in accordance with it to an even stronger degree. Our cynicism towards ideological systems (in consciousness) is what conceals the fact that we are still ideological to our bones (in the unconsious and in behavior). Social oppression was able to endure because it was displaced in relations between things (commodity fetishism); the stronghold of ideology was able to endure because it was displaced in our cynical “disbelief” in it.

“What conclusion should we draw from this? Should we say that we live in a post-ideological society? Perhaps it would be better, first, to try to specify what we mean by ideology” (p. 24). Okay, so we now see how we got from commodity fetishism to cynical (laughter-based) ideology — both involve a dialectical inversion that results in a symptom (a conversion of x into its opposite that disguises that x endures all the more). Žižek will now explore cynical ideology in greater detail. Again, because cynical ideology involves a dialectical inversion like that of the hysterical-conversion symptom of an analysand, we are able to use psychoanalytic concepts in our analysis of it, that is, we can use psychoanalytic tools at the social level. If ideology is symptomatic, if it works at the level of unconscious fantasy, then it’s going to involve desire, jouissance, objet petit a, master signifiers, lack, etc. This is where we see Žižek contributing original insights and connections. In the next section, he will go on to argue that while cynical reason has brought us to stand at a critical, ironic distance from ideology at the conscious level, we still take it seriously at the level of unconscious fantasy. In a sense, then, our cynicism towards ideology only makes it have an even more pervasive hold on us, since we think we are now ironically distanced from it.

Cynicism as a form of ideology

“The usage of the concept of ideology is now an anachronism.” In other words, ideology has won. This section marks a transition point. Here, or by the end of it, Žižek begins to shift his focus from the symptom to unconscious (ideological) fantasy. To understand how we’re still ideological, we must view things through the lens of unconscious fantasy — not symptoms. Cynicism is an ideological fantasy that conceals the deadlock of ideology — the impossibility of truly being non-ideological in a world built on ideology.

“The most elementary definition of ideology is probably the well-known phrase from Marx’s Capital: ‘Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es’ — ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’. The very concept of ideology implies a kind of basic, constitutive naiveté: the misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of its own effective conditions, a distance, a divergence between so-called social reality and our distorted representation, our false consciousness of it. That is why such a ‘naive consciousness’ can be submitted to a critical-ideological procedure. The aim of this procedure is to lead the naive ideological consciousness to a point at which it can recognize its own effective conditions, the social reality that it is distorting, and through this very act dissolve itself. In the more sophisticated versions of the critics of ideology — that developed by the Frankfurt School, for example — it is not just a question of seeing things (that is, social reality) as they ‘really are’, of throwing away the distorting spectacles of ideology; the main point is to see how the reality itself cannot reproduce itself without this so­-called ideological mystification. The mask is not simply hiding the real state of things; the ideological distortion is written into its very essence.” (pp. 24–5) The Marxist concept of ideology rests on people not knowing what they are doing, i.e., false consciousness. However, Žižek is going to invert this definition of it by arguing that people remain ideological precisely because they know what they are doing, i.e, they are cynically aware of ideology. Žižek credits the Frankfurt School with developing the concept of ideology. They argued that ideology is an essential part of our social reality and not something that can be severed from it — to take off the glasses of ideology is to lose reality — not just some false aspects of it. Ideology is not merely a false representation of reality, but, rather, something that helps produce our reality itself. Misrecognition is essential to our social world and individual subjectivities (Lacan argues the same with his theory of the mirror stage — to lose our misrecognitions, our misidentifications, would be to lose ourselves, since our egos are knit together by a web of misrecognitions, i.e., identity is alienation).

“We find, then, the paradox of a being which can reproduce itself only in so far as it is misrecognized and overlooked: the moment we see it ‘as it really is’, this being dissolves itself into nothingness or, more precisely, it changes into another kind of reality. That is why we must avoid the simple metaphors of demasking, of throwing away the veils which are supposed to hide the naked reality. We can see why Lacan, in his seminar on The Ethic of Psychoanalysis, distances himself from the liberating gesture of saying finally that ‘the emperor has no clothes’. The point is, as Lacan puts it, that the emperor is naked only beneath his clothes, so if there is an unmasking gesture of psychoanalysis, it is closer to Alphonse Allais’s well-known joke, quoted by Lacan: somebody points at a woman and utters a horrified cry, ‘Look at her, what a shame, under her clothes, she is totally naked’.” (p. 25) To throw away the distorting spectacles of ideology would be to throw away our very selves. What does it means to say, “the emperor has no clothes”? From the Wikipedia for “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: “As an idiom, use of the story’s title refers to something widely accepted as true or professed as being praiseworthy, due to an unwillingness of the general population to criticize it or be seen as going against popular opinion. The phrase “emperor’s new clothes” has become an idiom about logical fallacies. The story may be explained by pluralistic ignorance. The story is about a situation where “no one believes, but everyone believes that everyone else believes. Or alternatively, everyone is ignorant to whether the emperor has clothes on or not, but believes that everyone else is not ignorant.”” Ideology is not the incorrect belief that hides the naked truth of things, e.g., the emperor has no clothes. In this scenario, the untruth or misrecognition (the lie about invisible clothes) can be separated from the truth of the situation, namely, that the emperor is butt-ass naked. For Žižek, à la Lacan, ideology cannot be separated from reality — ideology is real and reality is ideological. To lose ideology is to lose reality as we know it. But Žižek will now state that all of this is already known (at least, by Marxists). Lacan on the Emperor’s Clothes: “If I do say “The king is naked,” it is not in the same way as the child who is supposed to have exposed the universal illusion, but more in the manner of Alphonse Allais, who gathered a crowd around him by announcing in a sonorous voice, “How shocking! Look at that woman! Beneath her dress she’s stark naked!” Yet in truth I don’t even say that. If the king is, in fact, naked, it is only insofar as he is so beneath a certain number of clothes — no doubt fictitious but nevertheless essential to his nudity” (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, pp. 13–4). It is precisely the belief (the belief of the Other/other) that has made the king naked. In other words, the king is only naked because he is wearing clothes — be they fictitious clothes. The point is that there is no naked, brute reality (reality outside of its ideological, symbolic distortion) for us to arrive at. Remember that “reality”, for Lacan and Žižek is not the Real; it is the reality of our Imaginary-Symbolic coordinates (and the Imaginary, in particular, is rooted in misrecognition).

“But all this is already well known: it is the classic concept of ideology as ‘false consciousness’, misrecognition of the social reality which is part of this reality itself. Our question is: Does this concept of ideology as a naive consciousness still apply to today’s world? Is it still operating today? In the Critique of Cynical Reason, a great bestseller in Germany, Peter Sloterdijk puts forward the thesis that ideology’s dominant mode of functioning is cynical, which renders impossible — or, more precisely, vain — the classic critical-ideological procedure. The cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he none the less still insists upon the mask. The formula, as proposed by Sloterdijk, would then be: ‘they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it’. Cynical reason is no longer naive, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it.” (pp. 25–6) The real question is whether or not ideology critique is still relevant today. Does it have any effectivity given the fact that we are all cynical towards ideology, that we no longer take our ideologies seriously at a conscious level? If we know that ideology is bullshit, then what’s the point of doing ideology critique? Žižek turns to Sloterdijk’s work to answer this question. We know very well that ideology is bullshit, but we still insist on living by it, doing it. Cynical reason is a paradox — an enlightened false consciousness.

“We must distinguish this cynical position strictly from what Sloterdijk calls kynicism. Kynicism represents the popular, plebeian rejection of the official culture by means of irony and sarcasm: the classical kynical procedure is to confront the pathetic phrases of the ruling official ideology — its solemn, grave tonality — with everyday banality and to hold them up to ridicule, thus exposing behind the sublime noblesse of the ideological phrases the egotistical interests, the violence, the brutal claims to power. This procedure, then, is more pragmatic than argumentative: it subverts the official proposition by confronting it with the situation of its enunciation; it proceeds ad hominem (for example when a politician preaches the duty of patriotic sacrifice, kynicism exposes the personal gain he is making from the sacrifice of others).” (p. 26) The distinction between cynicism and kynicism. According to Sloterdijk, kynicism is our standard ridicule of official ideology that comes in the form of irony and sarcasm — think of comedians attacking politics. The word noblesse just means the nobility, the noble class. Here, Žižek has in mind the “noble”, “upstanding”, “virtuous” appearance of ideological phrases, which we all know are total bullshit — pathetic attempts to outsmart and control us. The type of statements politicians make that you respond to with a “jerk somebody else off!” We know that behind these statements there is nothing but self-interest and manipulation. Kynicism is the sarcastic ridicule of these statements. Kynicism often involves ad hominem that highlights the difference between the enunciated/said and the enunciation/saying. “Hey, look at what this asshole just said! He has a lot of nerve to speak to us about duty!”

“Cynicism is the answer of the ruling culture to this kynical subversion: it recognizes, it takes into account, the particular interest behind the ideological universality, the distance between the ideological mask and the reality, but it still finds reasons to retain the mask. This cynicism is not a direct position of immorality, it is more like morality itself put in the service of immorality — the model of cynical wisdom is to conceive probity, integrity, as a supreme form of dishonesty, and morals as a supreme form of profligacy, the truth as the most effective form of a lie. This cynicism is therefore a kind of perverted ‘negation of the negation’ of the official ideology: confronted with illegal enrichment, with robbery, the cynical reaction consists in saying that legal enrichment is a lot more effective and, moreover, protected by the law. As Bertolt Brecht puts it in his Threepenny Opera: ‘what is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?’” (p. 26) Cynicism is the ruling class’ answer to our kynicism; it is its counter-strategy. Cynicism is counter-kynicism. For example, we are all kynical towards advertisement, but now companies have started to react to our kynicism with cynicism, which means they are making ads that are self-aware and self-critical. Today, many ads are saying something like “Hey, I’m an ad and I’m full of shit, but you should buy what I’m selling precisely because I admit that I’m bullshitting you”. In other words, the ad recognizes that it’s really just a ridiculous form of manipulation, but still goes on trying to manipulate you through its honesty about said manipulation. This might be a case of what Lacan called lying in the form of the truth. Axe You can be seen to be a cynical commodity. “Probity” means the quality of having strong moral principles; honesty and decency; “profligacy” means reckless extravagance or wastefulness in the use of resources. Read “probity” as morality and “profligacy” as immorality. Cynicism involves a certain twisted relation between morality and immorality. Sloterdijk affirms this: “The fertile ground for cynicism in modern times is to be found not only in urban culture but also in the courtly sphere. Both are dies of pernicious realism through which human beings learn the crooked smile of open immorality. Here, as there, a sophisticated knowledge accumulates in informed, intelligent minds, a knowledge that moves elegantly back and forth between naked facts and conventional facades” (Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 4). Cynicism sees morality as immorality. Whenever someone takes up an extreme moral disposition, there is immediate distrust of him or her.

“It is clear, therefore, that confronted with such cynical reason, the traditional critique of ideology no longer works. We can no longer subject the ideological text to ‘symptomatic reading’, confronting it with its blank spots, with what it must repress to organize itself, to preserve its consistency — cynical reason takes this distance into account in advance. Is then the only issue left to us to affirm that, with the reign of cynical reason, we find ourselves in the so-called post-ideological world? Even Adorno came to this conclusion, starting from the premiss that ideology is, strictly speaking, only a system which makes a claim to the truth — that is, which is not simply a lie but a lie experienced as truth, a lie which pretends to be taken seriously. Totalitarian ideology no longer has this pretension. It is no longer meant, even by its authors, to be taken seriously — its status is just that of a means of manipulation, purely external and instrumental; its rule is secured not by its truth-value but by simple extra­ ideological violence and promise of gain.” (pp. 26–7) Traditional ideology critique does not work on cynical reason. We can no longer simply perform a standard “symptomatic reading” (psychoanalytic interpretation) on ideology. If ideology admits to us all of the things it used to repress, all of the things it wanted to keep out of our sight, i.e., its “blank spots”, for example, the fact that it is a form of manipulation, then what’s the point of doing ideology critique? If ideology, in its cynical form, confesses all of its darkest secrets, then what’s the point of a ideology critique that would only be reiterating what ideology itself has revealed? If ideology is truthful about its own deceit, then aren’t we living in a post-ideological age, since the manipulation is right there on the surface for all to see? Žižek will say no. Ideology functions all the more better in its dysfunctionality. That is, ideology functions (at the unconscious level) all the more in its dysfunctionality (at the conscious level). Also, it’s worth noting that the truth of ideology is no longer an issue — people know very well that it’s bullshit. The traditional critique of ideology attempted to bring all of society’s deepest, darkest secrets to light, but if we already know and recognize these “unconscious” truths, then what does critique do now if it no longer is to proceed in exposing society’s symptoms?

“It is here, at this point, that the distinction between symptom and fantasy must be introduced in order to show how the idea that we live in a post­-ideological society proceeds a little too quickly: cynical reason, with all its ironic detachment, leaves untouched the fundamental level of ideological fantasy, the level on which ideology structures the social reality itself.” (p. 27) While cynical reason has loosened the grip of ideology at the conscious level, it has not done this at the unconscious level of fantasy (it has even intensified its own power there). We still take ideology seriously in our unconscious fantasies. The unconscious is still ideological even if consciousness is not. But what’s so important about the distinction between symptom and fantasy? A symptomatic reading of an “ideological text” would point out all of the points of tension within it, all of its contradictions, repressions and inconsistencies, all of the ugly truths about itself that society would like to keep out of sight, but if people have already fully accepted this to be the truth of all official (conscious) ideologies, then what’s the point of doing traditional ideology critique? If “ideology is bullshit” (kynicism/cynicism) is the default setting, then why bother pointing it out in a theoretical manner? I believe Žižek is saying that if the concepts of ideology and ideology critique are to still be of relevance, then we must look for ideology not in society’s preconscious/conscious symptoms (contradictions) but in unconscious fantasy, i.e., in the unconscious relations between the split subject, the big Other and jouissance (sublime object, objet petit a). The move from symptom to fantasy is what accounts for us still being ideological despite all of our cynicism towards it. We will see that while we know very well that ideology is bullshit, we are still doing what ideological subjects do. This doing is rooted in unconscious fantasy and the objectivity of belief. For us ideological cynics, ideological illusion is located in the doing (unconscious) and not the knowing (conscious). Žižek’s famous three toilets from The Ticklish Subject exemplify this.

Ideological fantasy

“If we want to grasp this dimension of fantasy, we must return to the Marxian formula ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’, and pose ourselves a very simple question: where is the place of ideological illusion, in the ‘knowing’ or in the ‘doing’ in the reality itself? At first sight, the answer seems obvious: ideological illusion lies in the ‘knowing’. It is a matter of a discordance between what people are effectively doing and what they think they are doing — ideology consists in the very fact that the people ‘do not know what they are really doing’, that they have a false representation of the social reality to which they belong (the distortion produced, of course, by the same reality). Let us take again the classic Marxian example of so-called commodity fetishism: money is in reality just an embodiment, a condensation, a materialization of a network of social relations — the fact that it functions as a universal equivalent of all commodities is conditioned by its position in the texture of social relations. But to the individuals themselves, this function of money — to be the embodiment of wealth — appears as an immediate, natural property of a thing called ‘money’, as if money is already in itself, in its immediate material reality, the embodiment of wealth. Here, we have touched upon the classic Marxist motive of ‘reification’: behind the things, the relation between things, we must detect the social relations, the relations between human subjects.” (pp. 27–8) Ideological illusion is now located in doing and not in knowing. Žižek’s Sloterdijk-inspired concept of ideology involves a reversal of Marx’s classic formula. For Marx, the illusion was in our knowing (false consciousness, mistaken representations), but, for Žižek, it’s in our doing or behaviour. On the surface, the illusion is in our bogus knowledge (representation) of reality, which is the traditional concept of ideology. However, for us, there is a ideological inconsistency between what we know (ideology is bullshit, ideological cynicism) and what we are doing (unconscious fidelity to an ideological fantasy). We know all to well the reality of our situation. We know that corporations, advertising and mass media are there to trick us into serving the will of capital (big business), but despite the fact that we know the real truth of our circumstances, we still behave in a way that serves capital (because of our unconscious fantasies).

“But such a reading of the Marxian formula leaves out an illusion, an error, a distortion which is already at work in the social reality itself, at the level of what the individuals are doing, and not only what they think or know they are doing. When individuals use money, they know very well that there is nothing magical about it — that money, in its materiality, is simply an expression of social relations. The everyday spontaneous ideology reduces money to a simple sign giving the individual possessing it a right to a certain part of the social product. So, on an everyday level, the individuals know very well that there are relations between people behind the relations between things. The problem is that in their social activity itself, in what they are doing, they are acting as if money, in its material reality, is the immediate embodiment of wealth as such. They are fetishists in practice, not in theory. What they ‘do not know’, what they misrecognize, is the fact that in their social reality itself, in their social activity — in the act of commodity exchange — they are guided by the fetishistic illusion.” (p. 28) Marx failed to see that the ideological illusion can also be in doing and not just in knowing. Nowadays, we know that money is not some magical entity but we behave as if it is. We are fetishists in our behavior — not in our thinking. If there is an illusion in our knowing, then it’s simply that we fail to recognize that we are still ideological in our behavior or social activity, in what we are doing in our social reality (which is rooted in unconscious fantasy).

