In Theory, Politics Does not Exist

The acrimonious dispute between Slavoj Zizek and Ernesto Laclau published recently in three Critical Inquiry essays turns away from the key question that it raises: Is there, today, any bond left between socialism and psychoanalysis, politics and theory? Perhaps the authors, blinded by their bitterness, cannot recognize the true subject of their contestation; or perhaps they believe that the debate actually concerns populism, which in fact is merely the skirmish’s pretext. It is certain that in the book that prompted the Critical Inquiry articles, On Populist Reason, Laclau attempts both to redefine populism–he notes that the term, used to classify so many different types of formations, has grown almost meaningless–and, through this redefinition, to illustrate that populism names not a particular kind of politics, but the political itself.[1] His central focus thus falls not on regimes that have been labeled “populist,” but on a general structure that encompasses all political interventions, including these “populist” ones. Laclau has a particular goal in offering such a thesis. He wants to show that populism, when rigorously recast, offers great possibilities for a new leftism in the wake of Marxism’s decline.
 
Zizek insists on the near opposite. Today, he argues, left-leaning populism is the great temptation that must be resisted. Its most seductive promise, the liberation of the poor from the clutches of neoliberalism, constitutes an appeal to old-fashioned liberalism, feeding the capitalist system it claims to undermine. In fact, Zizek is more intrigued by right-wing populisms than by their liberal counterparts. The former, radical and antagonist, at least disclose the objectionable elements of capitalism that the more “democratic” populisms both conceal and render palatable. Yet these right-wing movements are hardly desirable. Populism as a whole, then, is a political dead-end, a form within a contemporary “postpolitical” ( Zizek’s term), neoliberal universe that threatens to render politics itself superfluous.
 
Is populism, in the current setting, a proper name for politics or the means for its demise? There are few more pressing political questions. Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, so attractive to many on the left, so abhorred by many on the right, yet also so typical, almost banal, within a Latin American history that abounds in such populist regimes (Laclau, who cut his intellectual teeth during the Peronist period in Argentina, is quite familiar with the populist archetype), bears witness to the excitement and nervousness that populism causes, within all political camps, today as much as ever.
 
It should be noted that Zizek’s and Laclau’s opposing views on populism stand in for other fields of contention. Will a leftist politics of the future come in the form of a revamped democracy, as Laclau holds? Or, as Zizek maintains, is democracy the very political form that must be overcome for such an advent to take place? This particular, highly-intellectualized version of the argument “against or for” democracy must be situated in its proper place. For Zizek’s position is not taken merely in response to the “spreading of democracy” qua “spreading of the free market” rhetoric captained by politicians of nearly every Western–and non-Western–state. Nor does it represent a simple objection to the liberal so-called “political correctness” that today claims democracy with both hands. The more direct target for “anti-democrats” such as Zizek or Alain Badiou is a group of post-Marxist, post-Althusserian individuals: Laclau, Etienne Balibar, and Jacques Rancière, to name three principals. These scholars labor to rework or re-form democracy, casting the demos, the people, as the core of a leftism-to-come. Rather than setting out novel political theories (all parties agree that these are needed) that retain the basic assumptions of Marxism, namely, the fundamental importance of class difference and economic exploitation, the “democraticists” lend a hand to the disregard of even those fundamentals by eschewing their own Marxist origins. As a consequence, the question concerning democracy emerges as synonymous with another: Are the grounds of Marxism so flawed or “out-of-date” that leftist theory demands a total reworking of the very reason for Marxism? Or is Marxism and Marxist history, albeit recast, called for now more than ever?
 
In his 1933 essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (which Laclau briefly references), George Bataille opens a path for thinking through these matters. The essay poses two main queries: How did fascism emerge in Europe? And why did this popular revolt yield fascism rather than socialism? Popular movements within capitalism, Bataille says, develop not in response to a monolithic state homogeneity but precisely in response to its breakdown. The homogeneity itself is sustained through the development of productive citizens, each occupying a useful place. Add up all individuals performing one useful and measurable task within one contained site, and the sum is homogeneity. The actual production is thus beneficial neither in itself nor for the citizen. It is valuable for capitalism as a whole, which the production reproduces and advances; and it is equally valuable for the state since production generates and maintains the social order. It compels each person, reduced to an occupant within the field of production, to inhabit a proper place. Homogeneity, then, is the aggregate of calculable elements, of disjointed individuals held together by an abstract common denominator: money.
 
Given the alienation of its constituents, state homogeneity can nonetheless not evade unrest and must call upon, in Bataille’s terms, “imperative agencies.” According to Bataille, the state as such is not a sovereign entity. It does not possess the rights or power of an actual sovereign, e.g., the nation, the king, or the army. The state is therefore dependent upon imperative agencies that, borrowing their power from the sovereign bodies, preserve unity and order. (One might think of a local police force.) As a consequence, the homogeneity constantly adapts to restrain strife. On the one hand, it shifts in order to assimilate the novel alienated constituents; on the other, it adjusts so as to incorporate the diverse–depending on the circumstances–imperative agents upon which it calls. The latter, in fact, eventually garner or are granted so much strength that they grow independent. Independence, in this context, has a very specific meaning. It refers to an imperative agent that emerges as useful to itself rather than to the homogeneity. For example, a rookie cop in a rogue police force can come to believe that he is useful to the force itself, and to himself as an individual who ascends the ranks, but not to the town or state the force is supposed to protect. Hence, the “independence” generates two distinct aims of production: imperative agencies (individual powers) and the state. The homogeneity, split in two, breaks down.
 
Composed largely of the petty bourgeoisie, the agencies are now dissociated from the homogeneity. They thus materialize, in Bataille’s parlance, as heterogeneous bodies. Another heterogeneity parallels them; it is composed of those who never, as themselves (as human beings, not producers), belonged to the homogeneity, namely, the proletariat. As heterogeneous or “other,” both clusters are cast by the state as dangerous outsides, as taboo. One sits above the state, as the untouchable; the other below it, as dirt. When the loftier taboo, the dissociated–who reaped their original power from the sovereign–take on a military or paramilitary presence in order to assert or maintain independence, their leader or chief assumes the place of a sovereign (in fact, of the sovereign of the sovereign–as taboo, this body is pure exteriority, without peer, indeed, sacred and divine). The proletariat, no less heterogeneous, glimpses its own image in this peerless outside, in another other (the leader). Donning the military gala that symbolizes heroic inclusion within the reign of the new sovereign, the proletariat finds its place in or through that chief. Of course, in return the proletariat receives but more alienation. The uniformed men do not “become themselves,” neither workers nor men, through their identification. In fact, they take their place in the new order as lowly, passive, subjugated soldiers. Nonetheless, the bubbling “effervescence” (Bataille repeatedly deploys this term) of the proletariat, the root of which is the perilous disintegration of the original homogeneity, has served a purpose. It has generated the popular energy that feeds the revolutionary authoritarianism and, in certain cases, fascism.
 
