Zizek, materialism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat

It is hard to imagine the last ten years without Slovoj Zizek on the intellectual/ political scene — or should I say it would be painful to imagine his absence. In a flood of books and shorter pieces he has torn up the landscape — in a productive way and with a deeply serious purpose, as I see it.

Following is a review-essay on two of his most recent bigger books, The Parallax View (2006) and In Defense of Lost Causes (2008), as well as The Truth of Žižek, edited by Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp, and The Lacanian Left, by Yannis Stavrakaksis.

This essay originally appeared in Theory and Event in 2009. Jodi Dean is the author of Zizek’s Politics and blogs at the always interesting I cite.

The idealist views situations as open from the standpoint of participants but closed from the totalizing standpoint of God and eternity. In contrast, the materialist knows that “openness” has no closure – it can never be totalized …. Historical necessity appears retroactively, generated in the contingent process of its becoming. The Act or Event is possible insofar as we determine what determines us. Ontological nonclosure enables acts.

Again and Again and Again: Real Materialism

Jodi Dean

In 2006, Slavoj Žižek’s self-described magnum opus, The Parallax View, appeared. Two years later, he has come out with the equally formidable In Defense of Lost Causes. Both books deploy Žižek’s characteristically wideranging style, a demanding engagement with an array of philosophical problems, texts, and interlocuters combined with entertaining detours through literary, cinematic, musical, popular, and sub-cultures such as necrophiliacs and the Amish (I touch on only a narrow range of Žižek’s themes in this essay). Both books continue to develop Žižek’s unique Hegelian-Lacanian version of psychoanalytic Marxism, an approach that established his reputation among English-language readers as a comprehensive upgrade of ideology critique. Both deepen and extend the theory of ideology elaborated in The Sublime Object of Ideology and For They Know Not What They Do into a compelling— and refreshing—vision of a materialist Messianic politics of universal emancipation. The Parallax View reconceives dialectical materialism. In Defense of Lost Causes argues for a new approach to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Together they contribute to a materialist philosophy meant to shatter the partial and accommodating acquiescence to capitalism and liberal democracy that has taken the place of left political theory.

Dialectical Materialism Redux

The Parallax View formats Žižek’s previous insights into the work of negativity, antagonism, and the Lacanian Real in terms of the notion of a parallax gap, an idea Žižek takes from Kojin Karatani’s Transcritique. The parallax gap designates the irreducible gap between two perspectives. (To see it in action, extend your arm in front of you. Raise your index finger. Close one eye then the other. Your finger will shimmy in front of you, seemingly moving from one spot to another. Which position is its true or real one? The gap.) Karatani employs the idea of a parallax gap to defend Kant against Hegel: antinomies go all the way down. Reconciliation, mediation, and overcoming difference are impossible.

Žižek accepts the claim for an irreducible and insurmountable gap. Yet he disagrees with Karatani’s anti-Hegelian conclusion. For Žižek, the key Hegelian move is not the reconciliation of opposites but their assertion as such, an assertion that literalizes the shift in perspective itself: “‘reality’ itself is caught in the movement of our knowing it” (28). What this means for materialism is that reality is non-All (a term from Lacan); it contains the stain or blindspot of my inclusion it. So it isn’t simply that I am part of material reality, as if there were a god or history capable of grasping all reality; rather, there is always the twist of my inclusion in the reality I constitute.

Žižek uses the parallax gap both to explore Hegelian concrete universality and to revise some key Lacanian categories. Concrete universality does not refer to a universal core or essence animating its particular forms of appearance. Rather, concrete universality persists in the unsurpassable gaps between these forms, in their noncoincidence and struggle. The Universal, then, “names the site of a Problem-Deadlock, of a burning Question, and the Particulars are attempted but failed Answers to this problem” (35). For example, the concept of the State names the problem of how to contain the antagonism that underlies and generates society. Particular states are particular solutions. Christianity likewise names a struggling universality, one formulated from the position of the excluded which thereby splits substantial identities.