To make this clear, let us again take the classic Marxian motive of the speculative inversion of the relationship between the Universal and the Particular. The Universal is just a property of particular objects which really exist, but when we are victims of commodity fetishism it appears as if the concrete content of a commodity (its use-value) is an expression of its abstract universality (its exchange-value) — the abstract Universal, the Value, appears as a real Substance which successively incarnates itself in a series of concrete objects. That is the basic Marxian thesis: it is already the effective world of commodities which behaves like a Hegelian subject­-substance, like a Universal going through a series of particular embodiments. Marx speaks about ‘commodity metaphysics’, about the ‘religion of everyday life’. The roots of philosophical speculative idealism are in the social reality of the world of commodities; it is this world which behaves ‘idealistically’ — or, as Marx puts it in the first chapter of the first edition of Capital: So Žižek makes a connection between commodity fetishism and the Hegelian concept of the distinction between Universal and Particular. For Marx, the Universal depends on the Particular, whereas, for Hegel, it is vice versa. According to Marx, Hegel’s “speculative inversion” is metaphysical maneuver (“metaphysical” in a bad sense). For Marx, capitalist society was Hegelian before Hegel, since in treats value as a Universal thing-in-itself and not as the product of certain concrete (Particular) objects and relations between them. We behave idealistically even though we, qua empiricists, know better. As Marx says in Capital: “This inversion through which what is sensible and concrete counts only as a phenomenal form of what is abstract and universal, contrary to the real state of things where the abstract and the universal count only as a property of the concrete — such an inversion is characteristic of the expression of value, and it is this inversion which, at the same time, makes the understanding of this expression so difficult. If I say: Roman law and German law are both laws, it is something which goes by itself. But if, on the contrary, I say: THE Law, this abstract thing, realizes itself in Roman law and in German law, i.e. in these concrete laws, the interconnection becomes mystical.” I’m not sure if it would be accurate to consider Marx to be a typical nominalist, since I’m not sure if he thoroughly dismisses the reality of Universals (they may be real but simply rely on the concrete existences of particulars), but he’s certainly not a a realist of the Platonist/Hegelian sort that believes in the reality of Universals or Forms. However, he may very well be a flat out nominalist.

The question to ask again is: where is the illusion here? We must not forget that the bourgeois individual, in his everyday ideology, is definitely not a speculative Hegelian: he does not conceive the particular content as resulting from an autonomous movement of the universal Idea. He is, on the contrary, a good Anglo-Saxon nominalist, thinking that the Universal is a property of the Particular — that is, of really existing things. Value in itself does not exist, there are just individual things which, among other properties, have value. The problem is that in his practice, in his real activity, he acts as if the particular things (the commodities) were just so many embodiments of universal Value. To rephrase Marx: He knows very well that Roman law and German law are just two kinds of law, but in his practice, he acts as if the Law itself, this abstract entity, realizes itself in Roman law and in German law. Again, the ideological illusion is on the side of doing, the side of practice, on the side of our bodily movements, and not the side of knowing, consciousness, thinking, theory, etc.

“So now we have made a decisive step forward; we have established a new way to read the Marxian formula ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’: the illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what the people are doing. What they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic inversion. What they overlook, what they misrecognize, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality, their real social activity. They know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know. The illusion is therefore double: it consists in overlooking the illusion which is structuring our real, effective relationship to reality. And this overlooked, unconscious illusion is what may be called the ideological fantasy.” (pp. 29–30) We now have a new way to read Marx’s famous formula of ideology, which is the opposite of what he originally meant, since it places the illusion on the side of doing (it also changes what we do not know). Our ideological illusion is double because (1) there is an ideological illusion (unconscious fantasy) operative in our doing and (2) we overlook this behavioral illusion in our knowledge (2 is what we do not know, but this is not what Marx had in mind, since he meant false consciousness or mistaken ideological representations). The first illusion in our doing and our fail to recognize it in our knowing is the second one. We know all too well that official ideology is bullshit but we do not know that we are still ideologically captured by it in our behavior despite our cynical and knowledgable rejection of it at the conscious level. For Marx, our doing/behavior follows from our mistaken (ideological) knowing or false consciousness, but, for Žižek, ideology is primarily in our doing and the mistake in our knowing, that we are still ideological in our doing, follows from the doing and the unconscious fantasy at the heart of it. For example, we are commodity fetishists in our actions — not in our thoughts. If ideology critique is still to be a thing, then it must be able to describe the unconscious fantasies (ideological illusions) that structure and undergird our social reality itself, i.e., what we are effectively and concretely doing in our material actions. That is, it must move beyond attempting to locate where we go wrong in our thinking, how bogus representations distort our reality, and instead see how the ideological illusions that structure our doing structure our very reality itself. Žižek associates doing with (social) reality itself, since it is how our physical bodies are behaving in the material world. This distinction between knowing and doing seems overly Cartesian at times. Žižek would reject mind-body dualism, but it is as if he subscribes to it.

“If our concept of ideology remains the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge, then today’s society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not that of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way — one of many ways — to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.” (p. 30) Our society is post-ideological if we stick to the meaning Marx gave to his formula of ideology. At the level of knowing and consciousness, we no longer take our institutions seriously — we are ideological cynics — but we still take them seriously at the level of our actions. For us, ideology is not some illusory concept-system that distorts our perception of reality, but, rather, it is an unconscious fantasy that shapes our concrete actions (social reality itself) without our knowing it. For us, ideology is not a false consciousness that makes us “know” things in the wrong way, but an unconscious fantasy that makes us do the wrong things without it having anything to do with our consciousness at all. Ideology hides beneath the conscious cynicism of ideology. The fact that we are not ideological in our consciousness and only in our behaviour makes ideology’s grasp more powerful, elusive, etc. The fact that ideology resides in our spontaneous doing, our automated actions, the materiality of behavior, means that it’s situated at the bedrock level of our social reality — it is the mold of the social world. Yet we think we are post-ideological thanks to our cynicism. Our ironic detachment is a blindfold. Cynicism buttresses ideology.

“It is from this standpoint that we can account for the formula of cynical reason proposed by Sloterdijk: ‘they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it’. If the illusion were on the side of knowledge, then the cynical position would really be a post-ideological position, simply a position without illusions: ‘they know what they are doing, and they are doing it’. But if the place of the illusion is in the reality of doing itself, then this formula can be read in quite another way: ‘they know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still, they are doing it’. For example, they know that their idea of Freedom is masking a particular form of exploitation, but they still continue to follow this idea of Freedom.” (p. 30) Here, Žižek brings together Marx’s formula of traditional ideology and Sloterdijk’s formula of cynical reason. It gets us to this: we know that ideology is bullshit but we still do it, we still live ideology. This appears to contain a contradiction. He just said in the last paragraph that we do not know that our behavior is guided by ideological fantasy, but here he shifts and claims that we do know this for a fact. I’m not sure how to square this circle. Maybe he means that we know this at some preconscious level. Perhaps we can say that what we know (in Sloterdijk’s formula of cynicism) is that we still go along with the official ideology of the social order even though we know it’s bullshit, for example, we consumers know we’re still consuming even though we know consumerism sucks, but what we do not know (in Marx’s formula of ideology) is that ideology still has a strong hold on us at an unconscious level, that we still believe in it in our actions and unconscious fantasies. This interpretation squares the circle. Regardless, for Žižek, the main point is that ideology still resides in our doing and, therefore, structures the foundation of our material, social reality. Žižek will now go on to explain the connection between ideology (unconscious fantasy) and belief, which will involve him formulating a response to the Althusserian position on commodity fetishism.

The objectivity of belief

Žižek just showed our ideological belief (commodity fetishism) is not belief in the standard sense; it is not subjective, conscious, immediate, interior belief. Our “belief” in commodities has been displaced onto the commodities themselves — they believe for us. Here, Žizek will illustrate this mechanism of exteriorization, objective displacement, transference of belief, the medium of the other, etc., with examples from different historical periods: (1) the Chorus, (2) weepers, (3) canned laughter.

“From this standpoint, it would also be worth rereading the elementary Marxian formulation of so-called commodity fetishism: in a society in which the products of human labour acquire the form of commodities, the crucial relations between people take on the form of relations between things, between commodities — instead of immediate relations between people, we have social relations between things. In the 1960s and 1970s, this whole problem was discredited through Althusserian anti-humanism. The principal reproach of the Althusserians was that the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism is based on a naive, ideological, epistemologically unfounded opposition between persons (human subjects) and things. But a Lacanian reading can give this formulation a new, unexpected twist: the subversive power of Marx’s approach lies precisely in the way he uses the opposition of persons and things.” (p. 31) Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism rests on a distinction between people and things. The Althusserians considered this distinction to be naive and ideological, but Žižek attempts to resuscitate this distinction by reformulating it in Lacanian terms. In fact, according to Žižek, part of what makes Marx’s method of interpretation so powerful is precisely how he conceptualizes the distinction between persons and things. Marx noticed that if people are fetishized, then objects are not, and vice versa. There’s a strange inverse fetishistic relation between people and things.

“In feudalism, as we have seen, relations between people are mystified, mediated through a web of ideological beliefs and superstitions. They are the relations between the master and his servant, whereby the master exerts his charismatic power of fascination, and so forth. Although in capitalism the subjects are emancipated, perceiving themselves as free from medieval religious superstitions, when they deal with one another they do so as rational utilitarians, guided only by their selfish interests. The point of Marx’s analysis, however, is that the things (commodities) themselves believe in their place, instead of the subjects: it is as if all their beliefs, superstitions and metaphysical mystifications, supposedly surmounted by the rational, utilitarian personality, are embodied in the ‘social relations between things’. They no longer believe, but the things themselves believe for them.” (p. 31) What’s so interesting about Marx’s distinction between people and things, which involves the concept of fetishism, is that objects (commodities) can “have beliefs” all on their own. It is as if objects believe for us. In feudal society, people truly believed, in the colloquial sense, in fetishized human relations, that is, they really believed that the king was a king in essence. However, we don’t really believe that commodities have magical powers, but we act as if they do. It’s in this sense that commodities “believe” for us. What Žižek is getting at is the reality of objective, social structures that shape our behavior even without our knowing it. To say that objects believe for us means that their objective structures and dynamics unconsciously shape how we behave even though we do not have conscious beliefs in these objects within our psyches. Lacan’s four discourses are an example of this type of thing. We don’t believe in or know about the dynamics of the four discourses, but we still operate within their parameters — the four discourses believe in our place. The system of commodities works in the same way. It is as if our old mystical beliefs have been displaced, in the psychoanalytic sense, onto the world of objects. Objects had to start believing in order for us to give up on our conscious beliefs in fetishized human relations. The system of objects is, therefore, like a social or collective unconscious (Baudrillard pointed this out in The System of Objects and in The Consumer Society). The fact that we do not immediately believe in the magic of commodities makes their power all the greater, since we are oblivious to the hold they unconsciously have on us. For Žižek, then, the objectivity of belief has much in common with the functioning of the unconscious — it is an Other or exteriority at the core of our intimacy or spontaneous actions (Lacan would call this an “extimacy”, i.e., an external intimacy). There is another (an Other) motive behind our conscious “motives”. Feudal society was shot through with fetishistic illusion, but this illusion was far easier to recognize because it was right there on the surface. Our fetishism, the fetishism in our doing, is much more evasive due to the displacement of fetishistic belief.

“This seems also to be a basic Lacanian proposition, contrary to the usual thesis that a belief is something interior and knowledge something exterior (in the sense that it can be verified through an external procedure). Rather, it is belief which is radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people. It is similar to Tibetan prayer wheels: you write a prayer on a paper, put the rolled paper into a wheel, and turn it automatically, without thinking (or, if you want to proceed according to the Hegelian ‘cunning of reason’, you attach it to a windmill, so that it is moved around by the wind). In this way, the wheel itself is praying for me, instead of me — or, more precisely, I myself am praying through the medium of the wheel. The beauty of it all is that in my psychological inferiority I can think about whatever I want, I can yield to the most dirty and obscene fantasies, and it does not matter because — to use a good old Stalinist expression — whatever I am thinking, objectively I am praying.” (pp. 31–2) For Lacan and Žižek, belief is always something exterior and objective — not subjective or interior. This flies in the face of the traditional distinction between belief and knowledge, which sees the former as subjective and the latter as objective. The Tibetan prayer wheel attests to the objectivity of belief. This mirrors our cynical relation to ideology: I subjectively think ideology is bullshit, but I am objectively acting in accordance with it. My ideological belief is merely displaced. This is where we catch a trace of the influence of structuralism on Lacan and Žižek. It’s not that they simply reduce subjectivity to the dynamics of objective structures (discourses, beliefs, etc.) like structuralists proper, but they hold to their reality the objective effects they have on us.

“This is how we should grasp the fundamental Lacanian proposition that psychoanalysis is not a psychology: the most intimate beliefs, even the most intimate emotions such as compassion, crying, sorrow, laughter, can be transferred, delegated to others without losing their sincerity. In his seminar on The Ethic of Psychoanalysis, Lacan speaks of the role of the Chorus in classical tragedy: we, the spectators, came to the theatre worried, full of everyday problems, unable to adjust without reserve to the problems of the play, that is to feel the required fears and compassions — but no problem, there is the Chorus, who feels the sorrow and the compassion instead of us — or, more precisely, we feel the required emotions through the medium of the Chorus: ‘You are then relieved of all worries, even if you do not feel anything, the Chorus will do so in your place’.” (p. 32) When it comes to the the objective transference of intimate belief and/or feeling, his preferred example was that of the Chorus in Greek tragedy. The transference occurs without any loss in sincerity. Even if we don’t have it in us to feel something in our immediate interiority, we still are sincere about it in its displacement onto others (the Chorus). Also, Lacanian psychoanalysis is at odds with psychology because of how it holds to the objectivity of belief and feeling. According to psychology, these are always intimate or confined to the interiority of the individual psyche, that is, they are subjective. Lacan makes them objective or “objects” exterior to the mind, which makes him anti-psychology. Even though Heidegger would reject the usage of the objective-subjective binary, Lacan is saying something similar to what Heidegger says concerning the existential structures of attunement and das Man in Being and Time — they are in-the-world, not in the mind. Attunements are affects, emotions or feelings and das Man has to do with the “objective” source or mechanism of our everyday behavior (effective doing, material actions). It appears, therefore, that Lacan’s theory of exteriorization was greatly influenced by Heidegger (Lacan just remained French in his preferred terminology). You can use Heidegger’s phenomenological descriptions to add support to Lacan and Žižek’s arguments.

“Even if we, the spectators, are just drowsily watching the show, objectively — to use again the old Stalinist expression — we are doing our duty of compassion for the heroes. In so-called primitive societies we find the same phenomenon in the form of ‘weepers’, women hired to cry instead of us: so, through the medium of the other, we accomplish our duty of mourning, while we can spend our time on more profitable exploits — disputing the division of the inheritance of the deceased, for example.” (p. 32) Just as the Greeks had the Chorus, so-called primitive societies had weepers. And we have canned laughter. Therefore, we find this mechanism of displacement of belief/feeling (the medium of the other) in all human societies — it’s a universal phenomenon. We are still doing our objective duty to believe/feel even if something else is doing it for us. This is the type of thing Heidegger has in mind in his discussion of death in Division II of Being and Time — one can take my place as a teacher, but one cannot take my place in death.

“But to avoid the impression that this exteriorization, this transference of our most intimate feeling, is simply a characteristic of the so-called primitive stages of development, let us remind ourselves of a phenomenon quite usual in popular television shows or serials: ‘canned laughter’. After some supposedly funny or witty remark, you can hear the laughter and applause included in the soundtrack of the show itself — here we have the exact counterpart of the chorus in classical tragedy; it is here that we have to look for ‘living Antiquity’. That is to say, why this laughter? The first possible answer — that it serves to remind us when to laugh — is interesting enough, because it implies the paradox that laughter is a matter of duty and not of some spontaneous feeling; but this answer is not sufficient because we do not usually laugh. The only correct answer would be that the other — embodied in the television set — is relieving us even of our duty to laugh — is laughing instead of us. So even if, tired from a hard day’s stupid work, all evening we did nothing but gaze drowsily into the television screen, we can say afterwards that objectively, through the medium of the other, we had a really good time.” (pp. 32–3) For Žižek, the example of canned laughter is the modern day equivalent of the Chorus. The objective transference of belief/feeling is not some relic of the past but something we still do today. The laugh track laughs for us and, afterwards, we feel as though we were the ones laughing.