Bataille then asks under what conditions the two heterogeneous groups might join forces in the reverse direction, through the identification of the dissociated bourgeoisie with the excluded proletariat, thereby forming a socialist revolution. In other words, why is there fascism instead of socialism? Bataille demonstrates quite convincingly that a response cannot be derived from an examination of economic, cultural, or political factors. While these fields can account for the emergence of both a homogeneous state and the double heterogeneity that arises from the break-up of this homogeneity, they cannot yield an explanation for the identification of the excluded proletariat with the dissociated Head. That phenomenon is an issue for psychology. Deeply loyal to the Marxist cause, Bataille nonetheless intimates that no Marxist project can, of itself, demonstrate why socialism (a leftist popular front) rather than fascism (right-wing populism) should surface from either modern capitalism or democracies. In fact, Bataille insists that the democracy that the bourgeoisie instated by overcoming feudalism and absolutism, and that, in the classical Marxist framework, represents the conditions by which the proletariat will eventually overturn the bourgeoisie in the name of socialism, offers few expectations: “In fact, it is evident that the situation of the major democratic powers, where the fate of the Revolution is being played out, does not warrant the slightest confidence: it is only the very nearly indifferent attitude of the proletariat that has permitted these countries to avoid fascist formations” (159). Indeed, socialism’s advent depends not on mere socioeconomic shifts but on “forms of [psychological] attraction” that, rather than draw subordinates to powerful images of a Leader, “differ from those already in existence, as different from present or even past communism as fascism is from dynastic claims . . . [a] system of knowledge that permits the anticipation of the affective social reactions that traverse the superstructure and perhaps even, to a certain extent, do away with it” (159). The condition of leftist, popular revolt is a novel knowledge of “affect,” one that reveals how and why the human psyche will one day shift its direction “down” (the taboo of dirt) rather than “up” (the taboo of the absolute). Bataille thereby marks out a relation of knowledge and political practice. A theory of a potential reorientation of affects “anticipates,” thus renders conceivable, a distinct society. Unveiling alternative paths for the psyche, it produces realistic hope: the sheer fact that socialism can be anticipated. Current knowledge of political events, to the contrary, frustrates in advance socialist efforts. The limited knowledge that we possess of political processes and human behavior convinces us that socialism cannot but fail, draining the energy even to commence an emancipatory process. Of course, no form of knowledge can assure the socialist advent, the empowerment of the heterogeneity “from below.” Yet nor will the advent happen without this collective expectation, that is, without the knowledge that renders such prospects thinkable.
 
The knowledge cannot be scientific. According to Bataille, science operates only through the elimination of heterogeneity. Instead, what is required is a “discipline” whose aim is heterogeneity itself. Indeed, Bataille insists that heterogeneity is not a negative chaos (in the Hegelian or phenomenological sense of the negative) but an affirmative structure than can be outlined and understood: “social heterogeneity does not exist in a formless and disoriented state: on the contrary, it constantly tends to a split-off structure; and when social elements pass over to the heterogeneous side, their action still finds itself determined by the actual structure of that side” (140). The real existing structure of heterogeneity–this is what established intellectual systems cannot grasp; these systems do not offer “even the simple revelation of its [the heterogeneous side’s] positive and clearly separate existence” (141). However, a new discipline, still embryonic, is arising to accomplish the feat: Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud introduces a domain that “must be considered as one of the aspects of the heterogeneous,” to wit, the “unconscious” (141). In fact, political heterogeneity and the unconscious enjoy “certain properties in common” (141). Although Bataille is “unable to elaborate immediately upon this point,” he manages in “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” to present a notion that theory, including that of Laclau and Zizek, will broach for years to come: a Marxism supplemented by psychoanalysis opens the way for the thought of real existing socialism (141).
 
In The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Bataille’s friend Jacques Lacan conducts precisely such an “elaboration.” In the aftermath of May 1968, Lacan sets out to challenge the Parisian students who question the legitimacy of his teaching and practice: “The revolutionary aspiration has only a single possible outcome–of ending up as the master’s discourse . . . . What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one” (207). The inquiry into Bataille’s thesis actually begins, however, when Lacan posits the unconscious as a heterogeneous structure in his famous declaration that the unconscious is structured like a language. Most broadly, this signifies two things. It means that language has a particular structure, one found in no other domain, for language is the field of the other, a heterogeneous field; and it means that analysis of this heterogeneous topos exposes the structure of another, which is like it, namely, the unconscious. What structure or structures, then, are specific to language?
 
Lacan concentrates on two: rhetoric and grammar. Anyone who has learned a foreign language knows that grammar is not, as one might intuit, structured logically. That in a given idiom a certain adjective should appear after rather than before a noun is an effect unbound to any cause. The order of words is not “like” the order of logic (an order that stipulates that for every effect there is a prior cause). When one obeys or disobeys the rules of grammar, one engages codes that are of grammar alone. To be sure, grammar, like signifiers, makes possible the logical representation of phenomena–of things, ideas, emotions, messages, and so on–but grammar is not itself the logic of those representations. Indeed, grammar is not like, it does not represent, anything. It refers to no phenomenon that lies outside of it.[2] A father utters “dog” to a child, referring and pointing to an animal with four legs. If he points to the same creature and says “noun,” he still refers to a dog, not the grammatical unit, though dog may be a noun in this context. No “dog” (or sign) represents the “phenomenon” of a noun. “Noun” does not exist outside of language. Of course, a noun may be defined. It is a person, place, or thing, a given structure in a sentence, a word that patterns like a noun, and so on. In these definitions, however, the grammatical principle refers just to more language, to itself as language, not to a phenomenon.
 
What holds for grammar holds for the structure of language in general. Language is a schema that is certain to refer solely to itself. If, as many believe, language or the logos is the fundament of the being human, then such “being” necessarily follows the inhuman rules of “another scene,” the scene of language. Humans contain properties that are not proper, but heterogeneous to them, and heterogeneous to property itself. In other words, language installs in human practices and communities a template for heterogeneity that human beings cannot not follow; the schema forms an unavoidable, alien directive that is a portion of that humanity. The unconscious marks humanity in a similar fashion. It is a heterogeneous energy, whose elements refer only to itself, according to its own rules. These “guides” (mis)lead conscious activity without ever themselves becoming conscious.
 
The unconscious, then, is like language. The two domains represent two distinctive figures of heterogeneity. Yet the unconscious and language are not entirely “peerless” since they appear relative to each other. A likeness between them exists. This likeness, however, cannot be shared equally. “Likeness,” after all, belongs to the field of rhetoric, hence language. It is well known that for Freud and Lacan rhetoric (such as figures of speech, slips of tongue, stuttering, metaphors) translates the unconscious, primarily in the form of symptoms. One heterogeneous field, language, recasts and miscasts the other heterogeneity, the unconscious, into its own mold, into language. It is less emphasized that for Lacan the fact that the unconscious is structured like a language signifies that likeness–rhetoric as a scaffold of language that the unconscious is like–is an imbedded configuration inside the unconscious. Language is an internal part of the unconscious. To be sure, this language is very peculiar. While it can be translated or mistranslated into symptoms, it can translate or transform nothing but itself, into which it always already turns.
 
