The Politics of Lack

Lasse Thomassen

Department of Government
University of Essex
lathom@essex.ac.uk

 

Review of: Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology.London: Verso, 1999.

 

The Ticklish Subject is a recent work by Slovene philosopher, social theorist, and Lacanian psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek, who has produced books at the pace of more than one per year since the 1989 publication of his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology. As in his previous books, Zizek intermixes psychoanalysis, nineteenth-century German philosophy, political theory, and popular culture. With The Ticklish Subject, Zizek endeavors to bring together three of his main concerns: Lacanian psychoanalysis, the question of subjectivity, and the possibilities for a Leftist politics in today’s late-capitalist, postmodern world. He sets out to provide a “systematic exposition of the foundations of his theory” (to quote the book’s cover), in order to address the relation between Lacanian theory, subjectivity, and politics. Thus, The Ticklish Subject purports to be a Lacanian theory of politics and the political–in short, a theory of political subjectivity.

 

The book is divided into three parts, each of which addresses one of three important formulations of subjectivity: the German Idealist subject, the political subject of French post-Althusserian political philosophy, and the deconstructionist and multi-spectral subject theorized by Judith Butler. In each of the book’s three main parts, Zizek starts from a critical reading of Martin Heidegger’s, Alain Badiou’s, and Judith Butler’s respective critiques of the traditional Cartesian notion of the subject.

 

As an alternative to the Cartesian subject and to the three critiques of the Cartesian subject, Zizek proposes a Lacanian notion of subjectivity. To explain what this involves, we can start by looking at the notion of the decision and at the distinctions Zizek makes between the “ontological” and the “ontic.” Whereas the ontic refers to what is–that is, to a positive being–the ontological refers to the conditions of possibility and limits of what is. With the ontic we ask what is; with the ontological we ask how it is possible that it can be. Zizek believes that no ontic content or being can be derived from an ontological form. In other words, there is no concrete ontic content that can be the positive expression of being as such–that is, of the ontological order. In this sense, the ontological relates to the ontic in the same way as form relates to content. What Zizek wants to stress here is that it is not possible to find a concrete community that expresses the structure of community as such. So, for instance, he criticizes Heidegger’s assertion that the National Socialist State is the concrete expression of the structure of community and social being as such. Heidegger’s fault lies in the fact that he tries to establish a necessary connection between the ontological (the structure of social being as such) and a particular ontic being (the National Socialist State). We may be able to deconstruct community to show the conditions of possibility of community, but we cannot find the particular community that best expresses these conditions of possibility. Zizek develops this argument as a critique of Heidegger. The problem with Heidegger is that on one hand he insists on the distinction between the ontological and the ontic, but on the other hand he ends up looking for the particular ontic community that would realize the “essence” of the ontological structure of society as such, that is, for the ontic of the ontological.

 

Zizek insists that there is an insurmountable gap between the ontological and the ontic, and that we are not able to move directly from one to the other. In other words, it is not possible to proceed directly from a formal argument to a particular substantial argument, from form to content. The question then becomes how the gap between them is filled or bridged. Here we encounter Zizek’s notion of the decision, which fills the gap between the ontological and the ontic. The decision cannot be grounded in any ontological structure, but this does not mean that you cannot give grounds for the decisions you make. What it means is that the decision can only be grounded in ontic structures, which are never universal. The decision can be grounded in a system of thought–a culture, an ideology, a logic, and so on–but no system can be universal and fully coherent. Thus, ultimately there is no final and “secure” ground for the decision. It is for this reason that Zizek can assert that the decision filling the gap between the ontological and the ontic is “mad” in Kierkegaard’s sense of being ultimately ungrounded. The decision is a leap of faith, so to speak.

 

We can now understand Zizek’s Lacanian notion of the subject. In Lacanian theory, the subject is situated in the lack that we find in any symbolic structure and in the decision or act attempting to fill this lack. Here we can understand the lack analogously to the gap between the ontological and the ontic. Any symbolic structure–from mathematics to ideology–is constituted by a lack, something that escapes the symbolic structure and that it cannot explain. Thus, the lack denotes an incompleteness of the symbolic structure. The symbolic structures surrounding us and on which we rely for our social interaction are lacking something, and this lack is constitutive of social life and of any community. This makes social life a fragile enterprise because it does not have a secure foundation. The subject can then try to “fill in” this gap or to hide it. This is, for instance, the case when a constitutive insecurity is presented as contingent, when we are told that we merely have to get rid of a particular group of people, a particular environmental risk and so on in order to (re-)establish a perfect harmony. This is one aspect of what Zizek calls ideology. However, every attempt to get rid of the constitutive lack and fragility is ultimately futile, precisely because it is never possible to close the gap between the ontological and the ontic. The subject–and political subjectivity–is situated at the point where the filling of the lack would take place. Hence, the subject is itself constituted by a lack. The subject never succeeds in filling out the lack of the symbolic structures or the gap between the ontological and the ontic. The subject is never fully constituted; rather, the subject is these constant but always futile attempts at constituting the subject.