“If we do not take into account this objective status of belief, we might finish like the fool from a well-known joke who thought he was a grain of corn. After some time in a mental hospital, he was finally cured: now he knew that he was not a grain but a man. So they let him out; but soon afterwards he came running back, saying: ‘I met a hen and I was afraid she would eat me.’ The doctors tried to calm him: ‘But what are you afraid of? Now you know that you are not a grain but a man.’ The fool answered: ‘Yes, of course, I know that, but does the hen know that I am no longer a grain?’” (p. 33) Žižek finishes this section with one of his favorite jokes. The idea is that the guy still believes he’s a grain of corn even after he has consciously realized he is not. His belief has simply been exteriorized, retained, preserved, transferred or projected onto the other, which, in this case, is the hen (the hen, in this joke, symbolizes the unconsious). The point is that we can still unconsciously believe in x even though we do not have a conscious belief in it or no longer have a conscious belief in it (e.g., an atheist may very well not believe in God in his consciousness but still have a belief in Him in the unconscious). This happens through the “medium of the other” (transference). This mechanism of objective projection is why we are disavowed fetishists, ideologically speaking — “I know very well that consumerism is bullshit . . . but, nevertheless, I go right on consuming.” This is because my “belief” in consumption is not in me, but, rather, in commodities, advertising, the Code (Baudrillard), etc. The question is: how does this mechanism of exteriorization, which is at the heart of our commodity fetishism, relate to the Law? Also, Žižek’s most famous example of the objectivity of belief, which isn’t given in The Sublime Object of Ideology, is that of Santa Clause. The parents do not have a first-person belief in Santa, but, rather, believe through the children’s belief. The children, after a very early age, do not have a first-person belief, but go on pretending to believe for the sake of their parent’s belief in him (their desire to keep this Christmas tradition going). No one truly believes in Santa, but still belief functions all the same, since both the parents and the children act as if they believe. Žižek will show below how the mechanism of transference is at work in belief — we transfer or externalize belief by projecting it onto others. The Santa Clause thing is an example of no one believing in x while supposing someone else does, which is what makes the one who supposes (transfers) act as if they believe, i.e., behaviorally believe. When it comes to belief, we do not need to believe in the first-person, we just need to believe that some other believes (even if this other is purely hypothetical). We do not have to subjectively believe in order for belief to objectively function.

‘Law is Law’

This discussion of Law (and its tautological self-grounding) seems to come from out of nowhere. It is very important to see how it connects to Žižek’s concept of ideology qua unconscious fantasy and objective belief. What is this connection?

“The lesson to be drawn from this concerning the social field is above all that belief, far from being an ‘intimate’, purely mental state, is always materialized in our effective social activity: belief supports the fantasy which regulates social reality. Let us take the case of Kafka: it is usually said that in the ‘irrational’ universe of his novels, Kafka has given an ‘exaggerated’, ‘fantastic’, ‘subjectively distorted’ expression to modern bureaucracy and the fate of the individual within it. In saying this we overlook the crucial fact that it is this very ‘exaggeration’ which articulates the fantasy regulating the libidinal functioning of the ‘effective’, ‘real’ bureaucracy itself.” (pp. 33–4) So what’s the big takeaway from the objective status of belief? For one, belief is always materialized in our concrete social behavior — it is not locked away in the ineffective confines of subjectivity. Belief makes things happen and it does so, by and large, without us having any awareness of it — hence, ideology or ideological fantasy. Our materialized, objective beliefs (concrete doings) are deeply connected to our most fundamental ideological (unconscious) fantasies. Kafka’s exaggerated depiction of the modern world of bureaucracy has been said to give a distorted, caricatured representation of our world, but it’s this very exaggerated, caricatured depiction that captures the fundamental fantasy operative in this society. This implies that exaggeration and caricature are signs of unconscious fantasy. For example, Žižek has pointed out how some of the most overly conventional romcoms capture truths about love, sex and fantasy better than some of the more nuanced, artistic films. Kafka’s exaggeration is precisely what enabled him to disclose the fundamental fantasy ($◊a) at the heart of the libidinal functioning in bureaucratic society (reality). Consider how The Matrix presents us with an exaggerated image of our society of surveillance, control, simulation, etc., but this exaggeration is precisely what brings the truth of our society into clear view.

“The so-called ‘Kafka’s universe’ is not a ‘fantasy-image of social reality’ but, on the contrary, the mise-en-scène of the fantasy which is at work in the midst of social reality itself. We all know very well that bureaucracy is not all-powerful, but our ‘effective’ conduct in the presence of bureaucratic machinery is already regulated by a belief in its almightiness . . . In contrast to the usual ‘criticism of ideology’ trying to deduce the ideological form of a determinate society from the conjunction of its effective social rela­tions, the analytical approach aims above all at the ideological fantasy efficient in social reality itself.” (p. 34) Kafka’s exaggerated image of society is not some make-believe picture of the world that really has nothing to do with it, but, rather, the very bedrock truth and structure of the unconscious fantasy (mise-en-scène) that makes our world go round. Kafka’s stories stage the other scene of fundamental (ideological) fantasy operative in modern society. In this sense, we can say that Kafka’s stories are nonfiction. Kafka’s stories belong in the nonfiction section. Adrian Johnston pointed out that, for Lacan, abstraction is concretization. Meaning what? The more abstract we get, the better the models apply to particular cases, as is true with his three clinical structures, i.e., neurosis, perversion and psychosis. We could say that Kafka’s exaggeration/caricaturization is a form of abstraction à la Lacan. Abstraction lets us get to the hard kernel of the truth (core structure) of a thing. This is what Kafka did with bureaucracy. The psychoanalytic (Lacanian) approach to ideology critique aims at discovering the unconscious fantasy that holds in a given society, whereas traditional ideology critique simply tried to locate ideology in exploitative, social relations (especially those between classes). What’s the difference? The psychoanalytic approach attempts to locate ideology at the fundamental (unconscious) level of reality itself, whereas the traditional approach tries to infer ideology from our material, social relations. The sticking point is that traditional critique of ideology makes ideology into a derivative, supplemental, secondary phenomena, that is, something that is inessential to the basic (base) structure of social reality (the materiality of social relations). However, for the Lacanian-Žižekian approach, ideology is at the very core of society itself — it is not some supplement used by the ruling class to reinforce its power and reproduce its social relations (exploitation). Instead, for the psychoanalytic approach, ideology (ideological fantasy, objective belief) is precisely what shapes our social relations — it is the fantasmatic structure of society itself. While Lacan and Žižek would not like me using the word “deeper” in this context due to their strong rejection of depth psychology (Jung), we can say that ideology is deeper than our social relations, which goes against the traditional (Marxist) view that holds that ideology is part of the superstructure. For Žižek, ideology is the fantasmatic base of both the base structure and superstructure. When it comes to ideology, one infers from it and not to it. Žižek holds to the from it view, whereas traditional Marxists hold to the to it view. The traditional Marxists sought to infer ideology from our concrete behavior (social reality itself), but Žižek thinks we must look for ideology in this very behavoir (unconscious fantasy) and see how it shapes it. The Marxist position would, thus, make ideological belief (unconscious fantasy) separate from our material actions, whereas the psychoanalytic approach argues that ideology structures our behavior.

What we call ‘social reality’ is in the last resort an ethical construction; it is supported by a certain as if (we act as if we believe in the almightiness of bureaucracy, as if the President incarnates the will of the People, as if the Party expresses the objective interest of the working class . . . ). As soon as the belief (which, let us remind ourselves again, is definitely not to be conceived at a ‘psychological’ level: it is embodied, materialized, in the effective functioning of the social field) is lost, the very texture of the social field disintegrates. This was already articulated by Pascal, one of Althusser’s principal points of reference, in his attempt to develop the concept of ‘Ideo­logical State Apparatuses’. According to Pascal, the interiority of our reason­ing is determined by the external, nonsensical ‘machine’ — automatism of the signifier, of the symbolic network in which the subjects are caught: What does Žižek mean by “ethical” in the first sentence? How does he connect the “ethical” to the as if. Does he mean “ethical” in the sense of our concrete actions and behavior as opposed to the abstract, ineffective reflection of theory? Does the “ethical” mean practical activity? To me, it would be more appropriate to speak of the conditional or hypothetical construction (as if) of social reality rather than its “ethical construction”. We act as if we believe, our behavior seems to indicate the existence of an inner belief, but we actually do not believe in the standard, psychological sense of the word. We do not believe but we act as if we do. True ideology is in this as if and its corresponding unconscious fantasy. As soon as we lose the as if, the behavioral autopilot of ideology, the belief that is not a belief, we lose our social reality itself. Our objective beliefs (default, embodied, automatic, effective, materialized, “a priori” actions) are the grounds of our particular worlds. Despite the difference between Lacan/Žižek and Deleuze/Guattari, it appears that the latter’s concept of the order-word helps to shed light on what Lacan and Žižek call the “automatism of the signifier” (see Seminar XI, session 5, for more on this). I take it that this refers to how certain signifiers within the Symbolic order act for us, that is, put us in a mode of social autopilot — just like Heidegger’s das Man is what one does. Certain Symbolic orders will produce different behavioral default settings. Remember, for Lacanians, signifiers are not just literal words, but can also be actions, gestures, etc. D&G showed how words are not merely cognitive, ideal entities but shapers of concrete behaviors and responses. Žižek, à la Althusser, mainly credits Pascal with the discovery of what he calls objective belief, i.e., that fundamental belief is what we do (especially, what we repetitively do) and not what we think (belief is the traditional sense). For Althusser, ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) are there to shape our basic behavior-belief. They are there to primarily get us doing certain things, acting in specific ways — they are behavioral training centers (they are the conditions of our ideological conditioning). For Pascal and the Marxists he influenced, the way we think is determined by what we are doing, i.e., interiority is exteriority (extimacy). Whether we take ideology seriously or cynically is ultimately irrelevant because we are primarily ideological in our behavior (doing). We might even be able to say that the root of our cynicism towards ideology (our atheistic non-belief in it) is determined precisely by our particular behavior (true ideology). The Devil’s greatest trick was convincing the world that he does not exist — the same goes for Ideology. Žižek now quotes from Pascal’s Pensées: “For we must make no mistake about ourselves: we are as much automa­ton as mind . . . proofs only convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed. It inclines the automaton, which leads the mind unconsciously along with it” (Pensées, p. 274). Pascal was the first philosopher to really highlight this robotic dimension of our type of being. We are very much like automatons in our everydayness. Again, for Heidegger, our robotic aspect is das Man; for Lacan and Žižek, it is the big Other (automatism of the signifier); and for Deleuze and Guattari, it is rooted in order-words; for Baudrillard, it is the whole relay setup of the consumer society (see ‘Hypermarket and Hypercommodity’ in Simulacra and Simulation). Notice that Pascal claims that “proofs only convince the mind”, which means that arguments have little or no power to effect, change or alter our default behavior patterns or bodily habits. Proofs work on the mind but not the body (automaton). Changing one’s habits (bodily actions) is what truly changes one’s beliefs (objective beliefs, default responses, automatic actions). Pascal even held that bodily habit unconsciously leads the mind to consciously believe what it believes. There is a lag between bodily belief and mental belief.

Here Pascal produces the very Lacanian definition of the unconscious: ‘the automaton (i.e. the dead, senseless letter), which leads the mind unconsciously [sans le savoir] with it’. It follows, from this constitutively senseless character of the Law, that we must obey it not because it is just, good or even beneficial, but simply because it is the law — this tautology articulates the vicious circle of its authority, the fact that the last foundation of the Law’s authority lies in its process of enunciation: Pascal actually formulated the concept of the Freudian-Lacanian unconscious, therefore, Pascal was one of precursors of psychoanalysis. The “dead, senseless letter” (the trashcan of ideology) would refer to those arbitrary and stupid Symbolic coordinates (master signifiers, signifying-chain, semiotic trash) that shape what we think about ourselves and our societies at the conscious-egoic-intersubjective level. Our stupid behavioral patterns, with all of their scripted call-and-response schemas, are just that — stupid. And yet they structure the whole of social reality. This means that our worlds are grounded by the groundless, that is, groundless grounds. There is no deep meaning to be dug out of the fundamental structures of our ideological-behavioral fields. All the way down . . . trash. In fact, there really is no “down” to speak of if we take it to mean something like hidden profundity, purpose, or Meaning with a capital M. For Lacan and Žižek, the Symbolic order (Law, tradition, custom, official ideology, etc.) is constituted by stupid, pointless, insignificant, purposeless, semiotic trash (the junkyard of language). Here is where Žižek reveals the meaning of the title of this subsection, i.e., “Law is Law”. For Žižek, the arbitrary, senseless, groundless character of the Law means that there is no reason to follow it except for itself. There is no Law of the Law. There is no transcendent Law that grounds our immanent, worldly laws. This is why Lacan rejected the idea of a meta-discourse. The only field of meaning we have is the one we have. The only Symbolic orders are the ones of this world. The fact that our Symbolic orders are groundless grounds can be a very disheartening reality to face. Lacan once said that “there is no big Other”, by which he meant that there is no absolutely consistent Symbolic order that can make sense of all of the Real. God is the fantasy of a transcendent Symbolic order or ultimate source of Meaning that is all-powerful, complete, internally consistent and that can overpower (miraculously hatch) our Symbolic order at any moment. Every Symbolic order contains blindspots, gaps, inconsistencies, contradictions, deadlocks, “symptoms”, etc. The authority of the Law (Symbolic order) is nothing but the Law itself — we have no other ground to turn to. We can’t ground the Law on concepts of goodness, justice, etc., because the Law (Symbolic order) is what gives us these concepts to begin with. The authority of the Law is, therefore, tautological (circular): Law is Law. But, again, tautologies lack support or justification. The Law is a self-grounding tautology — but tautologies are meaningless. We accept the tautology of Law (social order) because we would lose all social reality without it. We accept the tautology of the authority of Law out of necessity — not because we’ve judged it to be perfectly rational, just and good on the basis of transcendent set of criteria (a meta-discourse).

Custom is the whole of equity for the sole reason that it is accepted. That is the mystic basis of its authority. Anyone who tries to bring it back to its first principle destroys it. “Equity” means value or worth. The sole “ground” of the Law is that we accept it, that we automatically assimilate it into our behavior, that it is our “a priori” custom. Without custom, habit or, dare I say, blind adherence to the Law, the Law would collapse. The only first “principle” of the Law is our default embrace of it in our embodied movements and actions. The mystic basis of the Law is that we automatically and “instinctively” live it and operate according to its dictates. The reason why attempting to bring the Law back to first principles proper is because this attempt only leads to the full recognition of the groundlessness and arbitrariness of the Law. Also, saying that we need to justify our allegiance to the Law actually just puts us at a distance from it. It challenges its autopilot-like mode of operation. Justification is problematization. What we, then, discover is that there is only groundlessness behind the Law, which puts it in great jeopardy. Once we see the groundlessness of the Law, we may try to simply choose to go on living our lives in a accordance with it, but things have changed. Why? Because we have made ourselves the Law, since we choose to accept it. Does this not negate the Law in a particular way? I am the Law of the Law (not in the sense of arriving at a meta-discourse, but just in deciding whether or not the Law is worth living by). In a sense, this dialectic reverses how the Law is “supposed” to work. The Law is “supposed” to be absolute and above question and we are to be automatic adherents to it. But seeing the groundlessness of it makes us into judges of the Law — we choose the Law and, thereby, make it adhere to us (it is made to pass through the mediating test of our subjectivity). For Law to truly function at the best of its abilities, it needs to be accepted automatically and without question — not out of (conscious) conviction. Žižek will now make this point himself.

The only real obedience, then, is an ‘external’ one: obedience out of conviction is not real obedience because it is already ‘mediated’ through our subjectivity — that is, we are not really obeying the authority but simply following our judgement, which tells us that the authority deserves to be obeyed in so far as it is good, wise, beneficent . . . Even more than for our relation to ‘external’ social authority, this inversion applies to our obedience to the internal authority of belief: it was Kierkegaard who wrote that to believe in Christ because we consider him wise and good is a dread­ful blasphemy — it is, on the contrary, only the act of belief itself which can give us an insight into his goodness and wisdom. Certainly we must search for rational reasons which can substantiate our belief, our obedience to the religious command, but the crucial religious experience is that these reasons reveal themselves only to those who already believe — we find reasons attesting our belief because we already believe; we do not believe because we have found sufficient good reasons to believe. True obedience to Law is, therefore, the “external” type, meaning that we automatically live it in our concrete behavior and bodily familiarity with the world, that is, without conscious (subjective, internal) conviction, willful and conscientious acceptance of it. This is similar to Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus. The Law and ideology have this in common — they fundamentally depend on our objective or external obedience to them, i.e., that we accept them in our concrete behavior and non-reflective, embodied interactions with others. Their functionality is greatly impaired by us accepting them out of conscious conviction. This is how Žižek is connecting Law to his theory of ideology (objective belief). Kierkegaard also thought that we go wrong in believing in Jesus because of x, y and z. Why? Because it sets us above Christ. “Hmm, let me sit here, judge Christ and calculate if he is worth believing in or not.” Instead, for Kierkegaard, accepting Christ out of faith (without rational justification) is the only way his goodness and praiseworthiness can be revealed to us, since it places us in a position of submission. Otherwise, we place ourselves in the prideful position of being the judge of the Judge of judges. For Law, ideology, Christ, God, etc., to be truly believed in, they must be accepted in the objectivity (materiality) of our behavioral patterns, and not through conscious, subjective, reflective acceptance via judgment. For Žižek, this is true even more for our inner, subjective beliefs. We must, first, objectively believe before we can have a subjective belief. Any inner belief worthy of the name is rooted in an antecedent objective belief. Of course, we want reasonable justifications for our beliefs, and it’s fine to pursue them, but the objective belief has to be in place at the start. We only seek confirming data if we already believe. First comes objective belief, then comes its subjective correlate.