We can thus sum up the meaning of the adage “the unconscious is structured like a language” in two statements: 1) the understanding of the structure of one heterogeneity (language) aids in the comprehension of its likeness, another heterogeneity, the unconscious; and 2) when, in analysis, language is experienced, so too is an imbedded “piece” of the unconscious, now a source for the knowledge of the “other scene.”
 
In The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Lacan directly discloses the political ramifications of these ideas. Addressing the context in which he speaks, the Paris post-1968, Lacan lays out four discourses: of the university, the master, the hysteric, and the analyst. The seminar, however, turns on and around Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic. The slave possesses both know-how, the skills that permit him to convert raw material into commodities, and comprehension, understanding of the master’s pleasure, without which he could not satisfy the master. In his quest for Mastery, the master has no choice but to appropriate this knowledge. He does so, stealing the slave’s knowledge via the medium within which it arrives at his doorstep, production. If the slave produces “things” through knowledge, those things must be containers of the knowledge. However, the appropriation (thievery) and conversion (knowledge to product) machine translates the knowledge into something other than knowledge, to wit, a series of equivalents and values, that is, into the commodity. In more Lacanian language, knowledge is turned into a system of signifiers that are “worth” something else. In other words, the master dispossesses the slave of his knowledge by translating it into the Symbolic Order. As compensation, the slave receives one of that order’s signifiers: a proper name, a useful place in the system, a value which relieves him of his slave status so as to handcuff him to the new social order, now as wage earner. Once bonded to the sovereign, the slave-slave reemerges as the worker-slave qua capitalist subject, subjected to the Symbolic Order. He moves from one master to another.
 
However, the master, as thief, errs in his quest. As Lacan emphasizes, a product, the result of knowledge, actually contains no knowledge within it (90). It is a dumb object. When the bandit master turns the slave’s production into a social order that reproduces itself through the wage-worker that materializes in the slave’s place, knowledge drops out of the equation. The slave’s knowledge disappears with the slave himself. Or rather, as we will see, knowledge remains, but outside, in excess of the capitalist conversion. Hence, the Symbolic Order cannot yield knowledge but solely truth (the master’s discourse, the University discourse, or the hysteric’s discourse), adequacy to a system. In fact, this is why the slave, who never forfeits know-how throughout the process (else he cease to serve the capitalist), does lose his knowledge. Over against the master’s discourse, which is that of truth, know-how ceases to stand as an alternative form of knowledge, materializing as less than knowledge.
 
Lacan is thereby able to define the master as the one who does not know, who has truth but no knowledge; he does not know his own pleasure, the knowledge that the slave once knew but that has been lost in translation (32). The Other Side of Psychoanalysis tracks this lost knowledge through an analysis of loss itself. When the slave is ripped off, he receives, in addition to his alienation, further compensation about which the master remains unaware: the dispossession itself, the loss. Indeed, in Lacan loss is a sort of object, the objet petit a. In the present context, three definitions of this object must be stressed: the object cause of desire , the object of the drive, and/or surplus jouissance (plus-de-jouir).
 
The objet petit a is often imagined as a substitute entity that, via fantasy, restores a forfeited wholeness, replacing a loss. Yet this presumed original loss, or former wholeness, is itself the fantasy, the fantasy of the master. The master discourse, indeed, is masterful only through this fantasy–not of the wholeness but of the wholeness’ lack. The master contains everything but one thing. In fact, the one thing may be almost anything. It is any old common noun that is taken by the subject, within a given context, as that subject’s proper name: as a signifier without a signified but endowed with a fixed, unyielding referent (for the adult, the proper name most likely serves this purpose). The collection of signifiers that composes the Symbolic Order is, by the very definition of that order, missing the one word, the phallic signifier. The master discourse thus lacks, contains a gap, an empty lot. Consequently, it is somewhat weak. The subject, taking advantage of the supposed weakness, appropriates or takes over the vacancy, claiming his freedom. Being what the master does not have, the subject (in many diverse manners, which we cannot discuss here), now the master of the master, catches himself in the Master’s fantasy.
 
For the joke is on this subject. The lack in the Other, which the subject installed through his Imaginary, is but the lure of the Master, the bait by means of which he establishes his mastery. The subject, seduced, has merely installed himself willingly into the order of capitalism and homogeneity. By taking the empty lot for himself, he finds his true place, his freedom in private property; and he finds that same self in a proper name, the name of the father, the signifier of the master. Identifying with the figure of alienation, the proper name, the I, takes a slot in the banal string of signifiers, a proper social subject enslaved to others, to society.[3] On this imaginary stage (of Lacan’s imaginary order), the objet petit a is never sufficient. It always fails as an agent of liberty. Eroticized as “the fix” qua the desired proper name, it emerges as only the object cause of desire rather than its object of satisfaction. A mere common sign, the little a has tricked the subject, raising false hopes. In Lacan, desire thus moves metonymically from object cause to object cause–desire, in this sense, is too “picky”–in search of the fulfillment it never gets.
 
However, the objet petit a is irreducible to this imaginary view of it. It is not a replacement for a loss but itself a lost object. An example of such an object, extended by Laclau, permits us to grasp the point, though I read the example in a manner that differs from Laclau’s interpretation. After weaning, a baby grows attached to milk in a nippled bottle, an erotic proxy for the mother’s now missing breast (On Populist Reason 114). The attachment has nothing to do with the recovery of a supposed lost union with the mother, since there never was such a union. The condition of the baby’s subjectivity, the “reason” it can suck at all, can function as the agent of that sucking, is an original separation, foundation of Lacanian psychoanalysis. In fact, the breast itself is a objet petit a, a partial object. It is suckled, treated as an erotic object, not as part of the whole mother, but as its own autonomous thing. The point of an erotic object is that it occupies the subject in itself, as detached, even or especially as partial. The nipple of the milk bottle, replacing the breast, represents the displacement of one partial object by another, one nipple for another.
 
As object of the drive, the objet petit a opens onto an entirely different scenario, one fundamental to The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytic concept of “the transference” best reveals the distinction. During the transference, the analysand restages a scene from his own past, casting the analyst as erotic object. Rather than recounting a previous, painful attachment, the analysand repeats the episode in the office, unable to remember the prior event that is being repeated. Here, the analyst as object petit a appears not as the cause or support of the drive, but as a real object of that drive. The doctor is not a substitute or representative, but the thing itself. After all, representation demands memory of the cultural conventions, the history that arbitrarily but firmly binds representation to the object it represents, the signifier to the signified, and in the transference the analysand repeats without remembering (18-25).
 
