RESPONSE TO SLAVOJ ZIZEK

CLAUDIA BREGER

Slavoj Zizek. THE RHETORICS OF POWER. Diacritics 31.1 (2001): 91104.

Perhaps I should begin by, in one respect, pleading guilty as well or, alternatively, with an apology for the sometimes polemical rhetoric of my paper. Part of the harshness of my tone may, however, be explained by a couple of remarks regarding the genealogy of my text. Written in the context of German academia, it originated, a couple of years ago, in an intellectual climate characterized by the omnipresence of Zizeks words and ideas, withas far as I could tellvirtually no critical questions being asked. This absence of debate seemed particularly conspicuous when compared to the ways in which other theory imports had entered German discourse in recent years, like the long-term fight over postmodernist concepts, with one of its climaxes in the ferocious debate on Judith Butlers Gender Trouble in the early 1990s. Once I had begun to engage more thor oughly with Zizeks concepts, I developed some serious concerns with regard to their political implications, and these concerns were eventually shaped into the ferocious critique published in this issue. Hoping to stir controversy, I intentionally focus, in my paper, on what I believe to be the problematic aspects of Zizeks theory, and I do enlist rhetorical strategies that serve to stress these aspects and to develop their implications. At the same time, my argument is based on a meticulous close reading of many of Zizeks texts, and I cannot plead guilty to falsifying or simply inventing any of the positions I discuss. After these explanatory words, I would like to thank Slavoj Zizek for his response, which I find very helpful in highlighting some central methodological and theoretical issues. I agree with his suggestion that, on one level, it is rather principal methodologi cal questions that are at stake here: from the dogmatic standpoint Zizek claims at the end of his paper, my relationship toward psychoanalysis would probably be described as disavowal. From my own, more or less relativistic position, this is, of course, not an appropriate notion, and I would explain my methodological position approximately in the following way: while I do believe that it is necessary to historicize psychoanalysis, I find many of Freuds and Lacans theorems extremely useful for describing modern configurations of sexuality, gender, and society, and, like many deconstructivists and many other scholarsI use psychoanalytic notions as theoretical tools in my own work. I do, however, believe that it is crucial to evaluate, question, and negotiate the theoretical concepts I use. In the case of psychoanalysis, this process includes a critical discussion of the concepts offered, in any specific thematic context, by Freud and Lacan or by Karen Horney or Joan Rivire. From this anti-dogmatic standpoint, I am clearly irritated by Zizeks claim to provide one superior, privileged reading of psychoanalysis via his exegesis of Lacan, and I am willing to defend this stance. While thus happily accepting the label anti-dogmatic, I would like to argue with the way in which Zizek stages the choice between the relativist liberal democrat and the fully engaged fundamentalist at the end of his paper [103]. The opposition reminds me of the debates within gender and postcolonial studies in the course of which