 

We have seen how Zizek conceives of the subject. It is from this conception of the subject that he criticizes conceptions of subjectivity by Kant, Heidegger, and Butler in each of the three main parts of The Ticklish Subject. Rather than provide a detailed analysis of each of these particular critiques, I will address the ethico-political conclusions Zizek draws in order to evaluate the value of the book. The question Zizek poses is whether we can argue for a particular Leftist politics given the conclusions he has made about political subjectivity. In this regard, the term “the authentic act” is central. The authentic act is an act–or, we could say, a decision–relating to itself in a special way. The authentic act acknowledges that ultimately it cannot be grounded. That is, the authentic act acknowledges that there can be no total, universal, and coherent symbolic system that can justify and support the act. Obviously the act can be supported by and justified within a cultural or ideological symbolic system. However, this system cannot be complete and coherent. There is something that escapes it; in other words, there is a lack. As opposed to what Zizek calls a “pseudo-act,” the authentic act acknowledges this fact and does not seek to cover it up. Zizek then believes that he can distinguish the Nazism of the 1930s and the 1940s as a pseudo-act, and the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia as an authentic act. Whereas the former sought to (re-)establish a positive and “full” totality, according to Zizek, the latter acknowledged that it could never establish a complete totality and therefore had to be repeated infinitely as an act. The latter is said to rely on the idea of a constant revolution. Thus, an authentic act acknowledges that it cannot be deduced from and reduced to any total and coherent symbolic structure. The authentic act is anti-totalitarian. Hence, we can say that the authentic act and an authentic politics “suspend” the symbolic structures through which we understand the world and on which we rely when we act in the world. This amounts to saying that the authentic act and an authentic politics put into question the structures that are otherwise taken as given, natural, and universal.

 

It is in this light that we must view Zizek’s critique of capitalism and of the theories of multiculturalism and risk society. According to Zizek, the world is capitalist today, and therefore politics must relate to the capitalist structures underlying contemporary life. This is not the case with the theories and the politics of postmodernism, multiculturalism, and risk society, however. These theories do not question the fundamental structures of contemporary society. Instead, they focus on what are merely the consequences of the development of contemporary capitalism: namely particularized cultural identities and environmental risks. In fact, environmental risks are generated by capitalism, and capitalism is able to exist and to globalize itself precisely by hiding itself behind cultural and national particularities. Thus, a Leftist anti-capitalist politics cannot merely recognize and affirm cultural diversity and target environmental risks. Rather, a Leftist politics should question the very structures underlying these phenomena. In this way, Zizek believes that it is possible to argue for a Leftist anti-essentialist political position that avoids reproducing existing structures and is not nihilistic, but is able to improve social conditions.

 

In The Ticklish Subject, Zizek provides a powerful articulation of political subjectivity, and I highly recommend the book. This said, however, I do have several reservations about the central argument of the book. Although there is a red thread running through it, the book does not provide the “systematic exposition” promised by its cover. In addition, I am troubled by the ambiguous scope and lack of internal consistency of Zizek’s theoretical argument. As we have seen, Zizek makes two central points in The Ticklish Subject. First, he insists on a distinction between the ontological and the ontic, and on the impossibility of deriving an ethics and a politics from a formal political ontology, for instance, from a Lacanian ontology of political subjectivity. Secondly, he attempts to argue for a Lacanian ethics and/or a Leftist ethico-political position. This is, indeed, a very interesting project and an important philosophical enterprise, given the ongoing political paralysis and postmodern nihilism of the Left today. However, Zizek’s position raises several problems. First, the status of Zizek’s notion of the subject is unclear. Is it an argument with universal applicability, or an argument about contemporary Western societies? Is Zizek’s notion of the subject a purely formal (structural) notion, or is it only applicable to postmodern Western subjectivities?

 

More importantly, there is the problem of bridging the gap between Zizek’s formal Lacanian argument and his ethico-political arguments. This is not a critique of Zizek’s ethico-political position, but of the way he argues for it. Zizek uses large parts of the book to stress the constitutive gap between the ontological and the ontic. However, when he engages with ethico-political arguments, an ambiguity appears. It is not clear what his Lacanian ethics and politics imply, since Zizek appears to argue for three different and mutually exclusive positions in The Ticklish Subject. The first position is that it is not possible to derive an ethics and a politics from the Lacanian argument about subjectivity. This follows from his insistence on the gap between the ontological and the ontic. The second position is that there is a certain Lacanian ethics, namely an ethics of disruption and suspension. This is an ethics that does not attempt to erect a new comprehensive system telling us how to live the Good Life, but rather attempts to open up possibilities for disrupting any existing system. In relation to this position, the problem is whether this is not already a particular positivization of a formal argument about subjectivity, a positivization that does not acknowledge the irreducible gap between the ontological and the ontic. Finally, Zizek seems to argue not only for concrete ethical and political positions, but also that these positions are the correct expression of the ontology of the subject. This, of course, runs counter to the argument he makes about the irreducibility of the gap between the ontological and the ontic. Zizek’s Lacanian argument is precisely that it is not possible to bridge the gap between a formal argument and a concrete position. In short, Zizek tries to do things with Lacanian theory that–according to his own arguments–it cannot do.

 

These critical remarks notwithstanding, The Ticklish Subject is a book that should be read by anyone interested in political subjectivity.