Geoff Boucher

Financial crisis, Social pathologies and 'generalised perversion' : questioning Zizek's diagnosis of the times

Slavoj Zizeks work has been highly influential in the formulation of an emerging consensus among Lacanian social researchers, that we live in a society of generalised perversion whose initial fruits are the corrosion of democracy and the recent financial crisis. This position rests upon a notion of modern subjectivity that connects ‘commodity fetishism’ with clinical perversion in a pathological configuration, so that social theoretical identification of crisis tendencies, evaluative language about moral problems and diagnostic categories from the Lacanian clinic can be combined in a single figure. In this article, we question the series of conceptual links that constitute this position, tracing them from Zizek’s critique in his short work on the global financial crisis and his broader restatement of this analysis in the recent Living in the End Times, through the moment of his announcement of the notion of ‘generalised perversion’ in The Ticklish Subject, all the way back to fundamental propositions outlined in his earliest work. Our argument progresses through three claims. First, we show in the evolution of this position that it leads Zizek to equivocate in his diagnosis of contemporary society between two mutually exclusive categories (‘psychosis’ and ‘perversion’), indicating an antinomy in his work that is resolved in favour of ‘generalised perversion’ on empirical, not logical, grounds. Secondly, we offer a critical resolution of the antinomy through a critique of what we argue is Zizek’s mistaken over-extension of psychoanalytic reason beyond its legitimate scope of application. Finally, we point to some of the political implications of the way that Zizek speculatively resolves his logical difficulties, by analysing the consequences of his claim that generalised social perversion - the problem to be solved - involves a dethroning of the communal ego ideal. A communitarian streak, implicit in the potential conflation of moral denunciation with psychoanalytic diagnosis that the rhetoric of ‘perversion’ invokes, runs through Zizek’s work on capitalism, we propose in conclusion.

Tensions in the Post-Althusserian Project: Descriptive Indeterminacy and Normative Uncertainty

The chapter presents Laclau and Mouffe’s theory and then outlines some of the most important criticism of their discourse analysis. After a brief summary of key terms, such as hegemonic articulation and constitutive outside, the chapter positions Laclau and Mouffe within the post-Althusserian moment, arguing that they inherit certain unresolved problems from this origin. The first problem concerns the application of categories derived from the theory of ideology to the entirety of the social field, which leads to what the chapter calls ‘descriptive indeterminacy.’ The second problem concerns the suppression of the normative dimension in the theory of social subjectivity, which leads to an oscillation between neutral description and partisan intervention. In both cases, Laclau and Mouffe’s response to these criticisms is explored and evaluated.

An Ideological Conception of Politics—Critique of Zizek on Political Theology

For some time now, Slavoj Zizek has provocatively maintained that the radical left needs a ‘politics of universal Truth’ whose model is Pauline theology’s transformation of the Hellenistic world. Furthermore, in light of the worldwide resurgence of religious militancy after 9/11, Zizek also contends that political theology provides the conceptual resources for thinking historical materialism today. Zizek here represents the leading wing of a ‘theological turn’ amongst radical intellectuals, for whom religion is a last resource of hope following the collapse of historical communism. In this article, I show that this rather desperate position leads to an ideological conception of politics, one that introduces mystified representations of social antagonism and class struggle into the heart of progressive theory. Through an imminent critique of Zizek’s work that draws upon its Althusserian foundations, I demonstrate that, although Zizek makes some important contributions to the critique of ideology, his theoretical position contains a significant problem. The idea that ideology and politics are structurally the same, which is what allows him to discuss problems of socialist strategy in the medium of political theology, is seriously flawed. It leads Zizek inevitably towards metaphysical notions of the subject of history, and away from theoretical engagement with rethinking the concept of class struggle for the new century.

