'Che vuoi?' / 'what do you want?'.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Sharpe, Matthew
• Date: 01 January 2001

The Question of the Subject, the Question of Zizek

... for whosoever shall take upon him to choose and alter, usurps the authority of judging, and should look well about him, and make it his business to discern clearly the defect of what he would abolish, and the virtue of what he is about to introduce. Michel de Montaigne, Of Custom. (1) The conclusion of Rear Window involves a typically Hitchcockian reversal of a cinema staple. Usually, in 'horror' or 'suspense' films, the final scene involves a terrified and confused victim fleeing before a callously single-minded aggressor. (Think, for example, of Silence of the Lambs.) In Rear Window, however, the murderer approaches the crippled 'hero' (Jimmy Stewart) in a different manner. As intent as he is on cornering Stewart, the murderer is also discernibly confused as to who this man is whose voyeurism has 'caught him in the act'. As he approaches Stewart, he repeatedly mouths variants on one question: 'What do you want from me?' It is almost as much to allay the force of this question as to halt the murderer's physical approach, that Stewart flashes the blinding light in his assailant's eyes. It is almost as much out of frustration at Stewart's failure to respond to his queries as to quiet Stewart who 'knows too much', that the murderer grapples with him fatefully at the edge of the window.

I mention this cinematic moment because the murderer's question to Stewart ('What do you want?') is what Slavoj Zizek argues is the question of the subject. As Zizek specifies in Plague of Fantasies, when the child is confronted by its first Others, s/he knows that s/he represents something for them. However, what s/ he represents is opaque to him/her. Zizek stresses here that any lasting identity s/he does take on 'in' or vis-a-vis this discourse is, then, minimally groundless. In taking on an identity, we are resolving a more primordial deadlock: the deadlock of not knowing what Others want from us. The reason for this is that the 'transferential' mechanism involved in this assumption of identity involves our 'primordially repressing' its contingent foundation. The operative illusion is that whatever identity we have taken on must be grounded in some-'thing' we always already embodied, and which the Others have now recognized. (2)

Importantly, this 'thing' which Zizek takes to ground our inscription into the social world is what he terms the 'sublime object of ideology'. This 'sublime object' is the subject's answer to the 'che vuoi?' question that emanates from its Others. However, as such an answer, it also serves to veil the minimal inconsistency of the inter-subjective order into which we have been thrown. The 'trick' of identifying with this object, Zizek explains 'consists ... in what speech-act theorists would call its "pragmatic presupposition"'. By proffering an answer to the desire of the Others, we presuppose the existence of a single collective of these Others ('the big Other') whose equally singular desire could be known and responded to. (3)

And this is why Lacanian theory can be politically subversive, Zizek claims. Hegemonic ideologies are ultimately there to 'fit' individuals into places within the preponderant social order. But the key thing about this is that the effect of unshakeable authority that ideologies generate for their subjects is transferential. It veils how the system that the ideology justifies is always minimally divided. Like all symbolic systems, Zizek argues, ideologies can never (a priori) explain their own origins without committing a petitio principii. If one undertakes within a given language to explain the origin of that language, one performatively presupposes what one had hoped to explain. (4) But so it is, mutatis mutandis, with every body of instituted Law, Zizek claims. Such a corpus of Law can only ever have been set in place by a gesture which itself would have 'transgressed' the laws its enactment has set in place. (5) Zizek's work, as a latter-day 'ideology critique', makes the following arguments.

First, a social order is always founded on certain key ideologies. These ideologies structure, and are reproduced in, institutions and social practices. They always hinge on key narrativizations that serve to occlude the fundamental antagonisms of the socio-symbolic order. These are classically marxist notions. But, and this is the second argument, as a Lacanian marxist, Zizek argues that what is ultimately repressed by ideologies is how the hegemonic order was founded on an 'excessive' gesture. The most telling example that springs to my mind in the Australian context is how 'white Australia' was founded upon symbolic and literal violence towards the indigenous peoples.