Turning to Lacan, Žižek argues for a “parallax Real.” The standard reading of the Lacanian Real is as that which “always returns to its place,” that which stays the same underneath all its symbolic appearances. Žižek rejects this substantialized account of the Real to view it instead as the gap between appearances, the shift between perspectives, or the non-existent X that is retroactively reconstructed out of the multiplicity of appearances. Consequently, the Lacanian objet petit a (a Lacanian term for that which is in the subject more than himself, the object-cause of desire, surplus enjoyment, or the excess that stains a pure form) is rendered as a “pure parallax object” or “difference itself as an object,” the special indescribable “something” that makes an object itself by making it more than itself. The shift from desire to drive should also be understood as parallactic: the enjoyment one desires but cannot reach becomes the enjoyment that accompanies repeated failure (for example, the attempt to shield oneself from sexual temptation incites sexual feeling; the more one tries not to think about sex, the more one is sexually stimulated).

The reworking of Hegelian and Lacanian categories through the idea of parallax is a key component of the first of The Parallax View’s three major sections (the book also includes two “interludes,” one on Henry James, the other on the contemporary European debate over anti-semitism). This first section develops a “minimal ontology of parallax.” The second takes up the parallax in brain science, the gap between self-consciousness and the biophysical reality of brains. The third focuses on politics and the parallax formerly known as class struggle. To reiterate, the point of theorizing the gap is not to overcome it but to use it to reinvigorate dialectical materialism: how can the miracle of the event in excess of its cause be thought in a materialist way? How is the gap between thought and being (the negativity of thought as a subtraction or withdrawal from the manifold of being) possible? How might we conceive such gaps in their becoming?

Donald Rumsfeld can serve as an unwitting guide to Žižek’s materialism: “I would not say the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started.”1  Žižek presents Hegelian dialectics as reintroducing “the openness of the future into the past,” and so to grasp “that-which-was in its process of becoming” (78, italics in original). Dialectical materialism, then, restores potentiality to actuality. Žižek illustrates his point with the observation as to how people in the middle of a situation perceive themselves as doing what they have to do. Rather than discerning multiple choices and possibilities, they experience themselves as caught, as reacting. Alternatives, possibilities, are apparent only after the fact. Freedom, then, involves the retroactive choice of one’s determinations.

For Žižek, this retroactive discernment is one of the key differences between idealism and materialism. The idealist views situations as open from the standpoint of participants but closed from the totalizing standpoint of God and eternity. In contrast, the materialist knows that “openness” has no closure – it can never be totalized. Žižek writes: “necessity is not the underlying universal law that secretly regulates the chaotic interplay of appearances—it is the “All” itself which is non-All, inconsistent, marked by an irreducible contingency” (79; Žižek also explains this point in his response in The Truth of Žižek, reiterating that his basic claim involves the link between ontological incompleteness and materialism, 219). Historical necessity appears retroactively, generated in the contingent process of its becoming. The Act or Event is possible insofar as we determine what determines us. Ontological nonclosure enables acts.

The idealist views agents as making history, as choosing what happens. But what about the materialist? Is her only option the Nietzschean one of affirming the non-All of becoming, openness, and uncertainty? Faced with ontological-nonclosure, should the materialist work on herself to embrace contingency and becoming, even if she experiences her choices as compelled by her situation? Žižek says no. Direct affirmation of openness and becoming proceeds too quickly and so fails to acknowledge a gap in becoming. This gap is the deadlock which propels becoming as a process. For Žižek, the Nietzschean option of affirmation moves directly from the rejection of the determinate meanings imposed upon us to an embrace of the meaningless process of becoming. Such a jump to direct affirmation of the meaninglessness of becoming, though, leaves out a crucial theoretical step, that of acknowledging pure meaning or meaning itself as an empty form. Kierkegaard’s concept of “infinite resignation” and Lacan’s treatment of the Versagung, the radical renunciation at the core of being, are both versions of this crucial theoretical step. Žižek identifies this pure, empty form of meaning as a void, meaning’s absence. It can only appear as nonsense or as the minimal difference between meaning’s presence and absence. A line from J.G. Ballard’s Millennium People, a novel of middle class terrorism, refusal, and violence, tags the idea: “A pointless act has a special meaning of its own. Calmly carried out, untouched by any emotions, a meaningless act is an empty space larger than the universe around it.”2