Any signifier is a coupling of forces. One is meaning. Every sign recalls, to a given subject, a signified. Although this bond of signifier and signified is not essential but conventional–the signified, therefore, can always slide–there is, as already indicated, no signifier without meaning. The second force is repetition. If meaning is habitual rather than essential, repetition lies at its source. Repetition is the key source of habit. Repetition, then, is internal to re-presentation, but not represented by it. It cannot be (represented) since it is, precisely, the other side of language. This side of language is representation, the signifier; the other side, the underside, is repetition. The word “dog” most often represents the animal in the animal’s absence, repeating the dog’s presence in another place (such as the mind). But this repetition does not appear in the signifier, in either of the two appearances (the dog before the eyes, the “dog” in the mind). Repetition, then, is a compelling component that renders language, signification, even the signifier itself, possible, yet that withdraws from signification.
 
If repetition never comes into view as such, it is at times experienced. Imagine an individual who, having not seen a hated ex-spouse for ten years, bumps into this person–each time in an increasingly awkward fashion–four times in one week. The individual feels like an automaton, a machine that, as if in the hands of a master, “does” the same thing repeatedly, apparently possessing no control over events. He or she, as would be natural, attempts to attribute a conscious or hidden motif for the coincidences. Nothing emerges. Neither party in any way intends that the encounters happen. They just keep happening. In fact, Lacan has a name for these coincidences: the “encounter with the Real.” The “Real” is the ceaseless return of a force that comes back for no good reason, from no possible history to which we might trace it. It takes over the subject in a form other than that of representation; without a history or a memory (even if unconscious), representation is impossible. The individual who collides with the ex-spouse a fifth time experiences the event as affect or mood, a sense of the weird, not as a meaning.
 
In fact, an encounter with the Real generates two fundamental feelings. One is dread, the fear that comes from a sense of being directed by an Other, a master over whom the subject enjoys no power, and that never stops imposing itself. Perhaps the force will repeat its reign of terror ad infinitum, a possibility that is itself the source of terror. The other affect is pleasure, or rather, pleasure beyond pleasure, the “beyond the pleasure principle” about which Freud speaks, defining it as the reduction of all tension to zero (46-49). Indeed, one can “get off” on the feeling of being in the hands of an unknown master, as if one were a mechanical doll, a thing without tension; one can “get off” on the nirvana of being driven while doing nothing at all, as a machine or part of a machine, as a thing that offers or experiences no resistance or tension, like a corpse–but that, unlike a corpse, is still able to “get off,” to feel a joy beyond mere pleasure.[4]
 
The Real does not return; it is that returning, the uncanny repetition. The Real, we therefore glean, is not an abstract Real. It is the Real of language, the Real of the unconscious, and the Real of the language within the unconscious. Commonly defined as that which resists symbolization, the Real nonetheless does not dwell outside of language. It is the experience of language as language, language repeating language–akin to “grammar,” as discussed above–repetition as such as language as such. This is why, as with the hypothetical encounters between ex-spouses, the Real can be “sensed” only as uncanny affect, as the uncanny itself–not as a representation, but as an unrepresentable director, agent of dread or pure joy.
 
In sum, during the transference, language, as the language of the unconscious, is experienced as jouissance. The object of the drive, as it turns out, is not the analyst (who remains on the new stage, but as object cause of desire rather than as object of the drive); it is the machine-like repetition that the subject’s encounter with the analyst brings on the scene in the form of a “weird feeling.” This is why for Lacan any signifier may re-present the object of the desire. If desire is too picky, and will accept no signifier as satisfactory, the drive is indifferent to the signifier to which it attaches, for all signifiers enclose the beat of repetition, the object of satisfaction.
 
The entire process is bound to knowledge. The analysand, during or in the transference, posits the analyst as the subject-supposed-to-know. The analysand therefore wants to occupy the analyst’s seat, to take him over bodily, so as to acquire (reaquire) that knowledge. In such a case, he would be able to allay the worst sort of anxiety, the anxiety of not knowing whether the “things” that are troubling him have a cause that can be diagnosed, this diagnosis being the condition of a cure. Are my problems so profound that they lie beyond analysis, beyond the good doctor, and hence will plague me forever? Will this repetition never cease to repeat itself? In the patient’s eyes, only the analyst knows the answer, knows what is really going on in the unconscious. Or rather, the analyst is supposed-to-know. He is supposed-to-know the unconscious. We can now introduce another term that is fundamental to Lacan’s understanding of the drive: aim. The dialectic of desire is between part and whole; the split of the drive is between object and aim. And the aim is no whole. While repetition is the object of the drive during transference–it is the force that drives the drive–knowledge of the unconscious is the aim of that drive. (The aim is also death, as in the death drive, but once more, this matter must be left aside.) This knowledge is conceivable only via analysis or reading: the reading of the language of the unconscious, in the unconscious, that appears in analysis as affect, as jouissance. The unconscious is “outed” during the transference in the form of repetition, itself “outed” as affect. The translation of representation, of the signifiers in the session that led to the transference, into unconscious affect, must now be translated back into representation or meaning if knowledge of the patient’s unconscious, his ills, is to be gathered, if “analysis” is to take place. Read my enjoyment!
 
This truth, however, cannot happen. The representation of the affect, the conversion of repetition into meaning, the translation of the other side of language into this side, is always already the repression of the jouissance, which is thus present solely under erasure. The mood has no conscious endurance. Alterity, the weird, is repressed before it surfaces, shoved back into the unconscious before it is read. This does not mean that affect is atemporal or ahistorical. It is an other time, the time of the other side. Heterogeneous time, it never comes, for during analysis it is always on the brink of coming. It is a future time or a time of the future–perhaps, as Bataille intimates, affect even portends the time of socialism.
 
In any case, the unconscious, disclosed for a viewing via the repetition that is its language–a viewing that the transference stages–closes down as soon as it opens. The event of the unconscious comes without revelation. In fact, repetition opens and shuts the Real of the unconscious largely because opening and shutting is the actual act that repeats itself.[5] Indeed, it is the erotic object, the object of the drive. The mouth is erotic because it opens and closes. The baby that sucks on the nipple of the milk bottle is attached to the rims around the pierced hole in that nipple, to his own lips as similar (closing/shutting) rims, to the teeth whose opening and shutting makes sounds comes out, to the starting (opening) and ending (closing) of those same sounds. All rhythmically repeat, opening and closing this releasing and shutting themselves.
 
During the transference, the opening and closing of the unconscious is the language (of the unconscious) as the Real object of the drive. The analysand originally posits the analyst as subject-supposed-to-know, as master. He then experiences this subject-supposed-to-know as the unconscious, as unknown force. The true master that drives the subject’s erotic and often painful attachments is not the master, not the analyst, but this “unconscious thing.” Yet even this thing is no master, for it cannot “control” itself. It cannot block from happening one of its own things, a thing beyond and inside it: the jouissance to which it gives birth. Mastery itself, not any particular master, is demastered by the taking place of jouissance, by that event. Thus, the subject is freed from the master signifier. Demastery is the joy itself. It is freedom from the tyrant that plagues, of the plague as tyrant, symptom, truth, and signifier.
 