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deconstructivist positions were charged with destroying political agency, and essentialism, or at least strategic essentialism [see, for example, Fuss], was defended as a political necessity. Zizek justifies his fundamentalismin quotation markssimilarly as a strategic choice. As evidence for its necessity, however, he enlists the topical figure of a postmodern deconstructionist who plays his/her academic power games in the safe realm of ironic distance from social struggles. To be sure: with a Foucauldian background, I have no difficulty in acknowledging that the rhetoric of self-relativization is part of academic power games as welland I do believe that these power games should be subjected to a process of political critique. This very process, however, seems to be the crucial point: if power is omnipresent (as Foucault argues), and no transcendental legitimation available for any of its singular performances (as not only the antidogmatist but also the strategic dogmatist has to add), we need to continuously engage in the process of evaluatingand thus, at least formally, relativizingdifferent claims. And while the epistemological gesture of recognizing the foundational plurality of diverging claims may be easily performed, the political process of actually negotiating these claims, of fighting for their recognition, and of being fought by others with their contrary claims, is no matter of peaceful serenity (unlesssomewhat flippantly spokenthe postmodern deconstructivist who envisions this process has converted to a very Habermasian world view). In other words: challenging the proposition that serious political engagement has to rely on (more or less strategic) fundamentalism, I would like toonce moreplead for political strategies that renounce such rhetoric. Perhaps it is useful to explicitly com ment on the (in a more narrow sense) political dimension of Zizeks recourse to this signifier: it cannot be read outside the context of the war on terrorism and the Western construction of the fundamentalist that accompanies this war. I understand Zizeks gesture of (ironic?) identification with this label as a strategy of political protest via provocation, but I would personally prefer it to be replaced by a critical genealogy of the notion of fundamentalism and its usesas well as an analysis of those constructions which function, in Zizeks text, as a political opposite of this fundamentalist protest: trust that the democratic substance of honest Americans is able to break up the conspiracy [96]. Even while accepting the implicit proposition that the rhetoric of democracy is today implicated with the politics of war, one can obviously ask whether the true Master-Signifier: democracy is entirely absorbed by this political configuration, or whether it does not function in more complex and multiple ways within and beyond this specific field of political events. Before eventually returning to this question of democracy, I would like to turn to a set of more specific issues that might deserve further comment: the question of undressing the emperor and the relationship of king and leader. In his response to my text, Zizek states that the problem with the undressing of the king is that it only destroys his personal charisma, not the power of the symbolic place of the King [92]. If this qualification was intended to suggest that we should develop strategies of deconstructing, disempowering, or splitting that symbolic place, I could only agreecompletely so. However, Zizek makes a somewhat different point. He describes a situation in which we seem to be unable to touch anything but the personal charisma of the kingand are thereby doomed to endlessly repeat the mechanism of replacing one royal individual with another. The argument I develop in my paper questions this description as a performative act: a gesture that installs failure in the project of democracy. I ask why Zizek keeps reiterating the negative evaluation (we cannot undress the emperor) rather than searching for alternative options (how could we undress him more effectively then), and I argue that it is Zizeks specific reading of Lacan that does not allow for this change of perspective. Thus, Zizekas I argue above in more detailnot only assumes

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that a position of (royal, that is, single, central, and superior) authority is a structural necessity within and for the social edifice, but also claims that the social process of fillingand fantasizing aboutthis position of authority is marked by the intervention of pieces of the Real. It is in this context that, in Grimassen des Realen, he suggests that Marxs reminder to concentrate on the symbolic place of the king rather than his personal charisma misses the inseparability of the kings two bodies, which implies the transsubstantiation of the body natural by virtue of its occupying the symbolic position of the king, and its infiltration with a moment of sublimity which prevents its effectivepersonal as well as politicaldegradation. As discussed in detail in my paper, one of the problematic aspects of this argument in Grimassen des Realen is, as I believe, that it threatens to collapse the difference between the kingor traditional masterand the modern leader by explaining the indestructible charisma of the leader with recourse to the paradigm of the king and his failed deauthorization in the French Revolution. As Zizek insists in his response, this difference between the two figures of authority is crucial for his theory, but unfortunately, the argument in Grimassen des Realen fails to substantiate the claim that they are different. In the passage of The Sublime Object of Ideology to which Zizek refers in his response, he does develop a different argument. Here, he claims that the transubstantiated body of the classical Master is [simply, CB] an effect of the performative mechanism of treating him like one; which means that he can be deauthorized effectively: as soon as the performative mechanism which gives him his charismatic authority is demasked, the Master loses his power [146]. In the context of this argument, the objet petit a that arrests the performative play of signifiers seems to play its role on the level of ideology/fantasy only, that is, in the political theology analyzed by Kantorowicz and, in modernity, the Stalinist vision, in which the communist leaders are described as people of a special mould, as a sublime object [145]. Ratherthan insisting that this ideology shapes history by constituting its necessary form, as Zizek does in other passages of The Sublime Object of Ideology [for example, 6162, as discussed in my paper], he, in this context, discusses its paradoxical basis and thereby suggests howboth premodern and Stalinistideology can be subjected to a critique. Other than the traditional master, the leaderand this is the basic feature of the difference between the twoenlists the very performative mechanism as the resource of his power by grounding his authority in the agency of the people. This point of reference, however, does not exist: in reality the People are the People becauseor, more precisely, in so far asthey are embodied in the Party [146]. In this passage, we thus find a more traditional critique of ideology than in those discussed in my paper. Perhaps, a friendlier reading than mine could have given more weight to these moments of Zizeks work. On the other hand, the political imaginary laid out in Grimassen des Realen seems to be the more consistent development of the problematicepistemological claims I have been discussing. And despite the different focus, the ideas in this short chapter in The Sublime Object of Ideology are also, in multiple ways, intertwined with the problems I have identified in other contexts. Thus, the passage concludes with a discussion of democracy that is only partially different from the ones I have talked about. Zizek starts from the proposition that the Lacanian definition of democracy would then be: a sociopolitical order in which the People do not existdo not exist in a unity [147], and associates this nonexistence with Leforts empty place of power. In this context, however, the Real is introduced on a morethan-just-ideological level once more. This idea of an irruption of the Real within the abstractions of formal democracy is familiar from other texts I have discussed in my paper. Whereas, in these other contexts, this irruption of the Real is, for example, located in the articulations of essentialist ethnic identity and racism, here Zizek finds it