Žižek considers the void as correlative to an excessive protuberance, objet petit a as the excess of the Real (the topology here can be imagined as like a giant sink hole in the middle of road; as folks try to avoid it, it shapes their behavior, interactions, patterns). It’s both the hole around which drive circulates and a disgusting, immortal, undead thing (the Lacanian lamella or the libido as an object). Žižek emphasizes that the Freudian death drive has nothing to do with a thrust toward self-destruction. “The ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis,” he explains, “is that human life is never ‘just life’: humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things” (62). Death drive, then, designates the opposite of death, a kind of immortality, the inhuman at the core of the human. Death drive is the excess of life, a persistence beyond life and death, a stuckness or fixation that introduces a radical imbalance into the continuity in which we are embedded. To my mind, a potential benefit of this immortal, undead materialism is its capacity to serve as an alternative to a biopolitics of bare life.

Death drive provides the concept missing in cognitivist science, the “closed loop of self-relating” constitutive of consciousness where brain science gets stuck. Fully aware that developments in brain science seem to render psychoanalysis obsolete, Žižek works to locate a tension or silence in work on consciousness where psychoanalysis might usefully fit. He argues that — rather than bridging the gap between the humanities and cognitivism — the proper task is formulating this gap as such, noting and clarifying the ways that consciousness misperceives itself, nature, and its place in nature. This is where psychoanalytic concepts like death drive can be helpful.

Influenced by Catherine Malaboux’s Hegelian reading of recent developments in neuroscience, Žižek takes up the way that we make our own brains. He notes how neural self-relating designates that point where neural activity “generates its own ‘object,’ the focal point around which its activity circulates” (213). There is no subject prior to the activity of self-relating; subject and object emerge together, two sides of a Moebius strip. The object is conceived in the mode of being, the subject in the mode of becoming. There is thus an irreducible gap between them. Expressed in Lacanese: the object that is the subject is objet petit a.

In the course of his discussion of the parallax gap in science, Žižek engages, among others, Antonio Damasio, Thomas Metzinger, Francisco Varela, and Joseph LeDoux. He notes, for example, the gap between the Freudian unconscious and the notion of the unconscious employed by LeDoux and Damasio. For them, the unconscious is a “thick impenetrable background of emotional texture” (229). Emotions are humans’ spontaneous reactions. In contrast, Freud views intense feelings as a mask; spontaneous emotions have nothing to do with the unconscious. Furthermore, insofar as Damasio considers self-regulation in terms of simple homeostasis wherein pleasure and pain are indications of sustenance or threat, he can neither account for the ways that pain itself can provide pleasure nor get “beyond the pleasure principle.” This omission limits Damasio’s usefulness in accounting for racism: racist hatred and disgust may arise as a displacement from another traumatic experience (fear, helplessness), and it may combine with forms of fascination, envy, and perverse pleasure. More fundamentally, Žižek argues, Damasio misses the “anti-Darwinian” lesson of psychoanalysis: humans are radically mal-adapted to their environs. “Death drive” names this rupture. Žižek writes: “the ‘death drive’ as a self-sabotaging structure represents the minimum of freedom, of a behavior uncoupled from the utilitarian-survivalist attitude. The ‘death drive’ means that the organism is no longer fully determined by its environs, that it ‘explodes/implodes’ in a cycle of autonomous behavior” (231).

On his way to (or in the course of) discussing the parallax gap in politics, Žižek takes up Heidegger, Badiou, the differences between fascism and Stalinism (particularly with respect to communism’s opening up of the space of utopian expectation), The Matrix, and jouissance as a political category.iii What comes through these discussions is the parallax gap between politics and economics, the way a focus on capitalist excess and self-revolutionizing does not easily translate into political terms of domination and regulation (law and its obscene supplement; the excess of representation over the represented). As Žižek puts it, “one either focuses on the political, and the domain of the economy is reduced to the empirical ‘servicing of goods,’ or one focuses on economy, and politics is reduced to a theater of appearances,” (56). So, yes, class struggle takes place at the heart of the economy, and, yes, the economy provides a key for discerning political struggle. The parallax gap between them means that we can never conceive them together from the same position. But this does not mean that we must reject one (the economic) in favor of the other (the political), as Badiou, Rancière, and Laclau contend. Thus, Žižek argues both that the economy is the key domain, where the spell of global capitalism must be broken, and that the fight is political, a fight against capitalism’s democratic form (as he emphasizes, contra Yannis Stavrakaksis, there is no direct connection between democracy and Lacanian psychoanalysis).

How then, does such a fight take place? Not, Žižek, argues through resistance. In this context, he argues against Simon Critchley’s endorsement of local actions at a distance from the state, an argument that continues across The Truth of Žižek, to which Critchley contributes a forward and Žižek a reply, and into In Defense of Lost Causes. In The Parallax View, Žižek argues that it’s better to do nothing at all than to undertake the little acts of participation that help smooth the running of things (as well as make one feel truly engaged). Little acts of resistance simply feed the machine of power. Žižek proposes “Bartleby politics” as an alternative to all this pseudo-activity. Bartleby politics entails a withdrawing from activity and a refusal to participate that open up the place for an act that will actually change the given constellation (in this way Bartleby politics is like infinite resignation or Versagung). For example, a withdrawal of participation can deprive power of its authorizing support, making it appear in all its violence and stupidity—one might think here of a teenager’s blank stare upon receiving an instruction or of a department chair’s frustration when faculty fail to answer email or show up for meetings. The subtraction involved in Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to,” then, is a kind of pure violence, the violence of the object that annoys, disturbs, and traumatizes the subject by its inert, insistent, presence. It’s a withdrawal that produces an empty space.

Such a politics of withdrawal, of doing nothing at all, could have disruptive effects (what if the president gave a press conference and nobody came?). But it could also make things easier for the bad guys, those, for example, dismantling public services, failing to oversee and regulate industry and agriculture, intent on bombing half the world into the Stone Age, etc. Accordingly, in subsequent work, Žižek supplements Bartleby politics with its other side, the side involved in constructing a new order.

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Referring to Walter Benjamin’s notion of revolution as redemption-through-repetition of the past, Žižek observes in The Parallax View that a “true Marxist historiography” involves not an attempt to describe events as they “really were,” but rather to “unearth the hidden potentialities (the utopian emancipatory potentials) which were betrayed in the actuality of revolution and in its final outcome” (78). He undertakes this task in In Defense of Lost Causes. The book recovers the traces of past revolutionary hopes in causes from Jacobinism to Maoism (inclusive of Heidegger’s Nazism as well as Foucault’s enthusiasm for the Iranian revolution). To be sure, much more is covered—from the imbrications of happiness and torture, to breakthroughs in biogenetics. Nonetheless, the core of the book involves locating the redemptive moment in those movements and causes liberal democracy rejects. The book’s motto comes from Beckett’s Worstword Ho: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Žižek’s recovery of “the excess of the utopian Idea that survives its historical defeat” (209) is guided by Badiou’s elaboration of four moments of the eternal idea of revolutionary justice: voluntarism, terror, egalitarian justice, and trust in the people (157). Against this background, he urges leftists to accept our terrorist past and its “rational kernel:” the violence of imposing a new order on society. Arguing that one’s opponents should not be allowed to define the terms of struggle and debate, Žižek considers various modes of terror and violence: Robespierre’s opposition between war and terror; Bejamin’s “divine violence” as the dictatorship of the proletariat wherein democracy and terror coincide in an extralegal, extramoral exertion of inhuman justice; the terror of absolute freedom through absolute subjection to a task (for example, John Brown). He cautions, however, that “excessive radicalism” is a phenomenon of “ideologico-political displacement,” an indication of a refusal to “go to the end” and “disturb the very fundamentals of economic order” (174). The decisive moments of revolution, then, are the attempts to reinvent everyday life, to build new institutions and rituals. In other words, what really matters is the day after. This is the terrain on which the Soviet and Chinese revolutions ultimately failed. As Žižek details, China is today the ideal capitalist state; not only does it recognize that capitalism depends on “an obstacle as positive position,” but the political rule of the Communist party provides precisely that obstacle. Indeed, the disruptions of the Cultural Revolution (a clear incidence of impotent acting out, of a reactive failure to “go to the end”) pale in comparison with the permanent self-revolutionizing of capitalism Indeed, Žižek argues that the former was a condition for the latter; “by undermining traditional stabilizing ideologies such as Confucianism, it rendered the people all the more vulnerable to the dizzying effects of capitalism,” (198).

