In less than a year my book manuscript for Zizek's Politics is due at the publisher's. Since I'm currently more interested in all things bloggie, particularly the emergent democracy discussions as well as another project I have on community media, I decided to follow the lead of some other bloggers and try drafting some of the book ideas here.
In his early (1989) influential The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Zizek uses the Party as an example of totalitarian misrecognition. Yet, by the time of his "Lenin's Choice" (the afterward to Revolution at the Gates--2002) the Party becomes the way to move beyond the cycle of resistance and toward an actual anti-capitalist politics. What happened? Did he simply change his mind or adopt that perspective most likely to annoy those Western multiculturalist academics he so loves to chide? In my view, the best reading of Zizek on this question will treat him as fully consistent: the Party he endorses in his reading of Lenin is simply not the same as the totalitarian Party. The key to this difference lies in the relation of knowledge to truth. Understanding it, moreover, requires understanding the link between democracy and totalitarianism that has remained a staple of Zizek's thought.
In Sublime Object, Zizek emphasizes the difference between the classical Master and the totalitarian Leader (146-147). The authority of the classic Master is absolute. It stems not from some element of the social order but from outside it--God, nature, a miraculous event. People treat someone as a king because he is a king where is marks this connection with the extrasocial. The fact that the person is king simply because he is treated as one, that kingship is a performative effect, has to be concealed. Once it is revealed, the king is no longer a king. In contrast, the Totalitarian Leader says that in himself he is nothing. He is merely the embodiment of the People, the agent of their will. Through him, the People rule. Hobbes' discussion of sovereignty in Leviathan illustrates Zizek's point: the sovereign is simply the agent of the People who remain the author of his acts.
Zizek argues that the position of the totalitarian Leader can be subverted by pointing out that the People do not exist: in other words, those whom the Leader purports to serve are actually not there--or at least they are not there until they are represented by the Leader. And, again, this point is well illustrated by Hobbes: there is no People prior to the instantiation of their will in the sovereign who makes them a People. Incorporation as a People must be taken literally. More entertaining is Zizek's reading of the totalitarian Party: to say that the People support the Party (that the Party represents the People's real interests) is also to say that anyone who doesn't support the Party isn't one of the People. Thus, an enemy of the Party is an enemy of the People. Likewise in Hobbes, anyone who doesn't join in the original contract remains in the state of nature--not part of the People--and can be killed.
At this point, Zizek jumps to a Lacanian definition of democracy as a sociopolitical order in which the People do not exist. He emphasizes Lefort's view of democracy as an empty place, a place that must always remain empty, a place anyone can occupy. This emptiness and reoccupation is of course staged in elections when in principle anything could happen. In an election, chance and variability come into play. Indeed, only as a stochastic process does democracy affirm the emptiness of the place of power, only in this momentary dissolution of society does democracy assure that any ruler is only a surrogate, only a stand in for the necessary (because the People cannot govern themselves immediately) but impossible (because without ground) sovereign.
In his next book, For They Know Not What They Do, Zizek refines his analysis with two moves. First, he develops the account of totalitarianism as an account of knowledge. In so doing, he adds the bureaucracy to his account of totalitarianism thus no longer signifying it solely in terms of the Party. Second, he situates the critique of the Master in its proper context: the democratic revolution. Differently put, he joins together two elements that had remained separate in Sublime Object: the realization that nothing underlies the authority of the king with democracy as an empty place of power.
Zizek's account of totalitarianism in terms of knowledge relies on Lacan's distinction between the Master Signifier (S1) and the chain of knowledge (S2) (233-236). The Master Signifier is the signifier without a signified that gives meaning to the chain of knowledge. Without S1, S2 is just a bunch of facts or elements, a disinterested collection of data. Put in terms of the Master and the Leader, S1 refers to the classical master whose word is Law, whose word is fully authorized (within the symbolic order) by the fact that he utters it. What's missing from this account of the Master is of course the irrational component of his power, but in the fact that the word is backed up by violence and the utter contingency of person of the Master. Zizek, invoking Lacan, formalizes this element of irrationality and contingency as an object, objet a, that sticks in S1, that can't be fully absorbed in the Symbolic majesty of the king. Classic works of political theory refer to this little extra, this sublime object or little piece of the real, in terms of the redoubled body of the king. Zizek illustrates it with the Stalinist idea that we communists are made of 'special stuff.' And Tom Wolfe memorialized the same notion in his book, The Right Stuff. At any rate, the key idea here is that S1, whether as Master, as Master Signifier, or as Law, is accompanied by an extra, by an object, by an element of violence that exceeds S1, is necessary for S1, but cannot be acknowledged by S1. Hence, for Zizek the object is an obscene supplement.