The master, we noted, strips the slave of his knowledge, receiving in return production and reproduction. Yet production, we also said, comes to the master with a loss: the loss of knowledge, of knowledge as the master’s lost object. Yet for Lacan no object ever completely vanishes. It always only misplaced. The capitalist-master, then, must possess his lost knowledge in another form, and according to Lacan, he does: he holds his knowledge as a bonus, a surplus that was thrown into the original bargain he struck with the slave. That extra, of course, is loss itself: objet petit a now as surplus jouissance or plus-de-jouir (107-08). Indeed, within that overall excess, the master receives all the topoi mentioned above: repetition, language, and pleasure beyond pleasure. In fact, these are alien to the master, just as knowledge is alien to the master’s discourse, which is a discourse of truth. Therefore, the master is master, the subject is subject, only through “alienation” as Lacan defines this term. To be, the subject/master must incorporate the unmasterable alien into his own body. This is why the master is never a master or whole unless imagined as such by another, unless imagined as the Other who lacks. The Master is actually the Other who has too much, one thing too many. Lack is the disavowal of the plus, unbearable to both master and slave.
 
Both like and unlike surplus value in Marx (which, in capitalism, usurps the place of surplus jouissance), surplus jouissance in Lacan spells, potentially, big trouble for the master since this bonus cannot be put into circulation, gotten rid of, turned into production, reproduction, value, and/or a signifier. Surplus jouissance can only accumulate; the master, as master, cannot spend it, else he cease to be master. This is the enjoyment he cannot know and cannot enjoy, the enjoyment of the other he subjects, alien jouissance and the jouissance of the alien. It is the joy of the proletarian who, far from having nothing but his chains to lose, no more than his body to sell, possesses the very thing the master cannot have, precisely because he (the worker) is just that loss, that body, pure dispossession as erotic enjoyment.
 
In the transference, the analyst, posited by the analysand as the master or subject-supposed-to-know, returns to his patient the plus-de-jouir that the patient always already had–not the stolen knowledge but his loss qua jouissance. Enjoyment liberates the subject from his subjectivity/subjection (one is never the subject of joy; joy carries the I away), from the imagined master-subject of an imaginary prisonhouse. The analysand now locates his liberty not in the image of the chief, but in the actual sovereign, in the jouissance that comes outside of knowledge. This is the joy about which Bataille never ceased to yell his head off. Indeed, Bataille does not realize to what degree he is right in “The Psychological Structure of Fascism.” If for the “proper” proletarian, as for the good analyst, the aim is heterogeneous knowledge, the object or objective of that aim is not the post occupied by the “Head” or the Master but the enjoyment, the effervescence that attracts the proletarian and that is the proletarian’s attraction. Bataille’s proletarian does not reach his aim, which is the knowledge of the other scene, heterogeneous knowledge. In its stead, he “attains” jouissance, pure expenditure, as payment for the quest. In the process, his psyche is turned away from a leader and toward a sacred heterogeneity, toward joy-until-death–the knowledge that leads to this rallying joy; and the crying out, for Bataille, is the condition of socialism and freedom within or over against either capitalism or its agent, the state.
 
The construction of the conditions for this enjoyment is the ethical responsibility of the analyst. If psychoanalysts play a role in the liberation of the slave-worker, it is solely as analysts that they do so. The analyst meets the obligation by attending to his duty, which is to be an analyst: a reader and overwriter of the language of the other. Of course, no precise rules, no manual of instruction, exist to guide the analyst in the right direction. Yet this does not mean that the analyst must operate as a subject who finds “his own way” according to the circumstances. The analyst is not a master or a subject. In fact, the analyst follows a set of rules for which there is no booklet: the rules of language. Of course, language makes itself available for following only in the conscious signifiers that conceal it (conceal language as such). Thus the signifier or stream of signifiers–though driven by language–set the agenda, the course of analysis. The analyst and analysand follow the path of the signifier, a direction without directions. The transference, consequently the liberating jouissance, “happens” if and when this task of analysis–speaking, reading, listening–is done within the sessions, most of which consist of idle chatter, but which all the same set out the conduit of signifiers, preparing the way for the event. While there is no correct time for the transference, no “objective conditions” in the history of the analysand that might “tell” the analyst that “now is the time” to coax the analysand toward the transference and action, nor will “any old time” do. The event, the subject’s liberating jouissance, occurs neither by plan nor by accident, neither by design nor by chance, but under the condition that the parties in play do their work, performing their duty, which is analysis.
 
We noted that, in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Lacan derides the Parisian students who believe that to act politically one must go out of the classroom and “onto the street” (143-49, 197-208). Lacan–who in key moments of the seminar discusses these matters after class outside on the “streets,” in “public” exchanges–suggests to the students the opposite. Students act politically only insofar as they do their duty, which is to be students, that is to say, readers and writers, analysts, whose aim is knowledge and whose object is language–not masters, academics, or hysterics. If bodies at a university, or in analysis, are to yield a politics, they can do so solely by executing the freedom from mastery and master signifiers that jouissance and knowledge grant, for that joy or “effervescence” cannot be contained within the office/classroom. It sallies forth as object of the drive and object of attraction, potentially gathering the undefined masses. Out of these masses, the happening, if it is to happen at all, occurs: the effervescence of the masses can indeed take any direction, including the direction of politics or socialism. They do not guarantee socialism, yet one can guarantee that there will be no socialism without them. As defined by Lacan, then, analysis is not a design for socialism; but absent the analytic design, no socialism has a chance to come. Hence, the student who leaves behind his responsibility as student, who abandons knowledge in favor of action, is not seeking the student-freedom that he proclaims but precisely the master who blocks that freedom–as well as himself as that master. To the brash student Lacan replies: “the revolutionary aspiration has only a single possible outcome–of ending up as the master’s discourse . . . . What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.”
 
Zizek and Laclau seem to have received this message in inverted form. They therefore ignore the knowledge Lacan strives to pass on in the form of jouissance, though their conflict is largely about knowledge of Lacan. On the basis of their debate, one would be led to believe that for them politics is precisely the avoidance of knowledge and thus of joy–indeed, that this avoidance is the condition of both action and politics. Space will permit me to address only a few key features of their dispute. At various moments, Zizek responds to Laclau’s attacks by defending the examples he (Zizek) offers of contemporary political movements that–even if they are in an incipient phase–“square” with, and perhaps validate, his political theory. To be sure, this is not any person extending or speaking about examples. Zizek’s brilliance lies in his capacity to tender captivating, frequently hilarious examples to illustrate difficult theoretical points. Zizek, one might complain, repeats examples, yet even this “annoying” maneuver discloses his canniness about exemplarity. For Zizek does not just proffer examples; he theorizes the concept of the example. In fact, he argues that the key to an example lies in repetition, but as with Freud’s dream work, in the iteration and overexposure of the same narrative. It is the repeated opening and closing of a single scene that discloses the “other scene,” the language of the unconscious, the erotic gap in representation or exemplarity that, like overexposure as such, repetition marks (“Schalgend” 200).
 