It’s what happens after the revolution, then, that really matters. A true revolutionary upheaval is sustained by enthusiastic engagement, not “the pathetic libertarian outburst” (196). If people are not transforming and transformed, the old patterns will return. And, at no point are there guarantees. Neither the revolutionary act nor the day after is covered by the big Other. You can’t predict the future—or the past. There’s not a “last judgment” wherein results (or intentions) are tabulated and assessed.

Žižek’s refusal to provide clear or easy answers, his absolute commitment to exposing the negative dimensions of emancipatory ideals as well as glimpsing the utopian aspiration ideal in its most brutal enactments, can be frustrating. This is clearly the case for many of the contributors to The Truth of Žižek, a collection of essays reacting to and provoking Žižek. When one expects him to read the Stalinist adoption of Russian culture and tradition as a betrayal of Leninist ideals, he does the opposite: Stalinist humanism reinstalled moral accountability against the biopolitics of full scale mechanization attempted in the early twenties. Perhaps even more important: the people preferred Socialist Realism to Bolshevik modernism. Stalinism’s violent reinstallation of ethics, Žižek suggests, may well have contributed to the very possibility of resistance to the Soviet regime.

While frustrating, these analyses are not random or indecisive. Although in In Defense of Lost Causes Žižek only infrequently repeats the language of parallax that informs his dialectical materialism, his recovery of left emancipatory hopes employs its logic. Terror and virtue (freedom, democracy, egalitarianism) are always intertwined; one is a constitutive obstacle for the other. Hence, the liberal-democratic attempt to have virtue without terror always and necessarily fails (as does its assumption that past revolutions were merely instances of terror without virtue). Forms depend on their opposite, on an inherent obstacle as their positive condition, for instance, as in the case of China. The very obstacle to the unencumbered reign of the market (an authoritarian state) is what makes the market’s success possible (The Truth of Žižek, 205). At these points, then, Žižek’s fundamental Leninism shines through. The true position at work in Lenin’s writing is one of “total exposure to historical contingency” (230).

There is not an objective party line that one can follow; there is one that one can trace, one that “emerges out of the zigzag of oscillations” and is “constituted in practice” (230). An additional component of Žižek’s defense of lost causes is his engagement with his critics and opponents. Taking up Ernesto Laclau’s revision of his theory of radical democracy in terms of populism, Žižek clarifies his own emphasis on class struggle, thereby addressing some of the criticisms raised in The Truth of Žižek as well; a number of the contributions to this collection repeat arguments already raised by Laclau; others diagnose or insult Žižek ad hominem. Žižek rejects Laclau’s depiction of populism as an instance of the political at it purest. Populism, Žižek argues, relies on the supposition that the people exists, and thus on a core of depoliticization that it projects onto its enemy as its positive condition/obstacle. Laclau neglects this aspect of populism. Furthermore, this depoliticized core or essence is not analogous to the determining role of the economy. As Žižek explains, Marx emphasized not just the working class as a substantially defined social group but the proletariat as a politicized, subjective position. Moreover, the economy is not a hidden meta-essence; rather, it is the structuring principle of distortion in the social field. The economy, then, is not just a social subsystem but the Real absent cause that distributes social subsystems. Class struggle refers to the political struggle (fundamental antagonism) at the heart of the economic.