‘External’ obedience to the Law is thus not submission to external pressure, to so-called non-ideological ‘brute force’, but obedience to the Command in so far as it is ‘incomprehensible’, not understood; in so far as it retains a ‘traumatic’, ‘irrational’ character: far from hiding its full authority, this traumatic, non-integrated character of the Law is a positive condition of it. This is the fundamental feature of the psychoanalytic concept of the superego: an injunction which is experienced as traumatic, ‘senseless’ — that is, which cannot be integrated into the symbolic universe of the subject. But for the Law to function ‘normally’, this traumatic fact that ‘custom is the whole of equity for the sole reason that it is accepted’ — the dependence of the Law on its process of enunciation or, to use a concept developed by Laclau and Mouffe, its radically contingent character — must be repressed into the unconscious, through the ideological, imaginary experience of the ‘meaning’ of the Law, of its foundation in Justice, Truth (or, in a more modern way, functionality): Žižek gets a little more complex, theoretical and Lacanian here with his take on the founding of Law in one’s existence (the Borromean knot). For the Law to truly take hold in our lives, part of it, namely, its groundless foundation and absolute Command (act of enunciation), must remain “incomprehensible”, that is, without full articulation within the Symbolic coordinates of reality — this is the Real of the Law. This Real dimension of the Law, the part of the Law that escapes semiotic, rational capture by conscious intelligibility is a necessary condition of the Law. The functionality of the Symbolic aspect of the Law depends on its Real aspect. For the Law to function properly, part of itself must remain indiscernible, in the background, out of sight. The second we begin to push this leftover of Law, its excessive, elusive, senseless, meaningless, contingent and groundless Command (enunciation or the saying), into the Symbolic order, the Law is in serious trouble and is on the verge of collapse. This means that the functioning of the Symbolic order transcendentally depends on something always being excluded from it — the Real of the Law is a condition of possibility for the function of the Symbolic Law. For the Law to have full authority in our lives, the groundlessness (Real) of it must be “repressed” or left outside of the Symbolic. This concealment of the Real (arbitrary groundlessness) of the Law is what makes the Law, qua Symbolic, possible. I take it that this will be just as true of ideology as it is of Law. From the Lacanian perspective, the Real is “traumatic” and “irrational” due to the fact we cannot incorporate it into our social intelligibility (we always fear what we do not understand). To put it more simply, the hidden dimension of the Law, its elusive secret and indiscernible foundation, give it its power. Its shrouded origin makes it far more intimidating and mysterious. If this is true of concrete human beings, then how much more powerful is it of something as abstract and ineffable as the Law with a capital L? It is precisely because the Law speaks (enunciates) from out of a hidden “depth” (the Real) that it has such an ominous grip. It’s not really what the Law says (the enunciated) within the parameters of the Symbolic, but that its says it at all (the enunciation) from a place outside of the Symbolic, i.e., the Real. This is what gives the Law a kind of sublimity (Kant’s aesthetics). Our assimilation into the Law (the whole name-of-the-father thing) is traumatic precisely because there is a certain “monster” behind the part of it that is understandable. We understand the said but not the saying. “Where is this Law coming from?” This monstrous dimension of the Law’s enunciation is what gives it its appearance of absolute necessity. Child: “Hey, dad, why do I have to do this?” Father: “Because I said so!” Now, of course, for Lacan and Žižek, there is a strong connection between Law and superego. What was just said of the Law equally applies to the superego. For both to function normally, their radically contingent and groundless character must be repressed under the facade of ideological and imaginary justification. In other words, anytime people start to think about why we serve the Law, there must be an automatic redirection of this suspicion to official justification, e.g., we serve the Law because it is good, just, etc. This redirection protocol is the Law’s first and last defence against its problematization. The Law: “I am good and just. I make things function well. There you go. Now you know why you serve me. End of story. Rest your precious head on that pillow. Go to bed now. Nighty-nighttime, lil bitch!” The Law seeks to catch problematization before it really becomes a problem. So, for Žižek, part of the function of ideology is to give the appearance that the Law has a meaning, rational ground, teleological and ethical justification, etc., and I think it’s safe to assume that different ideologies go about doing this in various ways. Once again, Žižek quotes Pascal to support the claims he just made: “It would therefore be a good thing for us to obey laws and customs because they are laws . . . But people are not amenable to this doctrine, and thus, believing that truth can be found and resides in laws and customs, they believe them and take their antiquity as a proof of their truth (and not just of their authority, without truth)” (Pensées, p. 216). We play a sort of trick on ourselves to keep from truly problematizing the Law. We say we believe in the Law because its true in order to evade the real truth of the Law — its radically contingent groundlessness. Pascal expresses that he wishes we could consciously bring ourselves to accept the tautology of the Law: Law is Law, that is, “we accept the Law because it is the Law”. For Pascal (and likely Žižek), this would be more honest, but we know how humans tend to do in the honesty department — what we find disturbing, we falsify (go ask Nietzsche). We have to convince ourselves that the authority of the Law is rooted in some profound Truth (e.g. God, the big big Other) instead of just taking it for what it is (groundless ground).

It is highly significant that we find exactly the same formulation in Kafka’s Trial, at the end of the conversation between K. and the priest: Both Pascal and Kafka share the same view of the Law (the Law is not Good, Just, True — just necessary). In the words of Kafka: ‘I do not agree with that point of view,’ said K., shaking his head, ‘for if one accepts it, one must accept as true everything the door-keeper says. But you yourself have sufficiently proved how impossible it is to do that.’ ‘No,’ said the priest, ‘it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.’ ‘A melancholy conclusion,’ said K. ‘It turns lying into a universal principle.’ The reason why accepting that the Law is necessarily nothing more than a necessity is so hard to accept is because the Law only functions properly when under the structural illusion (lie) of being necessarily Good, True, Just. This means that the Law, at its fullest functionality, involves a lie, i.e., it turns “lying into a universal principle”, as Kafka put it, insofar as the Law cannot work without the lie. This amounts to saying that the whole of the social order depends on a necessary fiction. Žižek will now clarify in greater detail the part of the Law which must remain repressed. “What is ‘repressed’ then, is not some obscure origin of the Law but the very fact that the Law is not to be accepted as true, only as necessary — the fact that its authority is without truth. The necessary structural illusion which drives people to believe that truth can be found in laws describes precisely the mechanism of transference: transference is this supposition of a Truth, of a Meaning behind the stupid, traumatic, inconsistent fact of the Law. In other words, ‘transference’ names the vicious circle of belief: the reasons why we should believe are persuasive only to those who already believe” (pp. 36–7) So now we know precisely what aspect of the Law must be “repressed” (withdrawn in the Heideggerian sense) for it to truly hold sway in our lives — “the fact that its authority is without truth”. In other words, we mustn’t see that the Law is not grounded in truth (true, ethical, meaningful principles, e.g., Goodness, Justice, Equality, Freedom, etc.), but, rather, only in the brute fact that there can be no social order without it. It’s not the origin of the Law as such that’s the problem but, instead, a component of that origin — the indifferent necessity in it. However, is social order necessarily a good and just thing? No, not necessarily. Order is just order. There was order in Nazi Germany. Symbolic orders are not good at essence, in fact, they are capable of great atrocities. But this is too hard of a truth for people to accept. They cannot accept that Law is Law, i.e., the fundamental tautology (and structural lie that conceals it) that is the hard kernel (the Real) of the Symbolic. The Symbolic order itself has its own perturbing unconscious. To say that the Law is Law simply means that there is no other reason to follow the Law accept for the Law itself. We follow the Law because we have no other choice as a social body (be it good, bad, both or indifferent). We follow it out of social necessity. That one line in Dio’s Holy Diver comes to mind: “Between the velvet lies there’s a truth that’s hard as steel”. We have to believe that the Law is Good, Just and True (velvet lies) at its very foundation in order to not have to face the fact that all the Law has going for it is a socio-structural necessity (a truth that’s hard as steel). Žižek sees in the structural illusion of the Law (and our relation to it) the mechanism of transference. We transfer or attribute the Truth (Goodness, Justice, Meaning) to the Law. For Žižek, transference is circular in structure just like the ways in which Law and belief are. These circles each have two steps. Transference proper: (Step 1) I attribute the knowledge or meaning of my symptoms to the mind of the analyst; (Step 2) the analyst is eventually able to produce an interpretation (knowledge, meaning) precisely because I took him to already have it. Transference in Law: (Step 1) I transferentially attribute Truth, Goodness, etc., to the Law in my behavior (unconscious); (Step 2) I consciously embrace the Law as True, Good, etc., because of my unconscious and behavioral transference (the Law strikes me, at the conscious level, as essentially Good only because I have unconsciously made it Good via transference). In other words, I believe in the Law because I believe in the Law: I (consciously) believe in the Law because I (unconsciously, behaviorally, transferentially) believe in the Law. Just as the Law rests on a structural and necessary lie, so, too, does psychoanalysis. The analysand must believe (consciously and/or unconsciously) that the analyst possesses the knowledge and the meaning of the patient’s unconscious, when, in truth, the analyst does not — the analysand is the one who possesses it but must transferentially attribute it to the analyst for analysis to work. Likewise, we are the ones that are good, just, etc., we are the ones who value these concepts, but we must transferentially attribute them to the Law itself (which is morally indifferent at its core) in order for society to produce moral behavior. Some part of ourselves must be transferentially externalized in order for it to truly take hold in our subjectivities. In and of itself, the Law wouldn’t work — we must use the circular movement of transference and tautology to make it work. I believe in the analyst’s interpretations only because I already believe in them via transference. Žižek is basically combining Pascal’s theory of belief with Lacan’s theory of transference, which forms a prototype of a psychoanalytic epistemology. I believe because I have, first, transferentially believed. There is always a belief before belief. The main point is this: Law, ideology, religion, belief and psychoanalysis only work if we go through the motions. We only come to consciously believe in them when we already believe in them at the level of behavior and the transference it brings with it. The big takeaway is the fundamental connection between behavioral (unconscious) belief and the mechanism of transference. Material belief, objectivity of belief, involves transference. For example, it is because I behave in a Christian way and transfer (suppositionally project) my ideas of Goodness, Justice, to Christianity itself, that I will eventually come to consciously believe in it. There is, thus, a connection between belief and transference. This connection is essential to understand if one is to comprehend Law, religion, ideology, politics, etc. Žižek will illustrate the transferential circle of belief with Pascal’s wager.

The crucial text of Pascal here is the famous Fragment 233 on the necessity of the wager; the first, largest part of it demonstrates at length why it is rationally sensible to ‘bet on God’, but this argument is invalidated by the following remark of Pascal’s imaginary partner in dialogue: The main point of the following quotation is that one does not come to believe in God (Law, ideology, religion, or whatever) by logical proof and convincing evidence, but, rather, by doing what a believer, a Christian in this case, does. The idea is to mimic the behavior of a believer. Think about how people who get saved in church have already started behaving like Christians insofar as they attend church, study the Bible, etc. It’s not enough to consciously and intellectually accept Pascal’s wager and Pascal himself knew this. Intellectual acceptance is not the same as believing something deep in your heart (unconscious). Let’s look at Pascal’s famous fragment: my hands are tied and my lips are sealed; I am being forced to wager and I am not free; I am being held fast and I am so made that I cannot believe. What do you want me to do then? — ‘That is true, but at least get it into your head that, if you are unable to believe, it is because of your passions, since reason impels you to believe and yet you cannot do so. Concentrate then not on convincing yourself by multiplying proofs of God’s existence but by diminishing your passions. You want to find faith and you do not know the road. You want to be cured of unbelief and you ask for the remedy: learn from those who were once bound like you and who now wager all they have. These are people who know the road you wish to follow, who have been cured of the affliction of which you wish to be cured: follow the way by which they began. They behaved just as if they did believe, taking holy water, having masses said, and so on. That will make you believe quite naturally, and will make you more docile. Now what harm will come to you from choosing this course? You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, full of good works, a sincere, true friend . . . It is true you will not enjoy noxious pleasures, glory and good living, but will you not have others? I tell you that you will gain even in this life, and that at every step you take along this road you will see that your gain is so certain and your risk so negligible that in the end you will realize, that you have wagered on something certain and infinite for which you have paid nothing. For Pascal, then, the key is act as if you are already a believer — that is the path to true, passionate belief. The movements of the mind take their cues from the movements of the body. If you don’t fully believe in x, then the secret is to pretend that you do — not seeking out more intellectual confirmation of it. Pascal’s final answer, then, is: leave rational argumentation and submit yourself simply to ideological ritual, stupefy yourself by repeating the meaningless gestures, act as if you already believe, and the belief will come by itself. For a belief to take hold in your mind (conscious commitment) it, first, needs to be repeated in your behavior — it must become habit. Repetition is essential to belief. Behavioral repetition is what turns meaningless gestures (automatism of the signifier) into deep meanings that passionately resonate in one’s interiority. Conscious belief also involves a lag. Second belief (conscious) lags behind first belief (unconscious).

“Far from being limited to Catholicism, such a procedure for obtaining ideological conversion has universal application, which is why, in a certain epoch, it was very popular among French Communists. The Marxist version of the theme of ‘wager’ runs as follows: the bourgeois intellectual has his hands tied and his lips sealed. Apparently he is free, bound only to the argument of his reason, but in reality he is permeated by bourgeois prejudices. These prejudices do not let him go, so he cannot believe in the sense of history, in the historical mission of the working class. So what can he do?” (p. 38) Pascal’s praxis of belief, the Pascalian procedure, is not just a mechanism that is only effective in relation to Christianity or religion in general; it is the universal mechanism behind all ideological conversions, e.g., religious, political, economic, etc. The French communists used it in their own particular way to so how a pro-capitalist can become a communist/Marxist. How is this transformation to occur. Žižek will now explain. “The answer: first, he should at least recognize his impotence, his inca­pacity to believe in the sense of history; even if his reason leans towards the truth, the passions and prejudices produced by his class position prevent him from accepting it. So he should not exert himself with proving the truth of the historical mission of the working class; rather, he should learn to subdue his petty-bourgeois passions and prejudices. He should take lessons from those who were once as impotent as he is now but are ready to risk all for the revolutionary Cause. He should imitate the way they began: they behaved just as if they did believe in the mission of the working class, they became active in the Party, they collected money to help strikers, propagate the workers’ movement, and so on. This stupefied them and made them believe quite naturally. And really, what harm has come to them through choosing this course? They became faithful, full of good works, sincere and noble . . . It is true that they had to renounce a few noxious petty-bourgeois pleasures, their egocentrist intellectualist trifling, their false sense of individual freedom, but on the other hand — and notwithstanding the factual truth of their belief — they gained a lot: they live a meaningful life, free of doubts and uncertainty; all their everyday activity is accompanied by the consciousness that they are making their small contribution to the great and noble Cause.” (p. 38) The pro-capitalist should mimic the behavior of the communists if he is to come to a true belief in communism. This is exactly the same advice Pascal offers to the would-be Christian. Now that we see why Pascal and Žižek believe that belief (the conscious and emotion sort) follows from one’s behavior, the question becomes: does this theory of belief amount to simple behaviorism? Žižek holds that it does not.

“What distinguishes this Pascalian ‘custom’ from insipid behaviourist wisdom (‘the content of your belief is conditioned by your factual behav­iour’) is the paradoxical status of a belief before belief: by following a custom, the subject believes without knowing it, so that the final conversion is merely a formal act by means of which we recognize what we have already believed. In other words, what the behaviourist reading of Pascalian ‘custom’ misses is the crucial fact that the external custom is always a material support for the subject’s unconscious. The main achievement of Marek Kaniewska’s film Another Country is to designate, in a sensitive and delicate way, this precarious status of ‘believing without knowing it’ — precisely apropos of the conversion to Communism.” (p. 39) Now we arrive at the difference between Pascal/Žižek and the behaviorists on the status of the relation between belief and behavior. For the behaviorists, there is just behavior and one’s eventual recognition of it, that is, belief is reducible to one’s behavior. This implies that belief never has a representational, cognitive, conceptual component to it. However, for Žižek, in accordance with his reading of Pascal, there is a certain cognitive aspect even to first belief (behavioral belief) insofar as the belief is in the unconscious. For Lacanians, the unconscious is highly sophisticated in thought and logic. The unconscious thinks, believes, etc. For Žižek, then, first belief or belief-in-behavior does contain a certain representational aspect due to its relation to the unconscious. While Žižek claims that our material actions are a “material support for the subject’s unconscious”, I think we could also say that the unconscious is an intellectual (fantasmatic) support of our behavior. I take it that the two form a type of hermeneutic circle — they expand and develop each other in a loop. But what is clear is that our material actions have a deep impact on the unconscious and, in turn, the unconscious greatly effects what we think and believe at a conscious level. As opposed to the behaviorists, there is, according to Žižek, a belief that is not entirely reducible to behavior that comes before conscious belief (conscious recognition and acknowledgment of the first belief-in-behavior). But here’s the kicker, the unconscious, for Lacanians, is not some utterly personal and private center of our inner lives — the unconscious is Other (signifiers). The exteriority of the unconscious is what enables Žižek is argue for an objective belief. To say that there is belief before belief is to say that there is objective belief (belief through the Other) before subjective belief (belief at the level of first-person experience). Behaviorists would reject the reality of an objective belief, which is what differentiates their theory of belief from that of Pascal and Žižek. Žižek will now elucidate the status of believing without knowing it by turning to Marek Kaniewska’s Another Country.

“Another Country is a film à clef about the relationship between two Cambridge students, the Communist Judd (real model: John Cornford, idol of the Oxford student left, who died in 1936 in Spain) and the rich homosexual Guy Bennett, who later becomes a Russian spy and tells the story in retrospect to an English journalist who visits him in his Moscow exile (real model: Guy Burgess, of course). There is no sexual relationship between them; Judd is the only one who is not sensitive to Guy’s charm (‘the exception to the Bennett rule’, as Guy puts it): precisely for that reason, he is the point of Guy’s transferential identification.” (p. 39) The term “à clef” refers to a nonfiction story that is disguised as a fiction (a story in which real persons or actual events figure in under the disguise of make-believe). The term roman à clef means a novel in which this is the case. Žižek claims that it is precisely because of Judd’s inability to succumb to Guy’s charm (they never have a sexual relationship) that he, Judd, becomes the focus of Guy’s transferential identification. Judd is the other through whom Guy, at first, comes to believe in communism via transference.

“The action occurs in the ‘public school’ environment of the thirties: the patriotic empty talk, the terror of the student-heads (‘gods’) over ordi­nary students; yet in all this terror there is something non-binding, not quite serious; it has the ring of an amusing travesty concealing a universe in which enjoyment actually reigns in all its obscenity, above all in the form of a ramified network of homosexual relations — the real terror is, rather, the unbearable pressure of enjoyment. It is for this reason that Oxford and Cambridge in the 1930s offered such a rich field for the KGB: not only because of the ‘guilt complex’ of rich students doing so well in the midst of the economic and social crisis, but above all because of this stuffy atmosphere of enjoyment, the very inertia of which creates an unbearable tension, a tension which could be dissolved only by a ‘totali­tarian’ appeal to renunciation of the enjoyment — in Germany, it was Hitler who knew how to occupy the place of this appeal; in England, at least among the elite students, the KGB hunters were best versed in it.” (pp. 39–40) Despite how strict and serious the English environment seems, it is, in fact, one in which there is an overabundance of jouissance (excessive enjoyment, drive satisfaction). What makes the environment unbearable is not the lack of jouissance, but the presence of too much of it. It was precisely because of this excess of jouissance that many English students were susceptible to KGB recruitment. There were many susceptible to it because they yearned for a relief from jouissance (a truly strict Symbolic order that places real restraints on jouissance, i.e., one in which the pleasure principle works well). The constancy of jouissance places one in a state of inertia (it’s a kind prison of immutability). Jouissance is the exponential movement of a tension that takes us nowhere except the wasteland of inertia. It was precisely the excess of jouissance produced in Western (bourgeois) societies that made the “totalitarian” rejection of enjoyment so appealable to English kids. When you do not have jouissance, you want it more than anything, but once you have it, you will do anything to get rid of it. Libidinally speaking, we are fucked! As Oscar Wilde said, “the only thing worse than not getting what you want is getting it”. Both the fascists and the “communists” knew how to exploit the renunciation or sacrifice of jouissance for political gain.

“The film is worth mentioning for the way it depicts Guy’s conversion: its delicacy is attested by the very fact that it does not depict it, that it only lays all the elements for it. That is to say, the flashback to the 1930s which occupies the main part of the film stops at the precise point at which Guy is already converted, although he does not yet know it — the film is delicate enough to leave out the formal act of conversion; it suspends the flashback in a situation homologous to one in which somebody is already in love but is not yet aware of it, and for this reason gives expression to his love in the form of an excessively cynical attitude and defensive aggressivity towards the person with whom he is in love.” (p. 40) Žižek admires Another Country for how it depicts Guy’s ideological conversion (belief transformation) by not depicting it at all, at least, not the conscious registering of an already unconsciously established belief. In other words, Another Country depicts first belief but not second belief and this is what makes it great. Showing Guy’s conscious acceptance of belief in communism would overshadow the primary belief (unconscious, transferential belief, that is, belief through behavior and through Judd’s belief). It’s precisely through not showing it that it is able to capture the structure of how a transformation in ideology/belief comes to pass. It doesn’t have to show you the moment at which Guy consciously realizes he believes in communism (belief after belief) due to the fact that it shows how Guy comes to believe in an unconscious, transferential, behavioral way (belief before belief). In other words, the film’s greatness lies in the fact that it focuses on first (primary) belief and not second (secondary) belief. If the film depicted the moment of the formal act of recognition of belief, then this would put unconscious belief formation/transformation (first belief) in the background. By drawing our attention only to the constitution of unconscious/behavioral/transferential belief, the film makes this type of belief the primary one. Žižek nicely likens belief formation to falling in love — we could easily speak of falling in belief. Guy “falls” into communism.

“What is, then, looking closer, the denouement of the film? Two reactions to this situation of stuffy enjoyment are opposed: Judd’s renunciation, his openly declared Communism (it is for this reason that he couldn’t be a KGB agent), and on the other side Guy as a representative of the extreme, putrefied hedonism whose game, however, starts to fall apart (the ‘gods’ have humiliated him by a ritual beating because his personal enemy, a patriotic career seeker, has unmasked his homosexual relationship with a younger student: in this way, Guy lost a promised opportunity to become a ‘god’ himself the following year). At this point, Guy becomes aware of the fact that the key to the dissolution of his untenable situation lies in his transferential relationship to Judd: this is nicely indicated by two details.” (p. 40) A denouement is the final part of a play, movie, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved. The denouement in Another Country is seeing where the two reactions (Judd’s and Guy’s) to an environment of stuffy jouissance lead to. The psychoanalytic logic here is somewhat hard to follow. I take it that the KGB had no seductive influence on Judd precisely because he placed restrictions on himself, that is, he abstained from the rituals of jouissance the other students engaged. His communist belief itself was enough to ward off jouissance. Guy, on the other hand, was suffocated in this pool of jouissance and, then, came to be rejected by it. This environment of jouissance spew Guy out of its mouth. So, for one, Guy was seeking restraints on jouissance and, for two, was motivated by the loss of his position in this bourgeois world.

“First, he reproaches Judd for not himself being liberated from bourgeois prejudices — in spite of all his talk about equality and fraternity, he still thinks that ‘some persons are better than others because of the way they make love’; in short, he catches the subject on whom he has a transference in his inconsistency, in his lack. Second, he reveals to the naive Judd the very mechanism of transference: Judd thinks that his belief in the truth of Communism results from his thorough study of history and the texts of Marx, to which Guy replies, ‘You are not a Communist because you understand Marx, you understand Marx because you are a Communist!’ — that is to say, Judd understands Marx because he presupposes in advance that Marx is the bearer of knowledge enabling access to the truth of history, like the Christian believer who does not believe in Christ because he has been convinced by theological arguments but, on the contrary, is suscep­tible to theological arguments because he is already illuminated by the grace of belief.” (pp. 40–1) In other words, Judd figured out how belief formation actually works. I take that the point of the first observation, that Guy points our Judd’s hypocrisy, is that it enables Guy, so he thinks, to transferentially detached from Judd. Now Judd’s belief is Guy’s precisely because Judd could not live up to it. Guy had to destroy his idol so as to claim the idol’s belief for himself. However, as Žižek will explain directly below, Guy is attacking Judd precisely because it is still so transferentially fixed on him. Guy, then, goes on to explicitly state the Pascalian-Žižekian principle of the objectivity of belief. In this scenario, it could be seen as another way to destroy Judd. It points out the Judd, the conscious ego that “rationally” found his way to Marxism, believes in Marx for reasons that are not his own. He is not master in his own house. However, this involves a secret projection: Guy is really talking about himself (he’s already a Marxist). Through all this, however, Judd is still the transferential pillar of Guy’s unconscious belief. Guy wouldn’t find enjoyment in provoking Judd if the transference had really been broken. People often say cruel things to others precisely because they love them.

“In a first, naive approach it could appear that because of these two features Guy is on the brink of liberating himself from his transference on Judd (he catches Judd in his inconsistency, and even unmasks the very mechanism of transference to boot), but the truth is none the less the opposite: these two features only confirm how ‘those in the know are lost’ [les non-dupes errent], as Lacan would say. Precisely as one ‘in the know’, Guy is caught in transference — both reproaches of Judd receive their mean­ing only against the background that his relationship with Judd is already a transferential one (as with the analysand who finds such pleasure in discovering small weaknesses and mistakes in the analyst precisely because the transference is already at work).” (p. 41) Again, Guy is doing this because he is locked into the transference. Judd is still at the center of Guy’s unconscious belief.

“The state in which Guy finds himself immediately before his conversion, this state of extreme tension, is best rendered by his own answer to Judd’s reproach that he is himself to blame for the mess he is in (if he had only proceeded with a little discretion and hidden his homosexuality instead of flaunting it in a provocative and defiant way, there would have been no unpleasant disclosure to ruin him): ‘What better cover for someone like me than total indiscretion?’ This is, of course, the very Lacanian defi­nition of deception in its specifically human dimension, where we deceive the Other by means of the truth itself: in a universe in which all are looking for the true face beneath the mask, the best way to lead them astray is to wear the mask of truth itself. But it is impossible to maintain the coincidence of mask and truth: far from gaining us a kind of ‘immediate contact with our fellow-men’, this coincidence renders the situation unbearable; all communication is impossible because we are totally isolated through the very disclosure — the sine qua non of successful communication is a minimum of distance between appearance and its hidden rear.” (p. 41) This is tricky paragraph. As far as I can tell, Guy is caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to his bourgeois environment. What he needs is an escape (line of flight) out of the very dynamic between his mask and his truth — both of which are rooted in his environment. Communism gives him a way out. Maybe Žižek is saying that the unbearable coincidence of mask and truth is a mechanism for a full-on transformation in one’s ideology.

“The only door open is thus escape into belief in the transcendent ‘another country’ (Communism) and into conspiracy (becoming a KGB agent), which introduces a radical gap between the mask and the true face. So when, in the last scene of the flashback, Judd and Guy traverse the college courtyard, Guy is already a believer: his fate is sealed, even if he does not yet know it. His introductory words, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Communism were really true?’, reveal his belief, which is for the time being still delegated, transferred onto another — and so we can immediately pass on to the Moscow exile decades later where the only leftover of enjoyment binding the old and crippled Guy to his country is the memory of cricket.” (p. 42) Long story short, Guy becomes a communist due to his transferential relation to Judd and because of the deadlock of his current situation. The film relates to what came before (Pascal and Kafka on belief, etc.) because of how it shows someone believing (via the Other, i.e. Judd) before they actually believe. I take it that this is the main point in bringing in the concept of transference. Why? Because transference is essentially another type of the objectivity of belief. Guy might not be doing all of the things a communist does, but he has made an unconscious identification with Judd’s belief in communism. It’s through this unconscious identification that Guy becomes a communist before he’s a communist. You need to see how the film is an example of all of this — especially, the automatism of the signifier, which Žižek will now go into in the next section. Notice that the first sentence has a “therefore”, which implies that he’s going to elaborate on what follows from the primacy of first belief (automatism of the signifier) as exemplified by Another Country.

Kafka, critic of Althusser

“The externality of the symbolic machine (‘automaton’) is therefore not simply external: it is at the same time the place where the fate of our inter­nal, most ‘sincere’ and ‘intimate’ beliefs is in advance staged and decided. When we subject ourselves to the machine of a religious ritual, we already believe without knowing it; our belief is already materialized in the exter­nal ritual; in other words, we already believe unconsciously, because it is from this external character of the symbolic machine that we can explain the status of the unconscious as radically external — that of a dead letter. Belief is an affair of obedience to the dead, uncomprehended letter. It is this short-circuit between the intimate belief and the external ‘machine’ which is the most subversive kernel of Pascalian theology.” (p. 42) Again, Lacan discusses the automaton in Seminar XI. It would be good to read that section of the seminar along with this passage. So the automatism of the signifier, in this context, means going through the motions, i.e., believing through our movements and not yet in our minds. The idea ends up involving extimacy, since it is the external “signifiers” (behaviors, movements, actions) that do not inwardly resonate at first that eventually produce our conscious, emotional, inner, intimate beliefs. Therefore, the exterior becomes the intimate — extimacy. We have staged and decided what we believe in our actions before our conscious minds catch up — this the lag of belief. Our actions (signifiers) are meaningless in the sense that we have no inner connection to them (the movements or signifiers involved in practicing a religious ritual do have meaning at the level of the social but not yet at the level of the inner or personal) . They do not resonate in our first-person consciousness. We can talk about the automatism of the signifier or going through the motions as a “machine” because they are what manufacture conscious, inner belief (second belief). We can talk of the unconscious as the automatism of the signifier or the dead letter insofar as it is an external, symbolic “machine” that determines our lived, conscious subjectivity. Again, this is not classic behaviorism because it involves signifiers or representations, i.e., the mediation of the Symbolic big Other (virtual, semiotic procedures) that is not reducible to our physical bodies and their behavior. What is different in Pascal’s and Žižek’s theory of belief is that our behavior has a deep connection to the external machine, the Symbolic, the big Other, the battery of signifiers, a virtual network of relations, etc. I take it that Žižek thinks Pascal’s theory of belief is “subversive” insofar as it greatly problematizes the standard theory of belief (one that has strong ties to Christian theology) which views belief as a reflective act of consciousness and will. For Pascal, we do not have the freedom to simply choose to form a new belief at the conscious level. This goes against the traditional concept of faith, which Kierkegaard was far more in line with. True belief is outside the “immediate” control of consciousness. It might involve a leap of faith, but not one directly performed by the individual at the heights of despairing self-consciousness.