What about the totalitarian Leader? Zizek says that the sublime political body as reemerged in "totalitarian" order in the shape of the Leader and/or Party (256). In what way? Well, S1, the classical Master, is eliminated. And this elimination creates an opening. One opening is the way of totalitarianism. The other is the way of democracy.
In his recounting of the revolutionary opening of the empty space of power, Zizek emphasizes the Jacobins. And he links the Terror not to totalitarianism but to democracy. Why? Because the Jacobins did not present themselves as instruments of history. They had doubts, uncertainties. Thus, they acted to preserve the empty place of power. With Saint-Just's slogan, "nobody can reign innocently," (268) they wanted to prevent any occupation of the place of power.
In contrast, totalitarianism involves the certainty of knowledge. Differently put, the totalitarian leader embodies S2--the chain of knowledge. Zizek describes this knowledge as 'bureaucratic." It isn't grounded in an S1--the word of the king. Rather, it is 'objective' like the objective laws of history. Or, it appears as an attribute, quality, or fact. As Zizek explains, one obeys the King because he is the King--that's it. Any other explanation subverts the authority of kingship. In contrast, one follows the Leader for specific reasons: adherence to the Cause, his courage, his management skills, etc. And, to return to objet a, under totalitarianism it appears as the mischevious or obscene underpinning of S2--the facts, knowledge, the objective laws of history. It's as if 'the facts speak for themselves" so that no one (no S1) has to accept responsibility for what they say. One's responsibility is instead to the facts, to history; the totalitarian Leader is thus again merely an instrument. In this way, the totalitarian Leader (whom Zizek refers to in the text at this point as the Stalinist, 235) avoids the constitutive division of the subject--he is an object of historical necessity and his will is the instrument though which this necessity is realized.
[In his next books, Zizek begins blurring the terms Master and Leader: Tarrying with the Negative (1993) (210); Plague of Fantasies (1997) (158).]
In The Ticklish Subject (1999) Zizek again works through the themes of the classical Master, totalitarianism, democracy, and knowledge, this time in the context of his reading of Ranciere's account of the disavowals of the political moment that form the logic of political conflict. He also moves away from a focus strictly on totalitarianism to emphasize differences between fascism and communism (or, even more specifically, between National Socialism and Stalinism) and he emphasizes the Leninist approach to the act.
More specifically, Zizek locates the move from the traditional Master in Ranciere's following of Lefort's insight that totalitarianism was opened up by the democratic invention (192). The democratic invention makes visible the fact that the place of power is empty, that the only reason the king is king is because people treat him like the king, and that totalitarianism takes this position seriously: "I am a Master only insofar as you treat me like one" (193). Zizek argues that the three logics (the traditional Master, the democratic fight for the empty place of power, and the totalitarian Master)fit with Ranciere's account of three modes of the disavowal of the political moment. The traditional master is in the sphere of arche politics (that of a traditional, closed social space). Democratic order is the sphere of parapolitics or the depoliticization of politics in terms of regulated competition between acknowledged agents who accept the rules of the game. And totalitarian politics is metapolitics: what unfolds is dictated from elsewhere, from the laws of history, say, or the inexorable unfolding of the scientific facts. Here Zizek distinguishes between Communism and Fascism, arguing that Fascism is better understood as a kind of 'ultra politics' that ultimately rejects politics for war.
In this context, Zizek emphasizes a fifth logic of disavowing the political (depoliticization): post-politics. Whereas the other modes disavowe and repress the political, this one, forecloses it. It emphasizes the importance of leaving ideological division behind, of drawing on expert knowledge, free deliberation, and the importance of taking into account people's concrete needs and demands (198). Post-politics thus forecloses political antagonism, preventing it from appearing as an antagonism. This foreclosure is marked by the return in the Real of irreconciliable conflict and violence. It is also marked by the 'part of no part'--those who cannot be included if the system is to remain intact.
(more later)
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