Third, what Zizek calls a 'properly dialectical analysis' of ideology is one that uncovers how the hermeneutic circle of a hegemonic regime is never closed. Critical theory must 'go through the fantasy' generated by its key ideologies, Zizek claims. (In our example, the fantasy would be that Australia was a terra nullius onto which our constitutional democracy was liberally painted.) This process of 'going through' the fantasy not only attempts to 'factually' refute what the ideologies' narratives describe. It looks at how these stories function (and what they occlude) within the contemporary political scene. In 'traversing' the fantasy, we are concerned with who we are now.

Fourth, the political correlative of this theoretical 'traversal of the fantasy' is thus a political act. This act involves a suspension of its agents' commitment to the predominant ideology's 'terms and conditions'. In it, we as it were 'repeat' and undo the act wherein we took on our identity in the current system. The act's intervention creates the 'terms and conditions' that will serve to justify it retroactively. This is why such an act always appears from within the preponderant system as 'diabolically evil'. (6)

Fifth, and vitally, the Zizekian act thereby actuates a radical political responsibility. In it, we answer for ourselves, without leaning on any pre-existent Other. This responsibility, for Zizek, corresponds to the post-metaphysical subject first systematically uncovered in German idealism as a necessary condition for the founding of any symbolic edifice. It is 'the abyss of freedom' Zizek discerns in the second draft of Schelling's Ages of the World. (7)

These five tenets of what Zizek wants, at least, are clear. As in Rear Window, where the result of Stewart's struggle with the murderer is his falling into the space he had previously only looked at, the end of Zizek's critique is to make us cease presupposing a consistent and untouchable social order. The point, for Zizek, is that we should stop striving to answer the question of 'What does It (the big Other) want from me?' True political subjectivity instead actively assumes the non-existence of this Other by acting without its sanction. In acting in this way we throw the question back to those who support the current regime, unsettling their cynical complacency.

And such a 'throwing back' of the question is what I wish to do in this article. I want to ask of Zizek what Zizek says is the question of the subject per se: 'Che vuoi?': 'What do you want?', or: 'Why are you saying what you are saying?' There are three parts. Part I looks at Zizek's political zeitdiagnose. If his paradigm for action is 'going through the fantasy' of a hegemonic order, I ask what is the 'ideological fantasy' he thinks underlies western society today? Part II asks if this zeitdiagnose is adequate, and, if not, can we trace its inadequacy to a systemic limitation in Zizek's social theory? Part III then suggests that the failures of Zizek's marxism reflect a lasting philosophical impasse in his work. The fact that he has recently begun talking the language of 'a politics of impossibility', I suggest, is not surprising. But it is old hat that politics is the 'art of the possible'.

Part I: The Ideology of Multinational Capitalism

Zizek's theory has always been a response to events and transformations in today's world. The fact that he brings Marx to Lacan from the first chapter of The Sublime Object of Ideology is deeply telling. A critique of the classical marxist critique of 'ideology', this chapter is also a critique of the argument that we live in a post-ideological era. Today, Zizek says, we all know that the relationship of 'free trade' to the other liberal freedoms is a tenuous one. Yet, we continue to act like we didn't know. The 'illusion' here, then, is not at the level of 'false consciousness'. This much Zizek concedes to the 'end of ideology' theorists. But, for him, this fact does not show that there is no illusion. It is just that today's ideology does not operate primarily at the level of what we consciously think. It targets a deeper level of beliefs. This level of beliefs is unconscious, and like the Lacanian unconscious, it manifests where we least expect it--on the 'other scene' of the apparently trivial aspects of our lives. Zizek's primary Marxian example is the fetishization of commodities in the act of trade. To adopt Lacanian terminology, ideology today only operates as disavowed. (8)

But what, precisely, in Zizek's reckoning, is the content of the ideology that we disavow today? In the final chapter of Ticklish Subject, Zizek says that 'the depoliticised economy is the disavowed "fundamental fantasy" of postmodern politics'. (9) Today's '... predominant form of ideological "closure"', he claims, '... takes the ... form of a mental block which prevents us from imagining a fundamental social change, in the interests of an allegedly "realistic" and "mature" attitude'. (10) Thus what today's much-vaunted 'third way' signifies is simply the disappearance of the possibility of the second way, which would involve a 'repoliticisation of the economy'. (11)

His theory aims to open up the possibility of such a...