A Jamesonian theory of theological practice: A critical response to the work of Roland Boer

In a conjuncture marked by the “resurgence of religion,” the problem of historical materialism’s relation to religious ideologies has acquired a new urgency. The work of Roland Boer, recently awarded the Deutscher Prize for his magnum opus on Marxism and Theology poses this question from a surprising perspective. While his main claim is that religious influences in Marxist theory represent a sort of theological unconscious in historical materialism, at the same time Boer also advances an original Marxist interpretation of the Abrahamic religions, especially Christianity. This line of research, which extends from his dissertation on Jameson and Jeroboam through to his most recent work on The Sacred Economy, proposes that theology is a reflective representation of the social totality. In this article, I criticize Boer’s valorization of theology as a practical discourse that is postideological but non-theoretical, and conclude by indicating an alternative.

Enjoyment as an Aesthetic Factor: The Specificity of the Aesthetic in Late Marxism

Lately, it has become as imperative to separate aesthetics and politics as it once was to link them. Many progressive literary critics have begun to react against the disturbing tendency in a lot of contemporary criticism to reduce the artwork to an allegory of political power. But equally, these critics wish to avoid the problematic regression to moralizing forms of criticism, or a revival of aesthetic categories bereft of historical context, that the ‘turn to ethics’ and the ‘turn to aesthetics’ promote. In a series of new positions, leftwing thinkers have sought to retain the idea of a cultural politics without sacrificing the conceptualization of aesthetic autonomy. Although his own position has recently become highly ambiguous on the question of aesthetic autonomy – often reducing artworks to instances of political ideology or illustrations for theoretical positions – among the most influential of the thinkers to endorse this new departure is Slavoj Žižek.

Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“The unconscious”, Lacan writes in one of the most powerful and evocative passages in his Écrits, “is that chapter of my history that is marked by a blank or occupied by a falsehood: it is the censored chapter”. Fortunately, Lacan maintains, the reintegration of the repressed impulses underlying the mutilated text of a damaged life is always possible, because “usually it has been written down elsewhere ... in the traces that are preserved by those distortions necessitated by the linking of the adulterated chapter to the chapters surrounding it”.1 This way of considering psychoanalysis as a reintegration into the individual’s life history of the spark of their alienated desire, with this restoration regarded in narrative terms rather than in terms of ego unity, is distinctly Lacanian. Lacan’s sort of psychoanalysis, then, is about the “dialecticisation” of those fixations that impede desire, leading to its release as creative potential in that open narrative that is an individual’s life history. In A World of Fragile Things, Mari Ruti proposes that this psychoanalytic work of recovery is the basis for a distinctive contribution to that “art of living” which constitutes the Western tradition in wisdom literature. A thoughtful and sensitive mediation on coping with uncertainty and accommodating the unconscious, the work endorses the idea that the goal of the art of living is the pursuit of individual uniqueness. Responding to writers on the art of living in the philosophical tradition, such as Alexander Nehamas and Pierre Hadot, and entering into dialogue with psychoanalytic contributions by Jonathan Lear, Hans Loewald and Christopher Bollas, Ruti is interested in formulating a psychoanalytic alternative to the ideal of authenticity that captures individual uniqueness but also reflects the discovery of the unconscious. For Ruti, the traditional art of living is too indi-

Slavoj Žižek, Violence

To those who say that he is an academic rockstar, an intellectual celebrity who represents the leading exemplar of a new kind of academic entrepreneur – someone who makes their money on the transAtlantic lecture circuit by writing intellectually fragile popcultural interventions – Slavoj Žižek off ers this, defi nitive reply. Žižek uses his celebrity status to write with political urgency and deep concern about the violence and suff ering at the heart of the New World Order. In Violence, he aims to produce an ethical shock that resonates from his analysis of the structural violence built in to the world economy and the military machine of the metropolitan countries, in a series of escalating meditations on the legitimate grievances of the global dispossessed, through to his advocacy of the redemptive violence of those who have nothing left to lose. “Th e circle of our investigation is closed”, Žižek concludes: