Zizek's Violence

Zizek’s short book Violence (2008) begins with a series of distinctions and delimitations in order to bring into view his proper object.  He distinguishes first between subjective and objective violence.  Subjective violence is the immediate physical, physiological, experience of “violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent” (1).  In contradistinction to this is objective violence, which is distinguished into symbolic and systemic varieties.  Symbolic violence includes hate speech, the various hierarchies inscribed into our daily language (of gender, for instance), but also the “more fundamental form of violence still that pertains to language as such” (2).  Systemic violence is the apparently straightforward designation for “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (2).  The whole point of the book, we are told, is to get away from the “inherently mystifying…direct confrontation” (3-4) with specific acts of subjective violence.  The crude political point is that acts of violence, be they bombings on American soil or genocides committed in a far away African country, are mediatized in such a way as to demand an immediate, and therefore partial, subjective, response.   Zizek’s goal, then, is to examine the background against which the ‘subjective’ violence is rendered just that, subjective rather than objective.  The point is not (only or centrally) to show, once again, that capitalism is built on the violence of expropriation, or that certain categories of individuals are systemically excluded from equal access to certain resources.  As Zizek elaborated at length in his Parallax View, it is the inescapable gap between the objective and subjective that is the space of the subject.  So the point here is to examine the mutual positioning of objective and subjective violence in order to understand what kind of a subject is situated there, and how a different one might arise. 

Put differently, Zizek is interested in sites of resistance.  For instance, in his discussion of tolerance, and the critique of it that sometimes emerges from postcolonial studies, his view of cultural difference is ruled by the consideration of political possibility.  He says,

The self-reflexive sensitivity to one’s own limitation can only emerge against the background of the notions of autonomy and rationality promoted by liberalism.  One can, of course, argue that, in a way, the Western situation is even worse because in it oppression itself is obliterated and masked as free choice…Our freedom of choice effectively often functions as a mere formal gesture of consent to our own oppression and exploitation.  However, Hegel’s lesson that form matters is important here; form has an autonomy and efficacy of its own.  So when we compare a Third World woman, forced to undergo clitoridectomy or promised in marriage as a small child, with the First World woman ‘free to choose’ painful cosmetic surgery, the form of freedom matters—it opens up a space for critical reflection (147-8).

The point that Zizek wants to make, it seems to me, goes beyond the notion that a rhetoric can become a reality, that an appearance to be maintained can become a positive force for change.  He remains, I think, attached to the level of the subject.  He means something more like, without formal freedom, there will be no concrete freedom—but entirely in relation to the individual, not the society. 

This allows us to enter into the terrain that is generally upsetting for readers of Zizek.  For Zizek, the subject becomes free only in the moment of terror.  This moment is the juncture between subjective and objective.  The position here is in some sense a Hegelian one, of course, and a Lacanian one.  But it is more interesting to point out that it is Zizek’s way of suturing ethics into politics.

The key text examined in Violence is Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.”  The notion Zizek wants to explore is that of divine violence.  Although Zizek isn’t quite willing to say it, it seems to me that he identifies divine violence ultimately with the abyss of human freedom, or we might say more in his own terms, with the terror of the radical emptiness of the subject.  This is where he follows Lacan against Kant, “What is truly traumatic for the subject is not the fact that a pure ethical act is (perhaps) impossible, that freedom is (perhaps) an appearance, based on our ignorance of the true motivations of our acts; what is truly traumatic is freedom itself, the fact that freedom IS possible, and we desperately search for some ‘pathological’ determinations in order to avoid this fact” (196).  Divine violence is Zizek’s way of discussing this same fact of freedom and possibility on the objective level.  Zizek cites a long passage from Benjamin’s “Critique,” and then asserts that divine violence is to be understood as the “domain of sovereignty” (198).  Divine violence is not law-making, but beyond law.  It is, one is tempted to say, immanent and therefore outside the realm of law.  Without law, no crime.  Hence, Zizek says, “It is mythical violence that demands sacrifice, and holds power over bare life; whereas divine violence is non-sacrificial and expiatory.  One should therefore not be afraid to assert the formal parallel between the state annihilation of homini sacer, for example the Nazi killing of the Jews, and the revolutionary terror, where one can also kill without committing a crime and without sacrifice” (199).  This passage has alarmed certain people.  Not without reason.  Zizek then goes on, quoting Benjamin, “Less possible and also less urgent [the implication is, than revolutionary/divine/pure violence itself] for humankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence has been realized in particular cases…”  He concludes from Benjamin’s warnings that the instance of divine violence (now fully transformed into revolutionary violence) is not really of the order of Being—and then, I think oddly, he goes on to say that it is rather of the order of Event.  This is odd because the identification, or rather the assertion, of the Event is absolutely crucial in Badiou’s scheme of things.  Zizek compares the event to the miracle that, although it might have empirically verifiable causes, remains for the believer a miracle.  Fine, but a sort of identification none the less plays a crucial role here. 

In the end, though, divine or revolutionary violence comes to have a fairly banal meaning for Zizek.  We might in Rancièrian language say that it is violence erupting from the part of no part, or in Badiou’s terms, from beside the void.  Of course these are not the same thing, and I think that Zizek does not want to exactly endorse either of them.  Rather, for him, divine violence is that which comes from those who are the constitutive outside of the capitalist system.  And here is where the split within the field of objective violence returns.  Divine violence is that which takes place when a subject has risen from subjective freedom into the simultaneous necessities of the symbolic and the structural.  The agent of divine violence is both existentially free (inside the imperious terror of baseless, necessary action), and objectively free (pinioned to the outside of the inflexible wheel of capital).  He says,

Divine violence should thus be conceived as divine in the precise sense of the old Latin motto vox populi, vox dei: not in the perverse sense of ‘we are doing it as mere instruments of the People’s Will,’ but as the heroic assumption of the solitude of sovereign decision.  It is a decision (to kill, to risk or loose one’s own life) made in absolute solitude, with no cover in the big Other.  If it is extra-moral, it is not ‘immoral,’ it does not give the agent license just to kill with some kind of angelic innocence.  When those outside the structured social field strike ‘blindly,’ demanding and enacting immediate justice/vengeance, this is divine violence.  Recall, a decade or so ago, the panic in Rio de Janeiro when crowds descended from the favelas into the rich part of the city and started looting and burning supermarkets.  This was indeed divine violence…They were like biblical locusts, the divine punishment for men’s sinful ways (202).

This last sentence is a bit over the top, forced on Zizek by the example, and not entirely in keeping with the theoretical frame.  Or perhaps it suggests that underneath it all, the content inherited from Marx is in fact just an approach to the moral content of the global economy?

The very last move of Zizek’s book is remarkable, and I think suggests a serious and perhaps significant convergence between him and the authors of Commonwealth.  Zizek goes to Robespierre and Che Guevara, and the notion of revolutionary love.  Commenting on Robespierre, “divine violence belongs to the order of the Event: as such, its status is radically subjective, it is the subject’s work of love” (203), and then further at the end of the chapter, “the notion of love should be given here all its Paulinian weight; the domain of pure violence, the domain outside law (legal power), the domain of the violence which is neither law-founding nor law-sustaining, is the domain of love” (205).  Here is the subjective, I think we must say ethical, side to the more familiar and comprehensive, the more apparently provocative but in fact conventional, claim of Zizek’s that Hitler was not violent enough.  The subject is asked to embrace their own radical brokenness, to assume the gap constitutive of others in an act of terribly violent love.  If this ethical act is accompanied by a genuinely radical politico-economic reconfiguration—if, to emphasize, the twin terrors of both symbolic and systemic objectivity can be assumed in the freedom of the subject—then we will have made revolution.

The second, 2009, edition of In Defense of Lost Causes contains an afterword entitled “What is Divine about Divine Violence?”  It is essentially a clarification and restatement of the ideas presented in Violence—indeed certain sections are simply word-for-word copies (it is also, incidentally, a venue for the continuation of Zizek’s polemic with Simon Critchley).  Although a few examples are operative here, a central one is Haiti.  Zizek follows Susan Buck-Morss in her Hegelian reading of the Revolution a certain distance, but stops at what he calls her “liberal limit” (471).  Her liberalism—and this is not a wrong definition of liberalism—amounts to a rejection of (most) revolutionary activity on the grounds that it will simply make things worse than they already are.  Revolution is thus to be avoided, to be treated as a fearful last resort.  Zizek firmly rejects this.  He suggests that we must, “distinguish as clearly as possible between two types of violence; radical emancipatory violence against the ex-oppressors and the violence which serves the continuation and/or establishment of hierarchical relations of exploitation and domination” (471).  A familiar move.  From this perspective, “we should thus condemn the elimination of all whites in Haiti not out of humanitarian compassion for the innocent among them, but based on the insight that the true strategic goal of this process was to establish a new hierarchical order among the remaining blacks, justified by the ethnic ideology of blackness” (472). Zizek has here the great virtue of stating his position in a clear and unambiguous manner. 

He is simply drawing necessary conclusions from his premises when he says that it is entirely possible and necessary to distinguish between the acts of violence committed by the Tonton Macoutes (Duvalier) and the chimères (Lavalas).  Precisely the same acts, the same mode of inflicting painful death on a human being, has objectively different meanings.  When a murder is committed by the chimères, for Zizek, “these desperate acts of violent popular self-defense are again examples of divine violence: they are to be located ‘beyond good and evil,’ in a kind of politico-religious suspension of the ethical.  Although we are dealing with what, to an ordinary moral consciousness, cannot but appear as ‘immoral’ acts of killing, one has no right to condemn them, since they are the reply to years, centuries even, of systematic state violence and economic exploitation” (478).  He thus arrives at a “minimal definition of divine violence,” that is, “the counter-violence to the excess of violence that pertains to state power” (483).  Then, framing a distinction that is significantly different from the earlier one between emancipator/repressive violence, he says, “if mythic violence serves the state, divine violence doesn’t serve another, better, purpose (such as life) – it doesn’t serve anything, which is why it is divine” (484-5).  It is not too clear how this divine, purposeless violence, lines up with a revolutionary violence that is anti-repressive.  Perhaps the relationship is one of inclusion.  A struggle for freedom is not positive, but rather anti-repressive.  It is therefore not really to any positive purpose.  In this sense it is divine, even though Zizek also sees Nazi genocidal violence as basically divine, but not therefore revolutionary.  So some objective element must enter into the evaluation of purposeless, pure, violence, to distinguish that which is revolutionary from that which is not.  And here again, Zizek is at least very clear.  I think we can assume that the objective element that intervenes to assign violence into the mythic or the divine is the same as that which distinguishes divine-revolutionary from simply divine-sovereign violence.  This is the ethical commitment.  He says, returning to the Haitian example, “chimères and Tonton Macoutes may perform exactly the same act—lynching an enemy—but where the first act is divine, the second is only the ‘mythic’ obscene and illegal support of power.  The risk involved in reading or assuming an act as divine is fully the subject’s own” (485). 

That, I believe, is a fair presentation of what Zizek says about violence in these two recent texts.  My summary has of course had an element of evaluation and criticism, but an adequate contextualization of the arguments in the history of such arguments and in the contemporary political and theoretical contexts would be required to mount a proper critique of the corner into which Zizek has painted himself.  The major issue, it seems to me, is how to reconcile the above justification—or story about how to distinguish justifiable and non-justifiable acts of violence from one another—with what I take to be Zizek’s ‘positive’ political project of subtraction.  Is the analytic here worked out simply a way to think about that violence which is acceptable in pursuing and defending specific instances of subtraction?  Violence ceases to be revolutionary, divine, the moment that it becomes something the revolutionary government wields ‘so that the people do not do it themselves’?  This certainly is the case, but as a criterion it doesn’t go very far.  A fuller account of what Zizek means by subtractive, Bartleby-inspired, politics is required before one could move forward here.  And that’s for another day.   

Incipient (voyeuristic) liberalism

Zizek is generally at least stimulating. He manages to pose problems. Indeed, he has the courage at least to pose the obvious questions and face the obvious objections. As he says in a recent piece (May-June, 2009) in the New Left Review, "if liberal-democratic capitalism is, if not the best, then the least bad form of society, why should we not simply resign ourselves to it in a mature way, even accept it wholeheartedly? Why insist on the communist hypothesis, against all odds?" Indeed. In this short essay, “How to Begin from the Beginning”—which is at least half a retelling of Lenin’s ‘last struggle’ with Stalin and bureaucracy—Zizek does briefly suggest the basis on which he thinks that revolutionary politics should now be set. He says, “All truly emancipatory politics is generated by the short-circuit between the universality of the public use of reason and the universality of the ‘part of no part’. This was already the communist dream of the young Marx—to bring together the universality of philosophy with the universality of the proletariat.”

In the current configuration, there are four principle immanent antagonisms that seem like sources of potential catastrophe “the looming threat of ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of private property for so-called intellectual property; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments, especially in biogenetics; and last, but not least, new forms of social apartheid—new walls and slums.” Zizek doesn’t say this, but I imagine that these four broad categories can be arrived at by a simple content analysis of popular culture. Those things that scare us the most are understood to be somehow related to these immanent antagonisms. Fictions reveal them to us in utopias and distopias, apocalypses and period pieces.

Only the fourth of these four areas of potential catastrophe has the potential for universality, for Rancière’s ‘part of no part.’ In other words, the other forms of antagonism can all be managed in various ways by the many mechanisms developed by liberal democracy—rather than true democracy—and its culture for this very purpose. Zizek says,

“The predominant liberal notion of democracy also deals with those excluded, but in a radically different mode: it focuses on their inclusion, as minority voices. All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, and so on. The obsession of this democracy is the protection of all kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, etc. The formula of democracy here consists of patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost in this is the position of universality embodied in the excluded. The new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything. The threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract, empty Cartesian subject dispossessed of all our symbolic content, with our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unliveable environment. This triple threat makes us all proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The figure of the ‘part of no part’ confronts us with the truth of our own position; and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to avoid actually becoming so is to act preventively.”

Such are the last lines of the essay. I know that Zizek’s intention was radical, but it seems to me that, in essence, what he has just said is that it is only the ghettoized, only those most radically excluded by modernity, who are able to hold up to us a mirror of our own possible futures if we do not successfully moderate rampant capitalism through the judicious use of liberal, humanist reformism. The favelas, in this passage, are not a call to revolution, but a reminder that we do indeed have physical, psychological, and intellectual comforts worth defending. The ‘preventative action’ he invokes at the end does not sound like a revolution, it sounds more like a justification for another bailout. “In a way, we are all excluded...” surely this sounds just like the kind of “In a way, we are all different...” mindlessness against which Zizek supposedly stands? I see no relation whatsoever between Lenin’s dilemmas in the first part of the essay, and the (albeit very brief) analysis of the present situation in the last part. Perhaps Lacano-Leninism has in fact finally run out of ideas.

writing about Zizek

I am now obliged to write a paper about The Parallax View. Reading and thinking with Zizek is, I'm fairly certain, bad both for your prose and your head. So far I've written several fat paragraphs about the dust-jacket, not because I've nothing to say about the inside, but because it seems like a reasonable place to start. These paragraphs are a bit ridiculous, so I'll probably cut them from the final paper, or reduce them substantially (they'd be almost 2 1/2 pages of what can't be more than 8 or 9 total--too much). In the interests of not letting myself forget that I sometimes write this sort of stuff, I'm going to post it here, now.
------

Since so much of The Parallax View is about the play of appearances, it seems to me that a prejudiced over-reading of the most superficial and transitory part of the book-as-commodity (the jacket) is in order. The front of is a painting of an empty arm-chair, wrapped in a white cloth; to the viewer’s left is a table covered with papers, which can be seen to wrap around the spine. Before following the table around the book, what is this chair? I can only see it as a reference to Magritte.[1] The folding of the white cloth is strongly reminiscent of Magritte’s series of cloth-covered heads. Further echoes immediately suggest themselves. The title of the book—in bold, empty white type, contrasting sharply with the textured, painted background—labels the empty chair. Ceci n’est pas un pipe is only the most famous of Magritte’s ‘labeled’ paintings, there is a whole series of them; always, the label is not the same as the picture. So far we have an empty chair, labeled by the title of the book, and even signed by the name of the author at the bottom. Should we then read the label as misdirection or questioning?

Following the table around to the spine of the volume, we arrive at the back cover. We see that behind the table there is a couch, only the very end of which we could see on the front, it also is empty. There is little text, only the technical information, and the barcode (I am pleased to learn that MIT Press is able so easily to categorize The Parallax View as ‘philosophy/cultural studies.’) Mostly, there is the second half of the picture: a man (bald) sitting and writing, the paper supported by his knee, which appendage almost, but not quite, touches the table. At this point: the images on the two sides of the book are connected by the table (covered in written-on paper), and behind the table, the couch. Should we see here “two sides of the same coin,” connected by, on the one hand, writing, the very image of intellection, and on the other, the couch, the emblem of psychoanalysis?

The man sitting taking analytic notes on the spectral occupant of the couch is not anonymous. It is Lenin.[2] Of course, things become more complicated when we open the back flap, and see the picture of Zizek there, in the normal spot for such images. It is a picture of a piece of installation art. An empty chair and a plant before a large mirror, in which we see Zizek, sitting, absent from ‘reality.’ (Magritte, again, has several paintings which play with the idea of the mirror.) The formal parallel between the portrait of Zizek and the painting of Lenin is unavoidable—indeed, the original painting was reversed when it was put onto the cover, perhaps just so as to make the parallelism work.[3] Zizek is thus in Lenin’s ‘place’—are we supposed to be able to apply a Lacanian grid of some sort to the cover? Would we read the empty spots of the couch and chair for subject-positions, one and two, Lenin for the analyst and then the fourth position would be we, ourselves, the viewers of the painting, possessors of the book? For Lacan, if we may hazard a generalization, what was most interesting about the Sausseurian formula of the sign was neither the signifier at the top, nor the signified on the bottom, but rather the bar separating the two. The cover of Zizek’s book, then, might also be not so much about the two sides, as about the gap of representation as such—in this case, the spine of the book. At the bottom is the publisher’s logo, out of which rises the leg of the table (a phallus?), supporting the written-on pages (phallogocentric discourse?). Hovering above this field of text is the title of the book, framed by the one of the back-cushions of the couch (psychoanalysis itself)—above this, textured nothingness. Have we yet achieved non-sense?

This is a good point to pull up out of this hermeneutic spiraling nosedive. The superficial and disposable outside of the book puts, I think, a very fine point on the game of representation, in which art, politics and psycho-analysis are all deeply involved. The relationship between Zizek and Lenin is highlighted, and by extension, the relation of psychoanalysis to politics. Similarly at play in the jacket design are the covered and the uncovered; the real and the phantasmic; the human and the inhuman.

---

[1] Clearly, there are no formal similarities between Magritte’s photo-realist-surrealism and the socialist-realist painting used for the cover-art of The Parallax View. This painting is itself a copy made by Grigori Shpolyanski from an original by Isaac Brodsky. The game of political (mis)-representation is very much afoot (see note on front-flap). Although one finds things to disagree with on nearly every page of The Parallax View, there are relatively few outright errors. Interesting, then, that Zizek as a passing comparison to the self-constitution of consciousness, incorrectly attributes to Magritte the M.C. Escher picture of a hand drawing another hand, itself drawing the first hand (219). Should this be read symptomatically?

[2] I tread on thin ice here: The picture’s title is “Lenin at the Smolny Institute,” which I think means a specific time and place, December 1917, when Lenin and his cabinet agreed that Finland should be separate from Russia. I wouldn’t speculate further on this without more information.

[3] Of course, this reversal often happens—perhaps it is a technical convenience? The cover of Laclau’s On Populist Reason also reverses its painting, a detail from “The Fourth Estate” by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. What conclusion, if any, is to be drawn from the fact that this painting is also featured as the background to the opening credits of Bernardo Bertollucci’s epic film Novocento? Did either Laclau or Zizek even have a hand in the design of their books? Does the answer matter?

Conservative

Apropos of the last posting: perhaps I have revealed my (always suspected) essentially conservative nature, since, as Zizek quotes Heidegger as saying:

“What is conservative remains bogged down in the historiographical; only what is revolutionary attains the depth of history. Revolution does not mean here mere subversion and destruction but an upheaval and re-creating of the customary so that the beginning might be restructured...” (qtd on page 278, Parallax View)

But then again, perhaps it is ‘properly’ progressive to be called conservative by Heidegger?

Harpham on Zizek

Harpham, Galt. "Doing The Impossible: Slavoj Zizek and the End of Knowledge." Critical Inquiry Volume 29, Number 3, Spring 2003.

All in all, much less exciting than the title might lead you to believe, but not a terrible polemic-by-way-of-introduction.

“If we took Zizek as a guide to the real character of conventional academic methods and practices, we would be forced to revise--actually, to discard--all our assumptions about academic work and indeed about rational thought as such. For if Zizek's practice were to be universalized, the result would be the destruction of the very idea of a field, a specialized professional discourse that arrives at a true account of a limited domain by progressive and rational means. It would mean the end of life as we know it.”

Harpham also says, “Much of Lacan's mystique derives from the fact that he grounds his hypotheses about the mind in a science of language, giving them authority, scope, and profundity. But, as we have seen, Lacan relied on Saussure for that science...” and it may be true that the mystique comes from this ‘structuralist veneer,’ but it is also the case (as Harpham says) that Lacan botched or radically altered Saussurean lingusitics. Isn’t a more sensible reading of the relationship between the two that in 1957 Lacan knew Saussure was huge, knew that everyone was saying these things, and proceeded with his own, rather un-Saussurean understanding of language? He is often nasty, often ironic—why not here? Certainly, Zizek is very clear in Sublime Object of Ideology that he does not consider Lacan to be any kind of structuralist.

dunno what's going on with the formatting. it's what i get for cutting-and-pasting from html.

theory

Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989).

First of all, the experience of reading this book. While conscious that I might be generalizing my own reading style, I would still say that this is not a book for which it is necessary to understand every sentence. I plowed through it. I think the book is designed for this sort of reading, because the major themes are repeated, speak to one another at nearly every point. Further, nearly every point is made first in highly specialized terminology, lacanian, hegelian, whatever, and then those nice whacky examples, Hitchcock, Jewish, Stalinist or otherwise obscene jokes...I, at least, followed doggedly and began to have moments of clarity. Here and there I came to see how the descriptions made sense. Lacanian formulations which were at first nonsensical began to take on not just specific, but, I think, useful meaning.

I am hesitant to summarize conclusions of the book in a conventional way. However, Zizek is explicit in the introduction about what he wants to do. First, he intends to introduce the reader to Lacanian psychoanalysis. Zizek’s Lacan, rather than post-structuralist is “perhaps the most radical contemporary version of the Enlightenment” (9). Although there seems to me no natural opposition between the two terms, Zizek also claims Lacan as a rationalist rather than an obscurantist. Second, he wants to “reactualize Hegelian dialectics by giving it a new reading on the basis of Lacanian psychoanalysis.” Finally, Zizek wants “to contribute to a theory of ideology via a new reading of some well-known classical motifs...and of some crucial Lacanian concepts.” Naturally, these three objectives are related.

Being familiar neither with common versions of Lacan as post-structuralist or Hegel as monist-idealist, I am not necessarily well equipped to evaluate Zizek. I am hardly better off when it comes to the theory of ideology, which I take to be more or less the same thing that Laclau and Mouffe do—Hegemony and Socialist Strategy pops up frequently in the text, and Laclau wrote the preface—a sort of althuserian post-marxism. I’ve looked at Hegemony, though only really in passing. Certainly, Zizek’s application (if so vulgar a word is acceptable) of Lacanian procedures to political/social analysis is more fluid, enjoyable, and condensed than Laclau and Mouffe’s. He seems less concerned than they are with ‘political’ questions, focusing rather on theoretical, philosophical issues.

What I appreciate about Zizek, and which I didn’t find in Hegemony, is the strong effort to have it both ways. Indeed, he presents Lacan as someone who is in full control of the conceptual apparatus of ‘structuralism’ and ‘post-structuralism,’ and who wants, none the less, to describe lived human experience. Or, rather, who insists on the reality of this experience, “Lacan always insists on psychoanalysis as a truth-experience: his thesis that truth is structured like a fiction has nothing at all to do with a post-structuralist reduction of the truth-dimension to a textual ‘truth-effect.’” (154). The contortions of Lacanian psychoanalysis are, among other things, attempts to explain the profound interpenetration of so called subject and so called language. These contortions are not so dissimilar, I think, to Sartre’s in the Critique of Dialectical Reason—hammering together the existential individual and marxist historical materialism. It is curious, I suppose, that Lacan seems more useful, more relevant today. Still, at several points in Zizek’s book, I felt strongly that the Lacan he was explaining had a great deal in common with the Sartre I’m aware of. Perhaps this feeling is the result of drinking at the Jamesonian trough about Sartre, and hearing him drop dark hints about the Sartrean interstices of Lacan. I’ll have to read Jameson’s Lacan essay.