Populism cannot function as a kind of pure instance of the political precisely because of its logic of universality. Laclau views politics in terms of a struggle among particular elements, a struggle over which one will fill out the empty form of universality. “The people” emerges in the course of the enchainment of a series of popular demands. The universality of class struggle is different. Rather than relying on the universal and its constituent exception—all of us versus them (the corrupt, the intruders)—the proletariat designates a part of no-part (Žižek takes this language from Rancière), that which has no place within a given order even as it remains internal to it (we might think here of the difference between trade unions and the proletariat; only one of these is compatible with capitalism although each are a product of it). Žižek starkly juxtaposes the two competing universalities: “The people is inclusive, the proletariat is exclusive; the people fights intruders, parasites, those who obstruct its full self-assertion, the proletariat fights a struggle which divides the people in its very core. The people wants to assert itself, the proletariat wants to abolish itself” (415).

In In Defense of Lost Causes, Žižek further considers the critique Yannis Stavrakaksis elaborates in The Lacanian Left. (Stavrakaksis begins inauspiciously with the unconvincing claim that Lacanian psychoanalysis is today second in influence in political theory only to analytical liberalism and decends further with each employment of the technical term “traversing the fantasy” as a synonym for “stop thinking this way and think this other way.”) Stavrakaksis contends that Žižek is insufficiently negative; rather than attending enough to negativity and the lack, Žižek instead idealizes the positivity of miracles (122). Žižek responds that Stavrakaksis relies on a flat, empiricist sense of negativity (the excess of experience over symbolization) and ignores the emphasis on drive that has characterized Žižek’s work from its inception. Instead of attending to “the negativity of the death drive as the condition of positive sublimation” (In Defense of Lost Causes, 307), Stavrakaksis accuses Žižek of perversion and disavowal. He charges Žižek with failing to consider feminine jouissance, (despite the fact that Žižek has discussed it in numerous places), and with presuming a notion of an Act that touches the Real without going through the Symbolic (despite the fact that Žižek regularly repeats the Lacanian point that the Real can never be encountered directly but only through the multitude of its Symbolic appearances).4  At the most general level, the weakness of Stavrakaksis’s understanding of Lacanian theory is the way the category of lack does all the heavy lifting (paradoxically becoming the positive condition of his revision of radical democracy) as if all that is really needed in politics is a kind of humility, an attunement to the limits of one’s fundaments, and an appreciation of contingency. To be sure, Stavrakaksis is fully aware that any Lacanian politics must include the notion of enjoyment (and he employs this notion critically and well in his chapters on consumerism and nationalism). Yet his gestures toward a democratic enjoyment of emptiness and the lack are unpersuasive. They suggest to me a radical democratic superego enjoining citizens to scrutinize and criticize themselves with an eye to eliminating any and all passionate attachments (except their constitutive attachment to lack).

Some of Žižek’s other engagements in In Defense of Lost Causes push him in interesting directions. Responding to Critchley, Negri, and Badiou, Žižek eschews left abandonment of the state. Each presupposes the continued existence of the state even as he envisions left politics as necessarily outside the state: “they share the premise that the era of party-state politics in which the ultimate aim is to take control of the state apparatus is over—from now on, politics should subtract itself from the domain of the state, creating spaces outside, ‘sites of resistance,’” (406). Critchley, for example, argues that true democracy can occur only at an interstitial distance from the state. He advocates a carnivalesque anarchism of resistance. The anarchists get ethical purity without having to do the dirty work of running things. The state gets to run things without getting bogged down in taking the playful satire of the anarchists seriously. Žižek similarly counters Negri’s “no governing without movements” with its obverse and supposition, “no movements without governing” (377). And, where Badiou reads the Cultural Revolution as signaling the exhaustion of the party-state framework for revolutionary politics even as the state itself cannot be abolished, Žižek reasonably asks about the form state power should then take and ventures toward “resuscitating the good old ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’” (412).

As Žižek points out, dictatorship is not the opposite of democracy. Rather, it refers to its underlying form, the kind of sovereignty a democracy has; it designates hegemony over political space. As Lenin made clear, liberal democracy is a form of bourgeois dictatorship because its logic is bourgeois. The excess where the buck stops, its constitutive underlying violence, is in the interest of the bourgeoisie. The dictatorship of the proletariat, then, is one where “those who are the ‘part of no-part’ set the tone” (413). Žižek asserts that the dictatorship of the proletariat is thus another name for the violence of democracy. More specifically, he considers democracy in terms of the violence of the egalitarian intrusion and its regulation/institution (a version of Rancière’s distinction between politics and police). The radicality of the democratic invention is not the empty place (what Lefort’s describes as the distinction between the place of power and its occupant) but the imposition of a place occupied by a subject that does not exist, the people. Thus, the truly terroristic dimension of democracy is not the egalitarian explosion but its institutionalization.