Zizek’s first example concerns the Maoist Sendero Luminoso, the Peruvian Shining Path. Zizek discusses events in the impoverished mountainous areas of 1990s Peru, where the Sendero often menaced campesinos, soldiers, and others.[6] More interesting, according to Zizek, is how the Sendero would sometimes direct its most brutal actions not at these Peruvians–not even at representatives of the Peruvian government, such as the army–but at U.N. international health workers, whose task was to aid the peasants. Forcing these individuals to confess their complicity with imperialism, the Sendero would then (at times) shoot them. Zizek does not condone or advocate such measures. Though such tactics are “sustained by the correct insight,” they are “difficult to sustain [as] a literal model to follow” (“From Politics” 512). Of course, the “correct insight” is that the true danger in Peru is liberal democracy, not the Peruvian military or government. The enemy is a false democracy “lying in the guise of truth.” It is the democratic capitalisms that created the horrible conditions in which the peasants live in the first place. Zizek cites Badiou as a radical scholar who backs this view on the matter: “Today, the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It’s called Democracy” (“Schlagend” 193).[7] The more innocent the aid workers were, the more they served as a tool of neoliberalism, since they made the democratic capitalist system “look attractive” to the peasants, who were then more likely to endorse the very savage powers that subjected them to their own dreadful circumstances.
 
This assertion must be read over against Zizek’s claim that the “objective conditions” for a revolutionary politics are never given (“Schlagend” 189). Referring to Lacan’s “passage à l’acte,” key to the enjoyment highlighted above, Zizek emphasizes that one cannot wait for the correct moment, the perfect “setting” for the act. Such a time never comes, for the “times” never license or authorize the truly radical act, which is unprecedented, hence without “father” or authority. Because no prior examples exist, neither does the possibility of knowing precisely what to do or whether “now” is the time to do it. The radical subject acts without assurances, relatively blindly. Bravery, conviction, frustration, anger and/or charisma are the conditions of the politics that ensues. However, Lacan, who regards the transference as this sort of “act” (to reiterate, Zizek’s notion of “act” is taken from Lacan), views matters a bit differently.[8] For Lacan, the “what to do” and the “when to act” are very clear. The analyst and analysand, right now, must conduct the work of analysis. Out of that labor, the event will or will not occur–not because the conditions are or are not ripe–but because preparation (the empty chit-chat) and duty (responding), and the passage á l’acte pertain to a single movement within analysis. The “groundwork” of analysis, the laying out of stupid signifiers, is neither the act itself, nor its conditions; it is the act’s responsibility and responsibility to the act.
 
What is the equivalent within Zizek’s analysis–or politics? We just indicated that Zizek argues that liberal democracy is not the solution to our consensual “postpolitics.” In Latin America, this “postpolitics” is usually dubbed the “neoliberal consensus,” and in fact, it is especially devastating in a nation such as Peru. However, Zizek tells us, killing or harming these workers is not a “literal model to follow.” Zizek need not make this last point, for one can never literally follow an example. An example is a figure. One can only follow it figuratively, by doing something like it. Zizek’s wavering (“difficult to sustain [as] a literal model to follow”), if read literally, could be translated as follows: in practice, one should not assassinate liberal democrats, and one should not conduct actions that are like these assassinations either.
 
The latter is a bit surprising, for one can certainly imagine a “like” action that is very much along the idea of Zizek’s remarks, the idea that Zizek literally means to convey with his overstated example. Imagine that instead of making the liberal gesture of rallying against a University administration that is utterly resistant to multiculturalism, one rallies against multiculturalism itself, which is nothing if not symbolic tolerance, false democracy “lying in the guise of truth.” Zizek advises us, repeatedly, that we should not take such positions in our actual lives. Though in the end multiculturalism serves the worst of ideologies, if compelled to choose on campus, one ought to select the multiculturalist over the racist cause: “Although, of course, as to the positive content of most of the debated issues, a radical leftist should support the liberal stance (for abortion, against racism and homophobia, and so forth), one should never forget that it is the populist fundamentalist, not the liberal, who is, in the long term, our ally” (“Schlagend” 194; emphasis added). What, then, is to be done? Zizek cannot extend a picture of a hypothetical example of a political act that corresponds to his theory. Neither in practice nor in theory can Zizek show us or offer us an example of what to do in theory. I just painted a nice–not too politically correct but not terribly violent–picture, in theory, of what to do if liberalism is in fact our enemy. Yet Zizek’s writings reject such solutions to the problem, and any solution like them. Even if in practice one has the opportunity to perform a peaceful but antagonistic act against democracy (demonstrating against multiculturalism), or even if, like the Sendero’s actions, one can do something that, “sustained by the correct insight,” would in theory be proper, in both cases one should not. One must not forget to theorize about doing them, but actually doing so is another matter. In the long term, then, this is not the time for any politics but liberalism. This may not be what Zizek means to say, but it is what he says, literally. In fact, nearly all the examples found in Zizek’s work, which number in the hundreds, represent negations, however comical they may be. Most often, they display the absurdity that lies at the heart of racism, capitalism, sexism, nationalism, classism, and anti-Semitism. They also negate the common liberal, “politically correct” analysis of why these attitudes are insidious. Yet when it comes to offering an example, a picture displaying how one might affirm (à la Bataille), even if only in theory, another politics, a path toward a politics of heterogeneity, or even a path toward heterogeneous knowledge, Zizek seems lost for images and jokes.
 
We said that in general Zizek presents examples to facilitate the understanding of theory, usually psychoanalysis. Yet both the statement on the Sendero and the idea the statement is meant to reveal (that the person who owns a bank is far worse than the person who robs one–as if this were being noted for the first time!), are not theoretical, intellectual, or even psychological. Zizek’s example is literally thoughtless, for it is neither a thought nor an analysis, but a subject position that praises subjects who take positions as subjects. That is the general example that the Sendero example, perhaps not the best of examples, sets perfectly. Lacan, on the steps of the Pantheon, extends free of charge to the students a model and theory of analysis, a theory of theory that, were the students to attend to it and to analysis itself, would or could open to a student political practice. In Lacan’s name, Zizek does the opposite. He presents non-theory, non-knowledge, and non-preparation as the prerequisite for a statement on politics, and for politics itself. Indeed, this is what his example of the Sendero Luminoso really insists upon, namely, that the discard of analysis, that is, the taking of a position is the condition of even a thought (the Sendero’s “correct insight”) of politics, to say nothing of political action.
 
At another moment, Zizek turns to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, in the context of a discussion of another Brazilian issue, the famous nineteenth-century Canudos uprising (“From Politics” 511-13). Recognizing these miserable sites as effects of capitalism’s worst violence, Zizek describes how new sorts of organization, such as community kitchens and illegal electrical networks, are nonetheless emerging within and from the devastation. In this wasteland of capitalism, movements that have the potential of leading to novel political formations are happening. Laclau is especially incensed by these comments (“Why Constructing” 680). He accuses Zizek of delirium, pointing out the sheer devastation of the favelas, devastation that includes the devastating communities that are developing therein: gangs, groups of drug dealers, and so forth. In fact, Laclau attributes Zizek’s avowal of the favelas’ promise not just to insanity, but to ignorance, advising Zizek to “go and do [his] homework” (680). Zizek responds accordingly: “Well, I did my homework” (“Schlagend” 191). Against what he regards as Laclau’s misreading of his argument, he then goes on to justify his take on the favelas.
 