“Of course, in his theory of Ideological State Apparatuses, Althusser gave an elaborated, contemporary version of this Pascalian ‘machine’; but the weak point of his theory is that he or his school never succeeded in thinking out the link between Ideological State Apparatuses and ideological interpellation: how does the Ideological State Apparatus (the Pascalian ‘machine’, the signifying automatism) ‘internalize’ itself; how does it produce the effect of ideological belief in a Cause and the interconnecting effect of subjectivation, of recognition of one’s ideological position? The answer to this is, as we have seen, that this external ‘machine’ of State Apparatuses exercises its force only in so far as it is experienced, in the uncon­scious economy of the subject, as a traumatic, senseless injunction. Althusser speaks only of the process of ideological interpellation through which the symbolic machine of ideology is ‘internalized’ into the ideological experience of Meaning and Truth: but we can learn from Pascal that this ‘internalization’, by structural necessity, never fully succeeds, that there is always a residue, a leftover, a stain of traumatic irrationality and senselessness sticking to it, and that this leftover, far from hindering the full submission of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it: it is precisely this non-integrated surplus of senseless traumatism which confers on the Law its unconditional authority: in other words, which — in so far as it escapes ideological sense — sustains what we might call the ideological jouis-sense, enjoyment-in-sense (enjoy-meant), proper to ideology.” (pp. 42–3) Žižek appreciates that Althusser utilized Pascal in his theory of ideology and ISAs (the external, Symbolic “machines” that condition and produce ideological subjects, i.e., believers). However, according to Žižek, Althusser got something wrong, namely, the relation between ISAs (Symbolic machines) and ideological interpellation. In other words, Althusser and the Althusserians failed to understand how ISAs or Symbolic machines (exteriority) make their way into our hearts and minds (intimacy). They acted as if it just happens, but mustn’t there be some sort of mechanism or process through which this comes to be? For Žižek, the answer is yes. How does first belief turn into second belief. How do meaningless actions and behaviors (signifiers) become our most intimate and cherished beliefs that give us a sharp sense of self? How does exteriorization become subjectivation? This transmission (from exterior to interior) occurs through the “medium” of the individual’s unconscious (the unconscious is radically exterior and radically intimate or interior). It is essential that the injunctions and commands of the ISAs have a senseless and traumatic impact on the subject (just as the Law must have — this is a connection between Law and ideology). ISAs basically lay down the Law (they establish the rules that govern a particular society). For Žizek, there must be a repressed, unconscious trauma, one caused by ideology/ISAs and related to Law, left outside of ideological consciousness for said consciousness to form. We can only enjoy ideological meanings (receive jouis-sense) if a certain dimension of them is left out of the picture. Jouis-sense is a certain type of jouissance that we get from the signifier, the Symbolic order, ideological meanings, etc., i.e., it is a jouissance in semiosis (the play of signifiers and signifieds). We are able to find enjoyment in the meanings and senses of ideology precisely because its groundless authority and “foundation” is repressed or kept out of sight. If we ever fully experienced the radical groundlessness of our ideology (the contingent frame through which we interact with others and the world), then our enjoy-meant in its meanings would collapse. Ideology is enjoyable because it makes sense of the world, but this meaning is ultimately groundless and unauthoritative, that is, it is based on an illusory authority, or sham foundation, or groundless ground. Simply put, the foundation of all ideology is bullshit — but it is a bullshit necessary for social functionality. Another way of approaching this is to say that Althusser only thought the Imaginary-Symbolic dimensions of ideological interpellation, which means that he failed to think it’s Real dimension — that of the trauma-inducing side of the Law. The law (ideology) must wound us, it must make us fear it, in order for us to accept its rule (just like the traditional father had to). It is this trauma, this fear, this groundless force, this senseless and irrational “violence” of the command, that gets repressed and installed in the unconscious and makes us cling to the Law at the Imaginary-Symbolic level. We identify with it because of the power it has, a power that must simply be taken as a given for the Law to function accordingly. The Real of the Law is not this or that command, but, rather, commanding as such. The Law commands because it commands! If we critically poke at this commanding, then we start of break the Law apart. Law and ideology take hold in the Imaginary and the Symbolic (meaning and truth) on the condition that they have already taken hold in the Real (unconscious trauma, surplus or leftover). It makes sense that this mysterious, undecipherable, fear-inducing, incomprehensible, unsymbolizable, non-integrated, “absolute” foundation (groundless ground) of Law/ideology is what brings us to submit to its specific commands. It is because of this external (unconscious, repressed) aspect of the Law, the fact that a part of the Law never gets fully internalized (conscious identification), that we come to strongly identify with its Symbolic dictates. To make this a little more clear, let’s just say that something has not truly taken hold in subjectivity unless it has established itself in the unconscious, which necessitates a certain trauma that we repress due to our inability to consciously process it. Althusser missed this condition of ideology and Žižek is the one that points it out. Law and ideology are traumatic before they are comforting — just like the traditional father. The authority of the Law/ideology is a horrifying trauma/disidentification that produces a happy submission/identification. The Law: first a monster, then a guardian — but always a trick. We can read the famous biblical saying, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10), in this Lacanian-Žižekian way — the unconscious (Real) establishment of the trauma and fear of the Law is the beginning of it being able to guide us (wisdom) in the Symbolic world (reality). The idea is that our allegiance and fidelity to the social world depends on it terrifying us. In order to be wise, to be able to successfully navigate the social world, to be able to practically apply the principles and precepts of the Law, we must have a fundamental fear of the Law that pervasively operates through our subjectivities. This fundamental trauma or fear has such a strong hold on subjectivity that it necessarily (in most cases) involves an ethical automation, that is, the subjects of the Law (fear of the Lord) automatically act in accordance with it (wisdom). And it is the terrifying, traumatic Otherness (Real) of the Law that leads to us coming to identify with its Symbolic (intelligible) aspects and finding enjoyment (jouis-sense) in them. The writer of this proverb was on to this Žižekian insight. I feel like Žižek is being at his most Nietzschean here insofar as he’s making the argument that a certain falsification is the structural condition of life (livability in the world). Jodi Dean offers some helpful insights into this idea in her entry for “Law” in The Žižek Dictionary.

“And again, it was no accident that we mentioned the name of Kafka: concerning this ideological jouis-sense we can say that Kafka develops a kind of criticism of Althusser avant la lettre, in letting us see that which is constitutive of the gap between ‘machine’ and its ‘internalization’. Is not Kafka’s ‘irrational’ bureaucracy, this blind, gigantic, nonsensical apparatus, precisely the Ideological State Apparatus with which a subject is confronted before any identification, any recognition — any subjectivation ­takes place? What, then, can we learn from Kafka?” (p. 43) The term avant la lettre means before the letter: before the (specified) word or concept existed. Kafka is the one who critiqued Althusser’s theory of ideology (ideological interpellation) avant la lettre, i.e., before said theory (“letter”) even existed. Kafka pointed out that it is the irrational, traumatic and senseless aspect of bureaucracy that enables us to find enjoy-meant (jouis-sense) in it. It’s has if the Law, in its Symbolic dimension, offers us a solution to an unbearable problem it itself caused in its traumatic Real dimension. We embrace and enjoy bureaucracy (Law/ideology) because it, first, terrifies us. In The Trial, Joseph K. is never able to get to the center of the authority of bureaucracy (Law/ideology), since it is nowhere to be found in the coordinates of our Imaginary-Symbolic reality — it is always in the same place, i.e., the gap in the Symbolic, i.e., the Real. One cannot locate the authority of the Symbolic within the Symbolic itself — this “authority” is always that which evades semiotic capture. The “gap” that (1) separates Symbolic machine/interpellation from subjectivation/identification and (2) allows the external Symbolic machine (Law, ISA, ideology, etc.) to become internalized (subjectivation) is the repression of its initial traumatizing effect, its groundless authority, into the unconscious (the Real). Kafka knew this to be the case.

“In a first approach, the starting point in Kafka’s novels is that of an interpellation: the Kafkaesque subject is interpellated by a mysterious bureaucratic entity (Law, Castle). But this interpellation has a somewhat strange look: it is, so to say, an interpellation without identification/subjectivation; it does not offer us a Cause with which to identify — the Kafkaesque subject is the subject desperately seeking a trait with which to identify, he does not understand the meaning of the call of the Other.” (p. 43) For Kafka, interpellation is not identification, which means that a subject can be interpellated by x without having made an identification with it. The Kafkaesque subject is interpellated by a mysterious x that possesses no traits to identify with. I think we could say that interpellation is a trauma (Real) done to us by the external Symbolic machine (ideology, ISA, Law), that is, by the big Other, whereas identification (Imaginary) is something the subject comes to do in response to interpellation. The traumatic Real aspect of Law/ideology/bureaucracy has no traits to identify with, but its Symbolic aspects do have traits. The Real (traumatizing authority) of ISAs is what Althusser failed to see. We are drawn to the “center” of the Law precisely because it is an elusive void or lack (consciously/Symbolically indiscernible) that has separated us from jouissance through its command (enunciation) and has caused us to desire — objet petit a.

“This is the dimension overlooked in the Althusserian account of interpellation: before being caught in the identification, in the symbolic recognition/misrecognition, the subject ($) is trapped by the Other through a paradoxical object-cause of desire in the midst of it (a), through this secret supposed to be hidden in the Other: $◊a — the Lacanian formula of fantasy. What does it mean, more precisely, to say that ideological fantasy structures reality itself? Let us explain by starting from the fundamental Lacanian thesis that in the opposition between dream and reality, fantasy is on the side of reality: it is, as Lacan once said, the support that gives consistency to what we call ‘reality’.” (pp. 43–4) For Žižek, before we identify with Law/ideology in the orders of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, we have already been interpellated by it in the Real. This is a hard passage to follow but I think it’s essentially saying the following: the authority of the Law (ideology), its cruel and senseless command, traumatically separates us from jouissance, it sets up the line between acceptable pleasure (the pleasure principle, for Lacan, is geared toward homeostasis or tensionlessness in the body and not the excessive excitement of jouissance) and unacceptable jouissance. In separating us from our jouissance, by taking possession of it, the traumatizing Law (Real) comes to make us desire that which it has “stolen” from us, i.e., lost jouissance/das Ding/the mOther. The Law is now the sole possessor of the lost, mysterious, repressed, precious object (called “agalma” in Seminar VIII). This results in the production of objet petit a (that ghostly remainder). The Real of the Law takes jouissance from us and, in doing so, establishes the object-cause of desire (objet petit a or virtual jouissance), which, in turn, turns us into barred subjects ($). Therefore, the Real or trauma of the Law, the essential function of it, produces desire and fantasy ($◊a). This is the fundamental mechanism (secret) of the Law (ideology) as such. In depriving us of jouissance and producing the fundamental structure of desire and fantasy, Law/ideology is able to shape the most basic ways we experience the world, that is, it is able to establish the elementary frame through which things are disclosed to us. In other words, ideology is our reality. What we call reality is ideological to the bone. As Žižek puts it, “fantasy is on the side of reality”. We might even be able to say that ideological fantasy ($◊a) is Being if what we mean by this word is the stable, unchanging, consistent side of our reality.

In his seminar on the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan develops this through an interpretation of the well-known dream about the ‘burning child’: “A father had been watching beside his child’s sick-bed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which his child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing round it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours’ sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’ He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child’s dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them” (The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 652). Here we get to Freud’s famous dream of the burning child and Lacan’s interpretation of it. It is through this dream that Lacan ends up holding that the Real is approached in dreams and evaded by reality (Imaginary-Symbolic world). The really Real is in dreams — not “reality”. In a sense, there is more truth in dreams than in waking reality (which is an elaborate fiction). The reason why the father wakes up is to escape his close proximity to the Real of his desire (subjective truth).

The usual interpretation of this dream is based on a thesis that one of the functions of the dream is to enable the dreamer to prolong his sleep. The sleeper is suddenly exposed to an exterior irritation, a stimulus coming from reality (the ringing of an alarm clock, knocking on the door or, in this case, the smell of smoke), and to prolong his sleep he quickly, on the spot, constructs a dream: a little scene, a small story, which includes this irritating element. However, the external irritation soon becomes too strong and the subject is awakened. The standard interpretation of the dream claims that the dream is fabricated simply to keep the father asleep while being perturbed by an external stimulus. The dream attempts to incorporate the irrupting element into itself, but once this stimulus becomes too intense, the dream fails and the sleeper wakes up.

“The Lacanian reading is directly opposed to this. The subject does not awake himself when the external irritation becomes too strong; the logic of his awakening is quite different. First he constructs a dream, a story which enables him to prolong his sleep, to avoid awakening into reality. But the thing that he encounters in the dream, the reality of his desire, the Lacanian Real — in our case, the reality of the child’s reproach to his father, ‘Can’t you see that I am burning?’, implying the father’s fundamental guilt — is more terrifying than so-called external reality itself and that is why he awakens: to escape the Real of his desire, which announces itself in the terrifying dream. He escapes into so-called reality to be able to continue to sleep, to maintain his blindness, to elude awak­ening into the Real of his desire. We can rephrase here the old ‘hippy’ motto of the 1960s: reality is for those who cannot support the dream. ‘Reality’ is a fantasy-construction which enables us to mask the Real of our desire. (p. 45) For Lacan, it’s just the opposite: the dreamer wakes up when the internal or subjective irritation becomes too strong, i.e., the Real of desire, the anxiety-provoking proximity of objet petit a. In this dream, the Real of desire is “the reality of the child’s reproach of the father”, i.e., the father’s guilt. I think the phrase “Real of desire” is a little tricky to use in relation to the father’s sense of guilt. Does he desire this guilt? How is his guilt the Real of his desire? Is “desire” being used here in a broader sense that essentially just means something like subjectivity or unconscious truth? I don’t see how his dead child or guilt could be identified as his objet petit a or object-cause of desire unless we see them all as traumatic losses. The father likely desires nothing more than to have his son back. But here’s the thing, the “Real of desire” does not necessarily mean the father’s desire. Put differently, it can be the son’s desire or the desire of the Other. Lacan often associated the desire of the Other with objet petit a, since they both cause us to desire. The son’s desire was for the father to help him and yet this was precisely what the father was powerless to do. The father desired to satisfy the son’s desire to be saved and he couldn’t. Remember, Lacan defined “desire” as the desire of the Other. The father couldn’t satisfy the son’s desire for help, which he desired to do, and this is the traumatic Real that assails him in the dream, which is why he immediately wakes up in order to keep dreaming (in order to distance himself from the Real deadlock). The father is guilty of failing to satisfy his son’s desire, which, in turn, is his desire. This impossibility of desire is unbearable.

“It is exactly the same with ideology. Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our ‘reality’ itself: an ‘illusion’ which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel (conceptualized by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as ‘antagonism’: a traumatic social division which cannot be symbolized). The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel. To explain this logic, let us refer again to The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Here Lacan mentions the well-known paradox of Zhuang Zi, who dreamt of being a butterfly, and after his awakening posed himself a question: how does he know that he is not now a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuang Zi? Lacan’s commentary is that this question is justified, for two reasons.” (pp. 45–6) For Žižek, reality and ideology are very similar, since it is through them that we distance ourselves from the fundamental (Real) kernel of our subjectivities and societies. Reality/ideology are opposed to the dream. Ideology is not an escape from reality but, rather, its very foundation. Ideological fantasy is the support of our waking, social reality. Ideology is an “illusion” or fantasy that structures our reality by concealing some traumatic, problematic, Real kernel or leftover that cannot be incorporated into the Symbolic. Part of what ideology attempts to do is conceal the fact that the social field can never be fully consistent with itself — it will always involve something, some contradiction or antagonism, that must be repressed, unconscious, hidden, masked, etc., which is its Real, in order for the social field to function at all. In other words, society always has a symptom that ideological fantasy attempts to conceal. Ideology is the social “reality” itself that enables us to avoid confronting the unbearable Real at the core (gap) of the social. Let’s take of look at how this can be better understood through the paradox of Zhuang Zi. As Lacan says, “When Choang-tsu wakes up, he may ask himself whether it is not the butterfly who dreams that he is Choang-tsu. Indeed, he is right, and doubly so, first because it proves he is not mad, he does not regard himself as absolutely identical with Choang-tsu and, secondly, because he does not fully understand how right he is. In fact, it is when he was the butterfly that he apprehended one of the roots of his identity — that he was, and is, in his essence, that butterfly who paints himself with his own colours — and it is because of this that, in the last resort, he is Choang-tsu. This is proved by the fact that, when he is the butterfly, the idea does not occur to him to wonder whether, when he is Choang-tsu awake, he is not the butterfly that he is dreaming of being. This is because, when dreaming of being the butterfly, he will no doubt have to bear witness later that he represented himself as a butterfly. But this does not mean that he is captivated by the butterfly — he is a captive butterfly, but captured by nothing, for, in the dream, he is a butterfly for nobody. It is when he is awake that he is Choang-tsu for others, and is caught in their butterfly net” (Seminar XI, p. 76).

“First, it proves that Zhuang Zi was not a fool. The Lacanian definition of a fool is somebody who believes in his immediate identity with himself; somebody who is not capable of a dialectically mediated distance towards himself, like a king who thinks he is a king, who takes his being-a-king as his immediate property and not as a symbolic mandate imposed on him by a network of intersubjective relations of which he is a part (example of a king who was a fool thinking he was a king: Ludwig II of Bavaria, Wagner’s patron).” (p. 46) The Lacanian definition of a fool is someone who totally identifies with his ego, that is, a person who reduces his subjectivity to his conscious awareness of self (someone who refuses to acknowledge his unconscious). For Lacan, being able to ponder whether or not you are not yourself and possibly someone else (unconscious subject/desire) is true wisdom. Zhuang Zi showed this type of wisdom in wondering if he is truly the butterfly he was in his dream.

“However, this is not all; if it were, the subject could be reduced to a void, to an empty place in which his or her whole content is procured by others, by the symbolic network of intersubjective relations: I am ‘in myself a nothingness, the positive content of myself is what I am for others. In other words, if this were all, Lacan’s last word would be a radical alienation of the subject. His content, ‘what he is’, would be determined by an exterior signifying network offering him the points of symbolic identification, conferring on him certain symbolic mandates. But Lacan’s basic thesis, at least in his last works, is that there is a possi­bility for the subject to obtain some contents, some kind of positive consistency, also outside the big Other, the alienating symbolic network. This other possibility is that offered by fantasy: equating the subject to an object of fantasy. When he was thinking that he was a butterfly dream­ing of being Zhuang Zi, Zhuang Zi was in a way correct. The butterfly was the object which constituted the frame, the backbone, of his fantasy­ identity (the relationship Zhuang Zi-butterfly can be written $◊a). In the symbolic reality he was Zhuang Zi, but in the Real of his desire he was a butterfly. Being a butterfly was the whole consistency of his positive being outside the symbolic network. Perhaps it is not quite by accident that we find a kind of echo of this in Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil, which depicts, in a disgustingly funny way, a totalitarian society: the hero finds an ambiguous point of escape from everyday reality in his dream of being a man-butterfly.” (p. 46) Zhuang Zi is the barred subject because he lacks the object that would make him desirable to the Other, but he is the butterfly insofar as this is how he fantasizes having the object (objet a) for the Other. In more simple terms, being the butterfly is what Zhuang Zi imagines to be the necessary and sufficient condition of retaining lost jouissance through being absolutely desirable to the Other. That’s one way to read it. According to Žižek, the barred subject ($) is the side of subjectivity that is determined by the Symbolic (and Imaginary), whereas objet petit a is that Real aspect of subjectivity (the lack at its absent center) that escapes the Symbolic, that remainder of subjectivity that is not reducible to signifying networks. Coming to identify with objet petit a (the Real of desire, fantasy identity) allows us to not be reduced to our social relations to others. The objet petit a (fantasy identity) is the “substance” of subjectivity, i.e., its positive content or consistency. Zhuang Zi encountered his true self in the dream when he was a butterfly. Elsewhere, Žižek has stated how video games allow a space to discover our true selves or the truths of our subjectivities, e.g., the Grand Theft Auto games allow people to be and do what they truly (and secretly) desire. These Real-fantasy identities are not what other people take us to be (again, they escape the network of our known, Symbolic identities). The film Brazil expresses this well. Perhaps we could argue that our Real identities are potentially revolutionary insofar as the tend to be at odds with the Symbolic order.