In both The Parallax View and In Defense of Lost Causes, Žižek points to slums as today’s “evental sites” and slumdwellers as the part of no-part (he draws here from Mike Davis). Slum-dwellers are incorporated into the global economy even as they live apart from the state, uncounted, excluded from rights of citizenship and ownership, beyond state surveillance and control. In this vein, Žižek argues that the contemporary fundamental antagonism is between the included and the excluded, the ultimate political point of reference and the proper way to conceive the part of no-part. Utimately, though, I’m not convinced: Žižek’s emphasis on the division between the included and excluded is one of several failures to carry through his own argumentation.

First, with his emphasis on inclusion, Žižek joins the ranks of the liberals and multiculturalists he’s been attacking for over twenty years. Inclusion is one of their buzzwords: what really matters is making sure everyone is included, every voice is heard, everyone is part of the process, in what may well be the ultimate children’s version of politics—they aren’t letting me play! Agamben provides a more interesting and subtle account as he considers Schmitt’s idea of inclusion by means of an exclusion. Rancière’s aesthetic politics of visibility is likewise a clear improvement over Žižek’s version of included/excluded insofar as it takes up the regime governing visibility and invisibility. For example, women weren’t excluded from politics prior to winning the right to vote. They were included—and visible as—mothers, whores, royalty, workers, and slaves. Exposure was a part of their political existence and a form of their inclusion. Indeed, even the most conventional versions of democratic theory involve more than the simple opposition between inclusion and exclusion as they consider how individuals, groups, ideas, objects, interests, needs, etc. are included. What discursive arrangements of truth and falsity, what regimes of power/knowledge, what suppositions of civilized and barbaric produce the positions into which something is included? How do forms of resistance and transgression already presuppose—and hence include—a person, thing, fantasy, or idea? Reducing the complexity of urbanization under neoliberalism, Žižek opposes the contemporary society of “total control” to territories from which control has been withdrawn and which are hence outside the law (426). He thereby fails to attend to his own best insights about control itself: never total, always fragile and in process, always and necessarily politically ambiguous. While Žižek is right to point to slums as potential evental sites, he jumps too quickly to the conclusion that what is to be done is the organization and discipline of slumdwellers, their incorporation into the state and its regimes of property and surveillance. What about the way that the sheer mass of slumdwellers, their ultimate inability to be counted, disrupts the most basic suppositions of capitalist economics (economists cannot formally account for the ways that millions of urban poor are able to survive on less than the minimum income deemed necessary for survival) as well as state authority?

Žižek’s formulation of the fundamental antagonism in terms of inclusion and exclusion pulls back from his emphasis on class struggle as the underlying antagonism constitutive of the social. Correlative to this retreat is a second one that rests similarly uneasily with Žižek’s bold appeal to the dictatorship of the proletariat—a retreat from state intervention in the economy. Žižek writes: “the solution is not to limit the market and private property by direct interventions of the state and state ownership” (429). What, then, does he expect his dictators to do? States already intervene in economies. Why not carry out this intervention for the sake of the part of no-part? Without this basic supposition, the dictatorship of the proletariat is not just empty rhetoric; it’s incoherent, repetition as farce. One brief example: Žižek gives Badiou the last word, repeating on the final page his four moments of the eternal Idea of revolutionary-egalitarian justice. Not one is possible without limiting the market and private property by direction interventions of the state and state ownership. So Žižek glosses egalitarian injustice with the idea of imposing “the same worldwide norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and so on.” Similarly, his example of voluntarism is confronting ecological catastrophe “by means of large-scale collective decisions which run counter to the ‘spontaneous’ immanent logic of capitalist development” (461). Unless the dictatorship of the proletariat is not just a radical term for the ever-popular global civil society (a global civil society as defanged as Critchley’s comic anarchists, insofar as it is barred from limiting the market), it cannot not intervene in the economy.

