Reconstruction 7.3 (2007)
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Slavoj Zizek: Live Theory by Rex Butler. New York and London: Continuum. 2005. Pp. 165. Softcover. 10.
<1> Here theorist and art critic Rex Butler addresses both the quantity and complexity of Slavoj Zizek's work, now exceeding twenty-five books and a multitude of articles on philosophy, culture and everything in between. Butler's is a virtuoso summation of this thinker's major dilemmas, shifting deftly from his writerly effect to his philosophy, aligning the performative with the structural, and rendering the pyrotechnic assault of his sentences intelligible in terms of Zizek's engagement with the history of philosophy. Launching a brave but urgently needed grappling hook onto the monstrous accumulation of Zizek's theoretical edifice, Butler renders it more readable through the circular framework of philosophical reason. In the movement from the empirical to the transcendental and back again, or in Lacanian terms from the Real to the Symbolic, from act to master-signifier, Butler traps the tendencies of Zizek's thought to reverse and double itself, to identify its own differences and turn them into the same.
<2> Unlike the other thinkers in this rather dully titled Live Theory series of books on major thinkers, Zizek is increasingly productive, making a project that sums up his work risky to say the least. In The Parallax View (2006) Zizek himself performed this onerous task. Unlike The Parallax View, though, Butler's book is not interested in obscuring this method with the method itself, instead taming the theatrical tendencies at work in Zizek with a comparatively plain extrapolation of the master-signifier, the act, the negation of the negation, and on the way passing through succinct descriptions of God and the void, object a and the cause, the exception and the not-all, Hegel's concrete universal and so on. The difference between Butler and Zizek here is between complexity and performativity, as the effort to pin down what operative force is at work in the latter requires a definitive knight's move away from the flourish that characterises it. It is, then, at the price of demonstrating comedy that Butler emphasises the tragedy of Zizek's philosophy, the impossibility of ever eluding the circular logic of the transcendental, of eluding the master-signifier's incomplete eclipse of the void. It is this awful fate that motivates the monstrosity of Zizek's productivity, the impossibility of resolving the deadlock driving that fluctuating indecision of reversal and doubling.
<3> Butler's previous full-length work also examined a high profile theorist, Jean Baudrillard, in a pair of choices revealing the kinds of seductions with which this critic is most attracted to working. Like Zizek, Baudrillard has been something of a public intellectual for the postmodern age, a figure whose affect has not only been authorial but mediated. The doubling that Butler described in Baudrillard's work, in a theoretical mirror of the social order that ended up mirroring its own intervention, is also in play in Slavoj Zizek. Doubling describes one aspect of Zizek's strategy as that which proliferates a machinic revisitation of that terminal moment of splitting by which its own discourse is produced and by which it condemns itself to repetition and circularity. This is the way in which Zizek adopts the insights of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and SocialistStrategy (1985), turning their model of antagonistic social struggles to the total field of philosophy and theory itself. Through Zizek's ongoing debates with Laclau, Butler is able to articulate Zizek's positions most precisely, as Laclau adopts an increasing distance from Zizek's and toward a Leninist pragmatics. As Butler notes, this rediscovery of a Leninist conception of class remains riddled with all the undecidable qualities of the psychoanalytic symptom, more a method for revealing the master signifier in any particular constellation of meaning than a return to some traditional Marxism. Class in the later Zizek is useful as that which brings contemporary culture into view most succinctly, because it is class that is most invisible to it.
<4> The irony here is in that in speaking of Zizek as a philosopher, of the originality of his system of thought, Butler reveals the very lack by which this philosophy constitutes itself. The structured incompleteness of Zizek's methodology, here turning to the objet a and there to class, is easily glossed as that infinite deferral that accompanies interpretation and its object, the flirtation with the conditions of the social that are but stand-ins for more conditions and so on. This has always been the didactic misreading of Lacanian theory, but Butler shifts an understanding of this incompleteness to the very process of transference and counter-transference that underpins its movement, to a thought of the movement that is itself philosophical because it describes its system from a place that is simultaneously within and outside the system. Here Butler innovatively returns to the performative dimension of Zizek's work, identifying the place of this communication as more significant than the communication itself, and of Zizek as the pre-eminent theorist of this performative place. Zizek positions himself in the history of philosophy by arguing that philosophy's authority lies not in what it says but in the fact of saying it, just as in psychoanalysis the training process demands that the analyst occupy the place of the analyst's speech rather than possess psychoanalytic knowledge. In being the theorist who in theorising this place of philosophy comes to occupy this place, Zizek comes to occupy precisely no place at all. The situation is not dissimilar to that of Zizek's Jew, who is all things at once, both high class and low class, dirty and untouched by dirt, only to become the Jew that is more than Jew and yet no Jew at all.
<5> It is at this point that Butler's analysis of Zizek's appropriations and the re-appropriations of Zizek turns into a perceptive theory about the role of authority after postmodernism, and an insight into the way, for instance, Marx and Freud have come to function in discourse today. The occupation of the place of authority is not unlike Louis Marin's Sublime Poussin (1999), in which the King brings to visibility the void by which he assumes power. It is thus that the irony of Zizek's philosophy here turns into the paradox of its production, as in the process of working through the discourses of philosophy according to its place the impossibility of ever working through its place becomes apparent. The impossibility of thinking the void or its inscription, or of overcoming the inevitable and eternal return of the master, quilts the social field into a circularity that Butler is implicitly critical of. According to Butler doubling describes a simultaneous repetition and description in Zizek's discourse that refuses to transform the conditions by which he entered the discourse. The epic battles between inscription and reinscription, and those glimpses of the void that lies behind these battles, comes to appear unsympathetic to the differences at work within the history of philosophy, a history that Zizek empties out into this formula of a fracture inherent to its movement. While Butler's book does not extend as far into Zizek's oeuvre as Organs without Bodies (2003), such a criticism cannot be better glimpsed than in this account of Deleuze. The impossibility of thinking outside the circle turns up in a series of fundamental misunderstandings of Deleuze's break with the notion of interpretation itself, a break that Zizek simply ignores to the peril of his own interpretation. The impossibility to which Butler alludes is the very impossibility of Zizek ever reading Deleuze, or anyone else for that matter, without reading him as symptomatic of something else.
<6> So it is that Zizek follows the methods of philosophy in asserting a coherent set of conditions by which his interpretive practice takes place, but that these conditions are fundamentally not transcendental. Instead, Zizek proclaims the fact that they occupy a place of impossibility, that philosophy is based on a misunderstanding with itself. It is possible, in turn, to return to Hegel and Marx in order to see their own projects at the moment at which they shift from impossibility to constitute their own possibility, to find in Zizek the culmination of a machinic process by which this void that constitutes this transference from the one to the other becomes visible. This is the radical import of Zizek's split between Real and Symbolic, one that makes no claims for the use-value of knowledge acquired in the humanities, but instead discovers an original fracture in the processes at work within it. Thus, and as Butler points out, Zizek's discovery of such a fracture in the great synthesiser himself, Hegel, may well be his finest moment, as in confronting the historicist turn in the humanities for the past two decades in the figure of the dialectic Zizek points out that the search for the historical is invariably doomed to fail by its own logic. The search for the absent and historical cause is plagued by the inevitability of transference and counter-transference, the pretence to knowledge that is not knowledge at all. That Zizek is accused of ahistoricism by both Ernesto Laclau and Judith Butler in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000), and that Zizek counter-accuses with this very same nominalism in turn, is not only testament to the power of historicism in our own day. It also demonstrates Zizek's strategy of the double-negative, and in this case the point that historicism is itself ahistorical, revealing what we thought were the conditions of interpretation were not there at all, but through the sleight of dialectical sublation are the very contrary of these conditions. Thus it is that the one is its doubled opposite, that the thing is also itself, the Real, the transcendental.
<7> It is to Butler's credit that these often intentionally obscure manoeuvres on the part of Zizek are described both strategically and tactically, in the context of a history of philosophy and of an antagonistic theory. This account for the Zizek effect is also a demystification of the smoke and mirrors that accompany its pyrotechnics, yet in a way that sufficiently and seriously attends to its complexity. It is difficult to know whether we will be reading Butler's book in ten years, after Zizek has, like Freud and Lenin before him, shelves of collected works in the library. What is irreplaceable in Butler's approach to master-thinkers, in his books on both Baudrillard and Zizek, is this attention to the function of their authority, to that neglected dimension of author studies that reflects upon author studies itself, to the way in which an author's writing turns into their figure and back again. For a generation who have been intellectually weaned on Zizek, it is necessary to come to terms with Zizek in order to become post-Zizek, to discover in Zizek that affect which reveals his performative power. Butler's book gives us a key by which to consciously make that shift, to name the Zizek that empowers the place of Zizek, in an identification of that fracture by which we might begin to excavate his constant production.
Works Cited
Butler , Judith; Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. London and New York: Verso, 2000.
Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack. London: Verso, 1985.
Marin, Louis. Sublime Poussin. Trans. Catherine Porter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Zizek, Slavoj. Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences. New York and London: Routledge, 2004.
Zizek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.
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