“At first sight, what we have here is a simple symmetrical inversion of the so-called normal, ordinary perspective. In our everyday understanding, Zhuang Zi is the ‘real’ person dreaming of being a butterfly, and here we have something which is ‘really’ a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuang Zi. But as Lacan points out, this symmetrical relationship is an illusion: when Zhuang Zi is awakened, he can think to himself that he is Zhuang Zi who dreamed of being a butterfly, but in his dream, when he is a butter­fly, he cannot ask himself if when awoken, when he thought he was Zhuang Zi, he was not this butterfly that is now dreaming of being Zhuang Zi. The question, the dialectical split, is possible only when we are awake. In other words, the illusion cannot be symmetrical, it cannot run both ways, because if it did we would find ourselves in a nonsensical situation described — again — by Alphonse Allais: Raoul and Marguerite, two lovers, arrange to meet at a masked ball; there they skip into a hidden corner, embrace and fondle each other. Finally, they both put down their masks, and — surprise — Raoul finds that he is embracing the wrong woman, that she is not Marguerite, and Marguerite also finds that the other person is not Raoul but some unknown stranger . . .” (p. 47) There is not a symmetrical relation between our dream-selves and our reality-selves. Our reality-selves can actually ponder if they truly are our dream-selves, but our dream-selves never ponder if they are truly our reality-selves. We only pose this type of question when we are “awake”. It’s as if our dream-selves know with absolute certainty that they are our true selves. I think that the takeaway from the joke is that if both the dream-self and the reality-self could doubt their identities, then there would be no self at all. Something like that? We only get close to the Real (the truth or really real) of our subjectivity in the dream. I also think Žižek is using the idea of Imaginary (egoistic) mirroring here, which he mentions two sentences down. If there is no hard kernel of the self (subjectivity), if there is only mirroring, then doesn’t the idea of mirroring itself collapse? How could there be a reflection (Imaginary-Symbolic) without the reality (Real) of the reflected? The Real is the support of reality (signs/images). If all things are just mirror images, then no reality is actually getting reflected, which means that there are no mirror images or reflections, either. Hence, the paradox of the two hands drawing each other Žižek employs directly below.

Fantasy as a support of reality

This is my favorite section of the chapter and, in my opinion, the one that has the clearest and profoundest insight concerning ideology. Here we see that ideology is the basic frame or matrix through which we interpret everyday experience. Everyday experience is ideological — not a neutral slice of reality that escapes its grasp.

This problem must be approached from the Lacanian thesis that it is only in the dream that we come close to the real awakening — that is, to the Real of our desire. When Lacan says that the last support of what we call ‘reality’ is a fantasy, this is definitely not to be understood in the sense of ‘life is just a dream’, ‘what we call reality is just an illusion’, and so forth. We find such a theme in many science-fiction stories: reality as a generalized dream or illusion. The story is usually told from the perspective of a hero who gradually makes the horrifying discovery that all the people around him are not really human beings but some kind of automatons, robots, who only look and act like real human beings; the final point of these stories is of course the hero’s discovery that he himself is also such an automaton and not a real human being. Such a generalized illusion is impossible: we find the same paradox in a well-known drawing by Escher of two hands drawing each other. For the sake of context, “this problem” refers to that of Zhuang Zi’s dream and Allais’ two lovers. What does Lacan mean in saying that fantasy is the support of reality? He doesn’t mean our reality is an illusion like the one in The Matrix. Why is such a “generalized illusion” impossible? Perhaps because if all reality is an illusion, then how could there be someone (a part of “reality”, i.e., the illusion) that comes to realize it is an illusion, since this person also isn’t real? The Matrix can get around this because it posits (at least, on the surface it does) a Real outside of the Matrix, but what about stories that hold there is nothing outside the illusion? I wonder how we can read Descartes’ Meditations from this perspective.

The Lacanian thesis is, on the contrary, that there is always a hard kernel, a leftover which persists and cannot be reduced to a universal play of illusory mirroring. The difference between Lacan and ‘naive realism’ is that for Lacan, the only point at which we approach this hard kernel of the Real is indeed the dream. When we awaken into reality after a dream, we usually say to ourselves ‘it was just a dream’, thereby blinding ourselves to the fact that in our everyday, wakening reality we are nothing but a consciousness of this dream. It was only in the dream that we approached the fantasy­ framework which determines our activity, our mode of acting in reality itself. For Lacan, there is always a Real that escapes the capture of signs (Symbolic) and images (Imaginary). Lacan is, therefore, a realist, but an odd one that is not of the sort that subscribes to naive realism. Lacan is a realist, but one that is the opposite of the naive realist, since he thinks that it is in the dream, not waking reality, that we approach the Real. To say that we are nothing but a consciousness of the dream means that our conscious, egoic, active, lived reality is greatly determined by our unconscious fantasies and desires, which we approach only in our dreams. What does the “subject of” mean? It means to be determined by something else, to be ruled and/or constituted by it, i.e., subjected to it. Lacan talked like this in Seminar XI when he said, “If the subject is the subject of the signifier — determined by it — one may imagine the synchronic network as it appears in the diachrony of preferential effects” (p. 67). Anyway, our “fantasy framework” (the Real of desire, objet petit a) is Real insofar as it resides in the unconscious — out of the Imaginary-Symbolic reality of consciousness.

It is the same with the ideological dream, with the determination of ideology as a dreamlike construction hindering us from seeing the real state of things, reality as such. In vain do we try to break out of the ideo­logical dream by ‘opening our eyes and trying to see reality as it is’, by throwing away the ideological spectacles: as the subjects of such a post­-ideological, objective, sober look, free of so-called ideological prejudices, as the subjects of a look which views the facts as they are, we remain throughout ‘the consciousness of our ideological dream’. The only way to break the power of our ideological dream is to confront the Real of our desire which announces itself in this dream. For Žižek, there is a parallel between actual dreams and ideological dreams. Ideology always is a fantasy-structure (a configuration of desire) that is operative in the unconscious. What we colloquially refer to as “ideology” (official or Imaginary-Symbolic ideology) is not Real ideology. For Žižek, to lose our Real ideology is to lose our Imaginary-Symbolic reality. We cannot throw off the spectacles of ideology without throwing off reality itself. Ideology-reality is the subject of ideology-Real, which means that to get to the (unconscious) truth of official ideology is of the utmost importance. Without arriving at the Real of ideology (ideological fantasy, desire, jouissance, etc.), we fail to grasp its (official ideology’s) fundamental truth.

Let us examine anti-Semitism. It is not enough to say that we must liberate ourselves from so-called ‘anti-Semitic prejudices’ and learn to see Jews as they really are — in this way we will certainly remain victims of these so-called prejudices. We must confront ourselves with how the ideological figure of the ‘Jew’ is invested with our unconscious desire, with how we have constructed this figure to escape a certain deadlock of our desire. Critique of ideology, anti-Semitism in this case, is not about showing us how Jews really are. The way Jews really are is ultimately irrelevant to the anti-Semitic perspective, since the reality of Jews is not the object it is focused on. The object it’s truly concerned with is the ideological figure of the “Jew”. Actual Jews can have bad qualities — just like everyone else. Particular Jews possessing bad qualities is not what the ideological figure of the “Jew” is all about, since the latter really just has to do with anti-Semites and their libidinal economies (jouissance, desire, fantasy, objet petit a, anxiety, etc.). Actual Jews are merely supports of the ideological figure of the “Jew”. This figure (the scapegoat) has been constructed for anti-Semites to be able to “explain” a certain deadlock, problem, complication, etc., in their desire. For example, the anti-Semite’s desire to satisfy the desire of his family, community, nation, etc. When an economic crisis, a crisis truly generated by capital, breaks out, people have a heightened desire. We desire the desire of the Other, that is, we desire to fill in the void in the Other’s desire. However, people tend to be unable to properly contextualize the crisis and see it has a structural, systemic problem. The cover over this deadlock, this imperceptible effect of structural dynamics, the anti-Semite produces a fantasy that makes sense of all of this — one that provides a cognitive mapping of the situation. Namely, the Jews caused all this. Of course, actual Jews did not cause the structure of capitalism, but the fantasy does make things comprehendible — but at the price of extreme falsification. The fantasy tells the anti-Semite what the Other desire of him. It gives his desire a target (to rid the nation of the Jewish plot).

Let us suppose, for example, that an objective look would confirm — why not? — that Jews really do financially exploit the rest of the population, that they do sometimes seduce our young daughters, that some of them do not wash regularly. Is it not clear that this has nothing to do with the real roots of our anti-Semitism? Here, we have only to remember the Lacan­ian proposition concerning the pathologically jealous husband: even if all the facts he quotes in support of his jealousy are true, even if his wife really is sleeping around with other men, this does not change one bit the fact that his jealousy is a pathological, paranoid construction. The point is that our figure of the “Jew”, or any scapegoat for that matter, has to do with our pathologies (mental illnesses). Ideology is pathological. Ideology and pathology have an essential thing in common, namely, they’re really not concerned with the reality of the things they are focussed on, but, instead, are aimed at figures, ideas, images, etc., of their own fantasmatic construction. The Nazi’s ideological relation to the Jew is like the jealous husband’s pathological relation to the wife (even if Jews are really bad and even if the wife is a cheater, it’s still not really about them). Žižek is able to make a strong argument against anti-Semitism by positing the immorality of actual Jews. This shows that it’s not even about them. As Tupac once put it, “It’s not even about me — it’s about some nightmare these people having.”

Let us ask ourselves a simple question: in the Germany of the late 1930s, what would be the result of such a non-ideological, objective approach? Probably something like: ‘The Nazis are condemning the Jews too hastily, without proper argument, so let us take a cool, sober look and see if they are really guilty or not; let us see if there is some truth in the accusations against them.’ Is it really necessary to add that such an approach would merely confirm our so-called ‘unconscious prejudices’ with additional rationalizations? The proper answer to anti-Semitism is therefore not ‘Jews are really not like that’ but ‘the anti-Semitic idea of Jew has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of a Jew is a way to stitch up the incon­sistency of our own ideological system.’ (p. 49) Ideology will secretly use “non-ideological” objectivity or “unbiased” argumentation as a roundabout way to rationalize itself, i.e., our unconscious prejudices. Objectivity: ideological supplement. The scapegoat serves to cover, simplify and “explain” away a certain inconsistency, discrepancy or deadlock in our ideology/society (the Symbolic).

“That is why we are also unable to shake so-called ideological prejudices by taking into account the pre-ideological level of everyday experience. The basis of this argument is that the ideological construction always finds its limits in the field of everyday experience — that it is unable to reduce, to contain, to absorb and annihilate this level. Let us again take a typical individual in Germany in the late 1930S. He is bombarded by anti-Semitic propaganda depicting a Jew as a monstrous incarnation of Evil, the great wire-puller, and so on. But when he returns home he encounters Mr Stern, his neighbour, a good man to chat with in the evenings, whose children play with his. Does not this everyday experience offer an irreducible resistance to the ideological construction?” (p. 49) Because ideology and the scapegoat figures it constructs serve to keep our social worlds “functioning”, because they mask certain structural problems that are very complicated, everyday experience is not usually powerful enough to break the hold they have on the ideological subject. Because the consistency (stability, understandability) of our world is so very important to us, ideology (qua presuppositional framework) is able to turn experiences that, objectively speaking, go against it into arguments in support of it. In this way, ideology is a type of conspiracy. What would be the result of a conspiracy theorist being confronted with epistemological criteria? I imagine it would have the same effect as disconfirming data has on the ideologue. Žižek gave us a great example of this right here. He points out how the everyday (pleasant) experiences the Germans had with good and friendly Jews actually only served to confirm their Nazi ideology. Why? Because the ideology takes disconfirming data and warps it into confirmations. “See how nice the Jews pretend to be? They are so sneaky.” The conspiracy theorist would make the same move with epistemological principles. “See how deep the conspiracy goes? It even effects the way people conceive of knowledge.” Therefore, the conspiracy theory is really just the ideological frame through which the conspiracy theorist remains invested in the reality he thinks himself to be so distanced from. The conspiracy theory is a conspiracy against the conspiracy theorist. If it is the case that one of the main functions of ideology is to unconsciously and automatically transform disconfirmation into confirmation, then is ideology not the true conspiracy that structures our reality? Ideology is the conspiracy of reality itself. It’s unfalsifiability. Even worse, it is an unfalsifiability that affirms itself. Any way the ball bounces, the ideology still wins. The trick is for this mechanism to work before conscious reflection can catch it. This is what gives it the feel of pure intuition. Ideology says, “This is just how things really are”. That’s the great conspiracy. People literally kill each other over this shit. Žižek wonderfully captures this with his example of Mr. Stern. The German’s everyday experience (objective reality) of the Jew is not enough to break the spell of Nazi ideology, in fact, this ideology turns this experience into its own support. As a side note, it would be interesting to considered this example in light of Levinas’ ethics of the face. How does ideology defeat ethics? How does the frame efface the face?

“The answer is, of course, no. If everyday experience offers such a resist­ance, then the anti-Semitic ideology has not yet really grasped us. An ideology is really ‘holding us’ only when we do not feel any opposition between it and reality — that is, when the ideology succeeds in determining the mode of our everyday experience of reality itself. How then would our poor German, if he were a good anti-Semite, react to this gap between the ideological figure of the Jew (schemer, wire-puller, exploiting our brave men and so on) and the common everyday experience of his good neigh­bour, Mr Stern? His answer would be to turn this gap, this discrepancy itself, into an argument for anti-Semitism: ‘You see how dangerous they really are? It is difficult to recognize their real 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.’ An ideology really succeeds when even the facts which at first sight contradict it start to function as arguments in its favour.” (pp. 49–50) An ideology has truly taken hold when it has erased the difference between itself and objective reality. Ideology is only truly functioning when reality is reduced to it — when it “is” reality. Ideology determines our everyday experience. This Marxist (Žižekian) insight is of importance to the phenomenologist.

Surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment

The connection between surplus value (Marx) and surplus-jouissance (Lacan) is very important to understand, since this conjunction is one of the essential points at which Žižek marries Lacanian psychoanalysis to Marxism (ideology critique). Also, it is in this section that we circle back around to the topic of the early sections: the symptom.

“Herein lies the difference from Marxism: in the predominant Marxist perspective the ideological gaze is a partial gaze overlooking the totality of social relations, whereas in the Lacanian perspective ideology rather designates a totality set on effacing the traces of its own impossibility. This difference corresponds to the one which distinguishes the Freudian from the Marxian notion of fetishism: in Marxism a fetish conceals the positive network of social relations, whereas in Freud a fetish conceals the lack (‘castration’) around which the symbolic network is articulated.”(p. 50) Here we get the crucial difference between Marxian definitions of ideology and fetishism and Freudian-Lacanian definitions of ideology and fetishism (Žižek holds closer to the latter). For Marx, a fetish always conceals a presence (e.g., social relations), but, for Freud, a fetish always conceals an absence (lack/castration). Both the Marxist and psychoanalytic concepts of ideology are fundamentally derived from there respective concepts of fetishism. The Marxist concept of ideology sees it as a limited or “partial” perspective on the Symbolic, whereas the psychoanalytic take on it sees it as an attempt to convince us that the big Other actually exists, that is, “a totality set on effacing the traces of its own impossibility”. (Perhaps we could argue that the Freudian-Lacanian definition involves a Baudrillardian simulation.) Every Symbolic order or big Other is subject to inconsistencies, contradictions, symptoms, gaps, blindspots, lacks, etc., but ideologies try to conceal this fact and present themselves as the big Other. Of course, Lacan famously said, “the big Other does not exist”, which, in this context, means that ideology is always a liar. From the psychoanalytic view, ideology is fetishistic insofar as it tries to conceal the lack, incompleteness, negativity, Real, etc., around which it functions (especially the groundlessness, voided core or lack of substance of the Law in its Real dimension). The big Other itself is castrated but attempts to fetishistically conceal its own lack via ideological fantasy and fetishism. Now, I don’t think that Žižek is altogether dismissing or rejecting the Marxist insights concerning ideology and fetishism, but I do think he finds the psychoanalytic ones to be of greater use and significance.