As readers, we do not receive a detailed account of the precise “homework” that Zizek completes. He may have visited the favelas, read first-hand reports, viewed documentaries, or talked with individuals familiar with the issues. In any of these cases, it is through empiricism that Zizek licenses himself to speak of the Brazilian situation. It is by gathering empirical evidence that he “does his assignment.” A theory of the favelas–Zizek admits that he is speculating on these zones, presenting an hypothesis about what could take place in the margins of capital, not despite but because of this marginalization–has political mettle, for Laclau no less than for Zizek, when grounded in observations that are pre-analytical. Thus, they are not theoretical at all, but entirely speculative. In fact, as with the hacker communities on the Internet that Zizek also affirms, one needs no knowledge whatsoever to take a position “for or against” the potential for communities situated in the margins of global capital (“From Politics” 514). One can do so just as well with or without knowledge. The hacker associations, for example, clearly exploit the networks that capitalism builds but that fall outside the control of both state and market, thereby forging unprecedented models of community-building, “real existing” virtual cooperatives. Consequently, they can be subversive or enjoy great subversive potential. These communities, however, are open only to those who own computers, enjoy access to the Internet, possess money for the service (which is astonishingly expensive outside “the West”), and have time to hack. This includes a very small percentage of the world’s inhabitants. As much as they undermine them, hackers reproduce capitalist structures of class difference. There is no basis for claiming that their communities offer more or less potential than any other community. However, we can always take a position that they do. Likewise, the favela inhabitants are as much alienated capitalists as they are defiant to that system. Both Laclau and Zizek know this and say so. Moreover, the favelas’ illegal networks, such as pirated electrical grids, are so common in Latin America’s urban villas miserias that they draw no attention, neither from within nor from without the community; more, they are not the result of planned communal efforts (for more on this point, see Aira 29-30). The message is clear: the political thinker, like the political actor, takes a subject position, makes a choice that demands no necessary engagement with either theory or knowledge. Take your pick, but please pick. It would seem that the political theorist not only need not theorize. He must not theorize.
 
It is thus not terribly surprising that Zizek eventually affirms the very populism that his replies to Laclau are meant to rebuff. Why not? As Bataille makes clear, when it comes to taking a useful position within the homogeneity of subjects, one position is as good as another. In fact, Zizek praises the now signature event of the Bolivarian Revolution, which exemplified populism in its purest sense, when “the poor came down from the hills” of Caracas in 2004. In the wake of a right-wing, U.S.-condoned overthrow, Venezuelans descended from the most destitute margins of the city onto the grounds of the presidential palace in order to restore Chávez to his post. One could just as well speculate that it was the army that restored Chávez, but that is a side matter. The key issue is that when one alludes to the Venezuelan poor that “came down from the hills,” one must put the statement in quotation marks, because the 2004 descent repeats the disastrous Caracazo episode of 1989, when “the poor came down from the hills” the first time. Elsewhere, Zizek suggests that Chávez’s populist regime is rather prosaic, both because it is sponsored by huge oil money, and because these sorts of populisms are common–and, in the end, not very good for “the people.” Zizek’s inconsistency is not a concern. The problem is that at the precise instant he has the chance to prod Laclau on Laclau’s grounds and home turf, in the very heart of real existing populism, Zizek misses the encounter. If populisms such as Chávez’s enjoy political potential, it is not as new movements, but as the repetition of the same movement, of the same example, hence as the overexposure of a political death drive. The thesis is not mine; it is literally Zizek’s theory, which I outline above. Yet precisely because further discussion of such a thesis would demand theory, Zizek does not “go there.” In theory, he has nothing to say about Chávez, or about contemporary politics in general. These are not topics for theory; they are affairs of the subject, the charismatic subject assuming a strong, attractive post in a public forum.
 
In his response to Zizek in Critical Inquiry, as well as in On Populist Reason (whose theses the journal article upholds), Laclau defends a theory of popular-democratic interventions. Laclau outlines the democratic nature of such interventions by challenging the Marxist narrative that, as noted, Bataille too extends. Modern democracy, Laclau argues, appears as feudalism and absolutism are defeated by the bourgeois revolution. The bourgeoisie, then, is both an agent of democracy and a precursor to the proletariat, which arrives on the scene later, as the world subject of socialism. Yet, as Laclau points out, the bourgeoisie never vanquished feudalism in “underdeveloped” nations. Thus, no bourgeois subject emerged to forge the democracy. The space for that subject was left open, and the people or demos had and still has the opportunity to fill it. The demos remains capable of constructing the democracy that the bourgeoisie failed to accomplish–a thesis that Laclau, drawing on the history of “underdeveloped” sites, translates into a general theory of political participation in our time.
 
“The people,” Laclau further contends, designates both the whole (the nation) and a part of that whole (the non-elite, the poor), the unrepresented part. “The people,” the whole, thus fails to represent the people, one of its parts. It is an “all” that falls short of itself, of “all.” “The people” serves as a marker of an empty wholeness, that is, of an incomplete, ruined, or cracked democracy (a whole with a hole is as good as empty); it is also the force that, in the wake of our failed democracies, now enjoys the space, at least potentially, to produce a more radical politics.
 
At this juncture, one should recall the goal of Laclau’s general project. Laclau seeks to establish new grounds for leftist politics given that the classical Marxist foundation, class difference, cannot ground itself, much less a politics in general. The worker is never a worker as such but a straight or gay worker, a female or male worker, a black or white worker, and so on. The real existing worker is the worker plus these constitutive outsides, which thereby pertain to the “being-worker.” If, as Laclau suggests, all politics is initiated by a demand to an authority, the demand of the worker, when made in the name of the working class as political subject, misses the real worker for it bypasses the racial, sexual, religious (etc.) elements that are “built into” the worker’s being. In contrast, a popular-democratic demand articulates the relation among the multiple interests of the worker (or of any other subject)–straight, gay, women, black, socialist; gay rights, women’s rights, black rights, worker rights–while reflecting none of the particular interests, i.e., no position that precedes the demand. Indeed, were such reflection the goal, one subject (such as the classed subject) would stand as the ground of all the others, rendering these others, as well as their interests, epiphenomenal, inessential, “discardable” in the name of the “greater good.” In other words, the popular demand performs-into-existence, gathers into a single political body, subjects that do not preexist this demand, a manifold that, without the demand, would not form a coherent group nor have a coherent cause.
 