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within the process of representative democracy itself: elections [147]. With Lefort, he characterizes the latter as an act of symbolic dissolution of the social edifice [148]. At the moment of election, society changes into a contingent collection of atomized individuals, and the result depends on a [. . .] stochastic process: some wholly unforeseeable (or manipulated) event [. . .] can add that half per cent one way or the other that determines the general orientation of the countrys politics over the next few years . . . [148]. Having identified this thoroughly irrational character of what we call formal democracy, Zizek concludes that democracy makes possible all sorts of manipulation, corruption, the rule of demagogy, but that the possibility of such deformations can only be eliminated at the price of democracy itselfSo-called real democracy is just another name for non-democracy: if we want to exclude the possibility of manipulation, we must verify the candidates in advance, we must introduce the difference between the true interests of the people and its contingent fluctuating opinion [. . .], and so on [148]and thus we find ourselves in a situation of totalitarianism once more. It should be noted that despite this pessimistic scenario, Zizek concludes with the suggestion to adhere to the universal notion of democracy as a necessary fiction [148]. Nonetheless, the analysis is symptomatic for the horizon he develops. Even if as I would admitthe idea of a moment of irrationality within the electoral process is not without its temptations, since majorities may be very small and the results of counting ballots occasionally disputed, I dont think that it is either necessary or helpful to credit an irruption of the Real with such problems. Instead, we could decide to analyze the results of elections as a combination of discursive articulations and factors of institutionalized powerthe latter including not only the specific regulations of the electoral process and any groups chance to decide on the modalities of their application in a situation of conflict, but also the intervention of the media, the campaign donations of companies, and so forth. This analysis, however, points toward a notion of democ racy that differs from the one used by Zizek: a notion of democracy designating not only a system of political representation, but a plurality of struggles that extend the egalitarian imaginary to different social fields within both the (heterogenous ensemble of elements constituting the) state and civil society [Laclau and Mouffe 176]. This notion of radical democracy also includes an ongoing process of questioning its constitu tive exclusions (which Zizek identifies in his response as the major problem of democracy as a positive formal system [97]). I believe that such a notion of democracy, which enlists the fiction of egalityand libertyfor the development of multiple strategies to fight a series of different, albeit intertwined forms of domination and subordi nation, could prevent the standstill of analysis in Zizeks scenario of formal vs. real democracy. And bring down the king and the leader, who would no longer, in splendid isolation, occupy the center of both society and political theory.

WORKS CITED Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference. New York: Routledge, 1989. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. 2d ed. London: Verso, 2001. Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.

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