Finally, a third failure occurs in the context of Žižek’s reply to Stavrakaksis where he clarifies his criticism of Badiou. Badiou has warned of the totalitarian danger of enforcing a truth on a situation in neglect of the multiplicity of reality that resists subsumption under a truth-procedure. Žižek’s disagreement hinges on the incompatibility between the notion of truth and excessive enforcement. He rejects the notion that one can excessively enforce a truth. Žižek writes: “a Truth is never enforced, because the moment the fidelity to Truth functions as an excessive enforcement, we are no longer dealing with a Truth, with fidelity to a Truth-Event” (In Defense of Lost Causes, 307). Žižek’s argument here neglects the retroactive temporality of the event, the openness of the future into the past. What may seem just right at one point in time may later seem excessive and what now is clearly excessive may later seem just right (George W. Bush relied on just such ontological indeterminacy in his continued defense of the invasion of Iraq). Žižek’s example of Stalinism is particularly problematic. Stalinism enforced a truth that was not a truth, “the vision of a centralized planned economy.” Thus, “the resistance of reality against it was a sign of its own falsity” (307). The oddness of Žižek’s point here stems from the fact that nowhere in his discussion of Stalinism does he identify the vision of a centralized planned economy as its central truth. Rather, he describes Stalinism in terms of its restoration of humanism and retreat from modernism (Pushkin over Akhmatova, Socialist Realism over Rayonism etc). He argues that Stalinism failed as a bureaucratic form, relying instead on violence, personal relations, irrationality, old nationalist sentiments, and the fantasy–with accompanying attempts at realization–that Stalin was personally involved in all sorts of specific low-level decisions. The truth of centralized planning was not enforced.

Why is resistance to central economic planning a viable indicator that central economic planning is not a truth? In the endnotes, Žižek admits that it isn’t–there is a difference between resistance by the people and resistance by the enemy. And he qualifies the Stalinist example by explaining that it is not exactly that the people resisted, it was rather that they were inert. But his own account of the Stalinist period belies this claim: there were all sorts of different mobilizations of people alive and well in the Stalinist period, from Stakhanovites to organized anti-fascists in the camps, even to the lower cadres mobilized against the upper echelons of the Party during the purges. Žižek’s claim that “the resistance of reality against it [central economic planning] was a sign of its own falsity” relies on premises he normally rejects, primarily, the possibility of totalizing “reality,” a presumption that reality is not the same as the big Other, the existence of the people, and the possibility of a people that is transparent to itself, that somehow knows the truth. All of these assumptions are ones he has already persuasively argued against. Is it not possible that fighting the inertia of the people is a central element of revolutionary activity, that revolution is the activity of creating a new people and that this is precisely where Stalinism failed? In sum, Žižek’s claim that Truth is incompatible with excessive enforcement is unconvincing. Excessive enforcement is necessary, which is why the dictatorship of the proletariat is so risky, why politics is terrifying, but ultimately open, contingent, untotalizable. If one can’t excessively enforce a truth what can one excessively enforce?

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Jodi Dean, co-editor of Theory and Event, teaches political theory at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She is Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her book, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in Fall, 2009.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Paul Passavant for comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

Footnotes

1.  Available at http://politicalhumor.about.com/cs/quotethis/a/rumsfeldquotes.htm . To be clear, Zizek does not develop his point via Rumsfeld but rather via a reading of Kierkegaard as a Hegelian.

2.  J.G. Ballard, Millennium People (London: Harper Perennial, 2004) 176.

3.  For a detailed discussion of enjoyment as a political category and the difference between fascism and Stalinism, see my Zizek’s Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006).

4.  One of the more valuable insights to come out of Zizek’s engagement with Stavrakaksis concerns Zizek’s overlap with Deleuze with respect to the Real. Drawing from Deleuze’s insight that repetition precedes repression, Zizek notes that insofar as the Real is a minimal difference the repetition that establishes difference is primordial. “The Real is primordially nothing but the gap that separates a thing from itself, the gap of repetition,” 312.

Related posts:

1. An interview with Zizek
2. Some comments on Zizek’s latest book