“In so far as we conceive the Real as that which ‘always returns to the same place’, we can deduce another, no less crucial difference. From the Marxist point of view, the ideological procedure par excellence is that of ‘false’ eternal­ization and/or universalization: a state which depends on a concrete historical conjunction appears as an eternal, universal feature of the human condition; the interest of a particular class disguises itself as universal human interest . . . and the aim of the ‘criticism of ideology’ is to denounce this false universality, to detect behind man in general the bourgeois individual; behind the universal rights of man the form which renders possible capitalist exploitation; behind the ‘nuclear family’ as a trans-historical constant the historically specified and limited form of kinship relations, and so on.” (p. 50) Here, Žižek touches on another important distinction between Marxist fetishism and Freudian-Lacanian fetishism, namely, that the latter involves the Real (a lack at the center of the Symbolic). This Real is important because it gives us an alternative way to proceed in our critique of ideology. The psychoanalytic notion of fetish allows us to analyze the “eternal” aspect of our social worlds, i.e., those horrifying and nightmarish parts of it that just continue to reappear and crop up again and again (repetition). Remember that analysands often repeat traumas that evade Symbolic capture. This is what it means to say that the Real always returns to the same place. Despite the differences between capitalist, fascist and “communist” societies, they have all had concentration camps of one kind or another. There is some “eternal” and traumatic aspect of industrial (modern) society in general that breaks through time and time again (repeats itself or “returns to the same place). This repressed, unconscious structure forms the ahistorical or eternal basis of our social orders. Is this not a type of symptom of sorts? Is not the concentration camp a symptom of modern industrial society? Or, instead, should I say sinthome? Anyway, the point is that Marxist critique attempts to show how a so-called universal or eternal feature of the social world is really a particular and historical one, whereas the psychoanalytic critique will attempt to get at the true “universal” and “eternal” feature — the feature of the Real. Now, do we ever encounter false eternalization and universalization? Absolutely! And ideology critique can very well set its sights on de-fetishizing these instances (show their historical determination), but Žižek’s point is that ideology critique must be able to do something else as well. Again, this is how he’s connecting Marxism (ideology critique) to psychoanalysis: on the one hand, psychoanalytic ideas are relevant outside the clinical setting, and on the other, every analysand is an ideological subject and an analyst must take this broader context into consideration. He explains below.

“In the Lacanian perspective, we should change the terms and designate as the most ‘cunning’ ideological procedure the very opposite of externalization: an over-rapid historicization. Let us take one of the common­ places of the Marxist-feminist criticism of psychoanalysis, the idea that its insistence on the crucial role of the Oedipus complex and the nuclear­ family triangle transforms a historically conditioned form of patriarchal family into a feature of the universal human condition: is not this effort to historicize the family triangle precisely an attempt to elude the ‘hard kernel’ which announces itself through the ‘patriarchal family’ — the Real of the Law, the rock of castration? In other words, if over-rapid universal­ization produces a quasi-universal Image whose function is to make us blind to its historical, socio-symbolic determination, over-rapid historicization makes us blind to the real kernel which returns as the same through diverse historicizations/symbolizations.” (pp. 50–1) Žižek explains how reversing the standard Marxist approach to ideology critique would work. The most important procedure of ideology critique, from a Lacanian perspective, is to locate the hard kernel of the Real in society (ideology) that just goes on repeating itself. Oedipus (the nuclear family) is just one example of this type of repetitious universality we find in society. Žižek seems to be saying that Oedipus is not reducible to some historical configuration that falsely (ideologically) took on the guise of eternal university, but, rather, involves a certain (hidden) structure, i.e., Law/Symbolic castration, that makes itself felt across all times and places. Where there’s Law, there’s Oedipus — which means every society (social order ordered by Law) is Oedipal. Is Žižek essentially saying that there is no real escape from Oedipalization? Is this implicitly directed at Deleuze and Guattari? It’s true that Lacan was anti-Oedipus in a sense insofar as he replaced Freud’s mythico-literal concept of it with a structuralist one, but this doesn’t mean he flat rejected it or thought that we could escape Oedipus once and for all.

“It is the same with a phenomenon that designates most accurately the ‘perverse’ obverse of twentieth-century civilization: concentration camps. All the different attempts to attach this phenomenon to a concrete image (‘Holocaust’, ‘Gulag’ . . . ), to reduce it to a product of a concrete social order (Fascism, Stalinism . . . ) — what are they if not so many attempts to elude the fact that we are dealing here with the ‘real’ of our civilization which returns as the same traumatic kernel in all social systems? (We should not forget that concentration camps were an invention of ‘liberal’ England, dating from the Boer War; that they were also used in the US to isolate the Japanese population, and so on.)” (p. 51) Now we get to the great example of the concentration camp. All three of the 20th century’s main ideological systems (capitalism, “communism”, fascism) used concentration camps at one time or another. This thought should melt our heads. The concentration camp is the symptom of industrial society. The concentration camp is the logical end of every society rooted in instrumental rationality.

“Marxism, then, did not succeed in taking into account, coming to terms with, the surplus-object, the leftover of the Real eluding symbolization — a fact all the more surprising if we recall that Lacan modelled his notion of surplus-enjoyment on the Marxian notion of surplus-value. The proof that Marxian surplus-value announces effectively the logic of the Lacanian objet petit a as the embodiment of surplus-enjoyment is already provided by the decisive formula used by Marx, in the third volume of Capital, to designate the logical-historical limit of capitalism: ‘the limit of capital is capital itself, i.e. the capitalist mode of production’.” (p. 51) So given the examples of Oedipus and the concentration camp, we can say that Marxism and its concept of ideology critique fail to take into account the absence at the heart of the Symbolic, i.e., the Real, trauma, objet petit a, leftover, surplus-object, eternal-universal structure, etc. In other words, in trying to show how some “universal” feature of the Symbolic is merely the byproduct of a certain set of historical relations, Marxism fails to perceive the hard kernel of the Real that perturbs, subsists and shapes the Symbolic itself. There is a determining factor of the Symbolic that is not reducible to it — just like how there is a certain repressed, unintelligible, unconscious aspect of our individual subjectivities that supports and largely determines our conscious, egoic sense of self. For both the individual and society, there are determining factors that remain imperceivable and outside of egoic consciousness. It’s bizarre that the Marxists failed to realize this in light of the fact that Lacan based his concept of objet petit a (surplus jouissance) on Marx’s concept of surplus-value. The idea of objet petit a as surplus jouissance is nicely articulated in Marx’s formulation of the limit of capital: “the limit of capital is capital itself, i.e. the capitalist mode of production”. But what is meant by the limit of capital? In what way is capital its own limit?

“This formula can be read in two ways. The first, usual historicist­ evolutionist reading conceives it, in accordance with the unfortunate paradigm of the dialectics of productive forces and relations of production, as that of ‘content’ and ‘form’. This paradigm follows roughly the metaphor of the serpent which, from time to time, sheds its skin, which has grown too tight: one posits as the last impetus of social development — as its (so to speak) ‘natural’, ‘spontaneous’ constant — the incessant growth of the productive forces (as a rule reduced to technical development); this ‘spon­taneous’ growth is then followed, with a greater or lesser degree of delay, by the inert, dependent moment, the relationship of production. We have thus epochs in which the relations of production are in accordance with the productive forces, then those forces develop and outgrow their ‘social clothes’, the frame of relationships; this frame becomes an obstacle to their further development, until social revolution again co-ordinates forces and relations by replacing the old relations with new ones which correspond to the new state of forces.” (pp. 51–2) There are two ways Marx’s formulation of the limit of capital can be read. The first one is the historicist-evolutionist interpretation, which is the one Žižek rejects. This interpretation is rooted in an idea Marx himself presented in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy. However, the second interpretation (the Lacanian one), as we’ll see, is consistent with other ideas in Marx’s work, which means both readings are in line with things Marx said but are nevertheless contradictory and incompatible — there is a contradiction in Marx’s thought. The first reading takes Marx’s dialectic of productive forces and relations of production as its interpretative frame. This dialectic rests on the relation between content (forces of production) and form (relations of production) — in other words, there are workers and technologies/machines (forces of production/content) and the social dynamics (relations of production/form) in which they belong. In structuralist terms, the forces of production are the elements and the relations of production are the structure which differentially determines the identities of the elements. The idea here is that the growth and development of productive forces (content) negate their relations of production (form) and give rise to a new set of social relations (that is, a new Symbolic order). This is a mechanism of social revolution. Throughout history, forces and relations have had long periods of compatibility, correlation, accordance, equilibrium, etc., but sooner or later, their relation becomes strained by the growth and development of the forces of production, which dialectically negate their frame or container (relations of productions). It’s like trying to wear clothes you have outgrown — you rip them. The only way for the forces of production to continue to develop is to break out of their old relations of production and get new ones. According to this historicist-evolutionist reading of Marx, the real-actual-material-technological change (development of productive forces) precedes the formal change (revolution in relations of production). However, Žižek points out directly below that Marx himself said the opposite in Capital.

“If we conceive the formula of capital as its own limit from this point of view, it means simply that the capitalist relation of production which at first made possible the fast development of productive forces became at a certain point an obstacle to their further development: that these forces have outgrown their frame and demand a new form of social relations.” (p. 52) The first interpretation of Marx’s formula of the limit of capital, therefore, holds that the capitalist relations of production is the limit of capital. Žižek thinks this greatly distorts the true limit of capital, since capitalism does not work like former modes of production. So how should we read Marx’s formula?

“Marx himself is of course far from such a simplistic evolutionary idea. If we need convincing of this, we have only to look at the passages in Capital where he deals with the relation between formal and real subsumption of the process of production under Capital: the formal subsumption precedes the real one; that is, Capital first subsumes the process of production as it found it (artisans, and so on), and only subsequently does it change the productive forces step by step, shaping them in such a way as to create correspondence. Contrary to the above-mentioned simplistic idea, it is then the form of the relation of production which drives the development of productive forces — that is, of its ‘content’.” (p. 52) Marx’s understanding of the dialectic of forces and relations is, therefore, the opposite of the evolutionary one, since the former holds that form is the dominant category whereas the latter holds that content is.

“All we have to do to render impossible the simplistic evolutionary reading of the formula ‘the limit of capital is capital itself’ is to ask a very simple and obvious question: how do we define, exactly, the moment — albeit only an ideal one — at which the capitalist relation of production becomes an obstacle to the further development of the productive forces? Or the obverse of the same question: when can we speak of an accordance between productive forces and relation of production in the capitalist mode of production? Strict analysis leads to only one possible answer: never.” (p. 52–3) We can forget about the evolutionist reading of Marx’s formula. Why? Because the moment at which the capitalist relations of production come to hinder the development of productive forces is a moment that never comes. Also, speaking from the opposite side of the dialectic, there is never a period of compatible equilibrium between forces and relations in the capitalist mode of production. Capital(ism) is in a permanent state of a revolutionary discord between forces/relations.

“This is exactly how capitalism differs from other, previous modes of production: in the latter, we can speak of periods of ‘accordance’ when the process of social production and reproduction goes on as a quiet, circular movement, and of periods of convulsion when the contradiction between forces and relations aggravates itself; whereas in capitalism this contradiction, the discord forces/relations, is contained in its very concept (in the form of the contradiction between the social mode of production and the individual, private mode of appropriation). It is this internal contradiction which compels capitalism to permanent extended reproduction — to the incessant development of its own conditions of production, in contrast to previous modes of production where, at least in their ‘normal’ state, (re)production goes on as a circular movement.” (p. 53) Capitalism is always modifying its form, e.g., the transition from industrialism (factory) to consumerism (mall) to digitalism (internet). The contradiction spoken of has to do with how our social system of production (capitalist relations of production) stand directly at odds with individual appropriation (the interests, needs, desires and wellbeing of the productive forces). There is a fundamental tension between capitalism’s relations and forces, which is why the proletariat is said to be the symptom of capitalism — the empirical manifestation of a hidden (unconscious, structural, formal) deadlock, tension or contradiction.

“If this is so, then the evolutionist reading of the formula of capital as its own limit is inadequate: the point is not that, at a certain moment of its development, the frame of the relation of production starts to constrict further development of the productive forces; the point is that it is this very immanent limit, this ‘internal contradiction which drives capitalism into permanent development. The ‘normal’ state of capitalism is the permanent revolutionizing of its own conditions of existence: from the very beginning capitalism ‘putrefies’, it is branded by a crippling contradiction, discord, by an immanent want of balance: this is exactly why it changes, develops incessantly — incessant development is the only way for it to resolve again and again, come to terms with, its own fundamental, constitutive imbalance, ‘contradiction’. Far from constricting, its limit is thus the very impetus of its development. Herein lies the paradox proper to capitalism, its last resort: capitalism is capable of transforming its limit, its very impotence, in the source of its power — the more it ‘putrefies’, the more its immanent contradiction is aggravated, the more it must revolutionize itself to survive.” (pp. 53–4) The limit of capital is its internal and structural contradiction between forces and relations, but this tension is precisely what drives capital onwards, that is, the internal limit is precisely what keeps capital going and not what destroys it. This limit is what drives capital into constantly revolutionizing itself, which is what insures its survival. Capitalism’s “normal” state or default setting is permanent development of its structure, i.e., conditions of existence. To continuously reproduce itself, capitalism must continuously revolutionize itself. It is its disequilibrium, lack of balance, instability, that preserves capital. It is the lack or absence (Real) at the core of the capitalist Symbolic that keeps it functioning. This internal contradiction functions like objet petit a insofar as the latter is the limit of subjectivity that insures its ongoing existence. How so? If we actually got objet petit a (which we can’t) it would destroy subjectivity, it is a true limit, but it’s a limit we never reach. It is the limit we are always moving towards without ever reaching (the proverbial donkey’s carrot). Subjectivity functions and develops only in moving towards a limit that it will never reach. In this sense, objet petit a is a tension or contradiction — it is that which sustains subjectivity by making it impossible (impossible in the sense of living in total satisfaction and completeness). We change and develop due to how objet petit a motivates desire to pursue new things in its metonymic movements. Objet petit a is the impossible object (contradiction, surplus, leftover, Real) that makes possible the subject. Again, Žižek is likening the limit of capitalist society (surplus-value) to the limit of individual subjectivity (surplus jouissance/objet petit a). At the heart of the subject and society, there is a structural lack that makes them possible (the lack is an x which cannot be integrated).

“It is this paradox which defines surplus-enjoyment: it is not a surplus which simply attaches itself to some ‘normal’, fundamental enjoyment, because enjoyment as such emerges only in this surplus, because it is constitu­tively an ‘excess’. If we subtract the surplus we lose enjoyment itself, just as capitalism, which can survive only by incessantly revolutionizing its own material conditions, ceases to exist if it ‘stays the same’, if it achieves an internal balance. This, then, is the homology between surplus-value — ­ the ‘cause’ which sets in motion the capitalist process of production — and surplus-enjoyment, the object-cause of desire. Is not the paradoxical topology of the movement of capital, the fundamental blockage which resolves and reproduces itself through frenetic activity, excessive power as the very form of appearance of a fundamental impotence — this immediate passage, this coincidence of limit and excess, of lack and surplus — precisely that of the Lacanian objet petit a, of the leftover which embodies the fundamental, constitutive lack?” (p. 54) There is a structural homology between surplus-value (internal contradiction) and surplus jouissance (objet petit a) — both are the causes of motion (social and individual “motion”). Capitalism moves because it fundamentally lacks (lacks equilibrium in the relation between relations and forces) and subjectivity moves because it lacks (lacks the remainder of jouissance it sacrificed on the alter of the Symbolic).

“All this, of course, Marx ‘knows very well . . . and yet’: and yet, in the crucial formulation in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, he proceeds as if he does not know it, by describing the very passage from capitalism to socialism in terms of the above-mentioned vulgar evolu­tionist dialectics of productive forces and the relations of production: when the forces surpass a certain degree, capitalist relations become an obstacle to their further development: this discord brings about the need for social­ist revolution, the function of which is to co-ordinate again forces and relations; that is, to establish relations of production rendering possible the intensified development of the productive forces as the end-in-itself of the historical process.” (p. 54) However, Marx acted as if he did not know that the evolutionist reading of his formula is bullshit. This is basically Marx’s fetishist disavowal: “I know very well that the evolutionist reading of my formula is wrong, but nonetheless I’m going to espouse it anyway — it is the road to socialism”.

“How can we not detect in this formulation the fact that Marx failed to cope with the paradoxes of surplus-enjoyment? And the ironic vengeance of history for this failure is that today there exists a society which seems to correspond perfectly to this vulgar evolutionary dialectics of forces and relations: ‘real socialism’, a society which legitimizes itself by reference to Marx. Is it not already a commonplace to assert that ‘real socialism’ rendered possible rapid industrialization, but that as soon as the productive forces reached a certain level of development (usually designated by the vague term ‘post-industrial society’), ‘real socialist’ social relationships began to constrict their further growth?” (pp. 54–5) Perhaps we could say that “real socialism” is the symptom of Marxism. It’s as if real socialism is the empirical manifestation of some repressed deadlock in Marxism (failure to fully clarify the true nature of the relation between productive forces and relations of production). Nevertheless, Žižek thinks that one of Marx’s main problems was the failure to properly think through the paradoxes of surplus jouissance (the logic of objet petit a). But what are these paradoxes exactly? It would have been nice if he had elaborated on them. I take it that Žižek is saying that Lacanian psychoanalysis can really help us rethink Marxism and make it even stronger.