For Laclau, this demand or set of signifiers, if popular-democratic, disrupts the Symbolic Order or the order of patriarchy, whose structure is analogous to that of contemporary global institutions and the neoliberal state. The Symbolic Order, as I indicated above, is always missing the pure or phallic signifier. This is the proper name, the signifier without signified but with a fixed referent (such as the name “Brett Levinson,” which does not mean anything but which refers unfailingly to me whenever I encounter it). This is a signifier, accordingly, that refers to the subject regardless of context or surrounding signifiers. The pure signifier is not bound or enslaved to the system in which it appears–appears, precisely, as freedom. The democratic-popular demand, because it represents no subject–the gay-feminist-worker is neither gay nor feminist nor a worker but a subject-to-come at the moment of its articulation–materializes similarly, as a signifier without a signified. Diverse associations, which are not distinct since each overlaps the other (the women’s association and the worker association share the woman-worker as a constituent), join forces in order to produce the signifiers/demands that take into account the multiplicity of causes. The ensuing community or subject results for the first time, therefore as an event or an intervention.
 
The intervention dislocates the social order, generating popular leftist movements, for at least three reasons. First, efforts to generate the signifier create upheaval within the established social order–one in which each identity is separated from another, each occupying its proper place–and hence call for political negotiations that are both horizontal (across the contending subjects) and vertical (up against the authorial order). Second, the signifier is antagonistic by its very structure; it generates, from out of the popular sector itself, a novel element within the Symbolic Order that–at the instant of its emergence–this order cannot ignore or include, incorporate or control. Finally, not unlike the chief in Bataille’s paradigm, the demand thus articulated forms the Head (Laclau uses the Lacanian term point de caption) of a manifold, which gathers a maximum of popular identification. The signifier attracts; it leads the movement. Potentially, it turns the association of multiple groups into a mass of energy composed of cathexes, one whose political direction, while initiated by the signifier/demand, will not (as mass) necessarily answer to the demand itself. The energy can “get out of hand,” possibly yielding not reform but revolt. If Bataille’s Head is a fixed subject, Laclau’s is a signifier that displaces the stagnant Master. (In populism, Laclau insists, the name of the populist leader is more powerful than the leader himself; the name does not stand in for the cause but is the cause.)[9]
 
Moreover, the signifier itself cannot be mastered; it floats as new groups attach to, alter, and rework it, inducing still different cathexes.
 
This signifier that would head popular democratic movements has only one problem: it does not exist. As Laclau argues, there is no signifier without a signified (On Populist Reason 105). In fact, desire can only generate an object petit a, as object cause and signifier, that is not sufficiently strong, not enough of a signifier, to attract subjects in the manner outlined by Lacan. This partial object or sign represents the empty wholeness; yet, precisely as mere representative, it fails to offer the promise of fulfillment that would lure the popular subjects. Subjects of desire move metonymically from object cause to object cause, in search of the wholeness they do not receive via the partial object. They are not held or captivated by the signifier, which thus fails to gather the manifold. For Laclau’s politics, the demand that emits from desire is literally unsatisfactory.
 
Laclau, then, needs a signifier that does not represent that whole but that is the whole, i.e., a part that is the whole. His ideal signifier, while necessarily a partial object, must be a full performance of democracy. A proper name, as indicated above, could perhaps accomplish this feat–if only it existed. The object of the drive, Laclau decides, is the next best option (On Populist Reason 119-20). After all, the drive attaches to a circumscribed object that, for the “aroused” subject, is as good as any whole. The bottle is as good as the breast, which is as good as the complete mother, which in turn is as good as completeness itself. All are equally partial over against their aim, which is knowledge (or death). The object of the drive, then, is not partial relative to a whole. A missing or completed wholeness has nothing to do with the drive’s direction or aim–the aim that splits the drive, which in turn splits off, endlessly driving past its aim, while never falling short of it.
 
On the one hand, Laclau’s theory of populism requires an object petit a qua signifier that fills the empty fullness of our modern democracies-to-come. In Lacan, this signifier is the desired signifier, the signifier of desire that marks the dialectic between part and whole. The people–for Laclau, both a part within and the full body of the democratic state–thus names this name for Laclau. On the other hand, Laclau’s theory calls for an object petit a qua signifier that is the thing as such, not its mere cause or representation; it calls thus for the object of the drive, sufficient unto itself. In other words, for Laclau popular politics demands a signifier derived from a smooth blend of desire and drive. It hinges on neither the object cause of desire nor on the object of the drive, but on the object petit a as object of desire. There is only one problem with such a thing: it does not and cannot exist.
 
It is telling that Laclau derives his notion of the drive from a secondary source, not from Lacan’s actual writings (On Populist Reason 119). At the key moment when he must make Lacan work for a theory of popular democracy, Laclau has to remove Lacan’s texts from the picture. The aim of the drive is knowledge. Laclau evades that aim, evades that knowledge–which is the knowledge of Lacan–in order to cast his political net in the name of that very knowledge. It is not that Laclau’s practice abandons theory so that it can operate, potentially, “in the real world.” In bypassing theory, the practice skirts practice too. In fact, within Lacanian theory an object of desire that acts as the thing itself, as the whole, cannot be imagined, not even if that thought is utopian. It can exist neither in theory nor in practice, neither in the mind nor materially. Laclau, by offering not only a theory that is missing its theory, calls for–because it is missing its theory–a practice that cannot be practiced. Lacan holds that the division of knowledge and practice precludes both, since psychoanalysis is a practice of knowledge. Conversely, Laclau marshals this very division by throwing the Lacanian principles (the fundamental difference between drive and desire) upon which his (Laclau’s) theory of politics counts outside of that very theory. The theory of politics is a performance of the resistance to theory.
 
For Lacan, psychoanalysis is psychoanalytic, just as theory is theoretical. A psychoanalyst is a psychoanalyst; a theorist is a theorist. In their debate Laclau and Zizek, in fact, are theorists. That is their post, task, and work. Yet it is a task that they cannot cast or imagine as political. That is why they step out of theory “in the final analysis” to get to their politics. However, they end up in neither politics nor theory but dogmatism. Lacan has let us know that the analyst and theorist are obliged to and responsible for their aim, which is knowledge. That analysis or theory could one day turn into politics is certain. Yet theory cannot “be” political. That is, it cannot make itself political. For at the instant it performs this gesture, theory ceases to be theory. Precisely such a cessation is the main event of the Laclau/Zizek boxing match, a bout that exemplifies the fact that politics, for theory, is now the absence of theory. If we cannot lay this fact at the doorstep of Laclau or Zizek, it is a fact nonetheless. When it gets down and dirty, to the real, politics must do without theory, making do instead with subject positions. For better or worse, Lacanian psychoanalysis may be too formalized to continue fighting against these postures. Either theory will be done, will respond to itself, to its duty as theory, in which case a politics in theory, a theoretical act, can be anticipated; or else theory will become the absolute property of Masters, hysterics, and University dogma. In the latter case, theory’s aim cannot but be capitalist reproduction, in theory as well as in practice. Theory capitalizes on itself in an effort to rid the master of his plus-de-jouir (surplus jouissance) so that we, theory’s analysts and analysands, inherit but a stifling plus-de-jouir! (no more jouissance!) as our working conditions.