AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

AN AFRICAN FANTASIAINDEX
GENERAL HUMANITARIANISM/MORAL IMPERATIVE MODULE
* Link: Compassion * ................................................................................................................................................................................ 4 * Link: Assorted Victimhoods *............................................................................................................................................................. 6 * Link: Helping Africa *............................................................................................................................................................................ 7 Link: Helping............................................................................................................................................................................................. 8 Link: Moral Imperative.............................................................................................................................................................................. 9 Link: Humanitarianism ............................................................................................................................................................................ 10 Link: Refugees......................................................................................................................................................................................... 14 Link: Famine............................................................................................................................................................................................ 18 Impact: Humanitarianism Biopolitics ................................................................................................................................................... 19 AT: Perm (Compassion Link).................................................................................................................................................................. 20 Impact: Conservatism (Helping Africa)................................................................................................................................................... 21 Impact: Victimization (Humanitarianism) ............................................................................................................................................... 21

1NC Cliterodectomy Shell...................................................................................................................................22

Link: Cliterodectomy ............................................................................................................................................................................... 27

ENVIRONMENT MODULE
1NC Environmental Fantasies Shell...................................................................................................................30
Link: Great Apes...................................................................................................................................................................................... 39 Link: Enviro = Post-Politics..................................................................................................................................................................... 42 *Link: Nature* ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 43 Link: Chocolate Laxative......................................................................................................................................................................... 45 Link: Green Ideology = Completion Fantasy........................................................................................................................................... 47 Impact: Eco-Crazies................................................................................................................................................................................. 48 Impact: Fear Unstable Green Identifications ...................................................................................................................................... 49 Impact: Nature Fantasy Scapegoating Intruders.............................................................................................................................. 50 AT: Perm (Environment) ......................................................................................................................................................................... 51 AT: Perm (Aff = Basis for Identification)................................................................................................................................................ 53

DEMOCRACY MODULE
Link: Democracy ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 54 Link: Equality/ Multiculturalism ............................................................................................................................................................. 56 Impact: Democratic Fundamentalism ...................................................................................................................................................... 57 Impact: Democracy = Capitalism ............................................................................................................................................................ 57 Impact: Violent Exclusion (Democracy Link) ......................................................................................................................................... 58 Impact: Scapegoating (Democracy Link) ................................................................................................................................................ 59 AT: Perm (Democracy Link) ................................................................................................................................................................... 60 AT: Democracy Solves Tyranny/Violence. ............................................................................................................................................. 61

THE INTERNAL LINKAGES OF OUR ENJOYMENT

* Link: Armchair Activism/Interpassivity * ............................................................................................................................................ 62 Link: Subjects Acting on Objects ............................................................................................................................................................ 63 Link: Enjoyment of DistanceDivorced Husband ................................................................................................................................. 64 Link: Enjoyment MediationStrawberry Cake ...................................................................................................................................... 65

THE LINKS WHICH INVEST US LIBIDINALLY

Link: Development .................................................................................................................................................................................. 66 Link: DevelopmentExpertise ............................................................................................................................................................... 68 Link: DevelopmentImpact ................................................................................................................................................................... 69 Link: DevelopmentAT: Permutation.................................................................................................................................................... 70 Link: Women ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 71 Link: WAR/Realism ................................................................................................................................................................................ 73

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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Link: Heg Good (Zalmay) ....................................................................................................................................................................... 75 Link: Fiat ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 76 Link: Sovereignty .................................................................................................................................................................................... 77 Link: SovereigntyAT: Perm................................................................................................................................................................. 78 Link: Rationality ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 79 Link: Utopian Politics .............................................................................................................................................................................. 80 Link: Debt Relief ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 81 Link: MDGs = Utopianism ...................................................................................................................................................................... 82 Link: MDGs............................................................................................................................................................................................. 84 Link: Traditional Healers......................................................................................................................................................................... 85 Link: Deleuze........................................................................................................................................................................................... 86 Link: Derrida............................................................................................................................................................................................ 87 Link: Foucault.......................................................................................................................................................................................... 90 Link: Hardt & Negri................................................................................................................................................................................. 92

THE IMPLICATIONS OF A PATHOLOGICAL DESIRE

******Impact: Scapegoating/Nazism*****............................................................................................................................................ 93 * Impact: Enjoying OppressionJouissance Snatching *....................................................................................................................... 95 Impact: Oppression .................................................................................................................................................................................. 96

AN ALTERNATIVE ORGANIZATION FOR THE WORLD

* 1NC Role of the Analyst Alternative* .................................................................................................................................................. 97 * Alt: Role of the AnalystComes First *.............................................................................................................................................. 98 Alt: Role of the AnalystAnalyst Key Policy................................................................................................................................... 99 Alt: Role of the AnalystAT: No Alt................................................................................................................................................... 100 ***AT: No Alternative/Necessity (analyst)***..................................................................................................................................... 102 Alt: Identify with the Abject .................................................................................................................................................................. 103 Alt: ID w Abject/Metaphoric Condensation .......................................................................................................................................... 104 Alt: Mourning ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 105 Alt: Radical Democracy......................................................................................................................................................................... 106 Alt: Rejection......................................................................................................................................................................................... 107 Alt: Solves Case and Feminism ............................................................................................................................................................. 108 Alt: Solvency ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 109 AT: Alternative Fails (take the risk)................................................................................................................................................... 110

ANSWERS TO: VARIOUS QUESTIONS

AT: Permutation .................................................................................................................................................................................... 111 AT: Permutation/ Alt Solves.................................................................................................................................................................. 112 AT: Deconstruction Perm ...................................................................................................................................................................... 113 * AT: Must Act * ................................................................................................................................................................................... 114 AT: (K) is Apolitical.............................................................................................................................................................................. 115 AT: Krishna ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 115 AT: Metaphoric Condensation............................................................................................................................................................... 115 AT: FrameworkInterpassivity ............................................................................................................................................................ 116 AT: FIAT ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 118 AT: Lacan is post-modern and post-modernism is bad.......................................................................................................................... 118 AT: Case Outweighs .............................................................................................................................................................................. 119 AT: Doesnt Apply/Only Clinical.......................................................................................................................................................... 120 AT: Overly Determinist ......................................................................................................................................................................... 121 AT: We ARE Democracy....................................................................................................................................................................... 121 AT: Violent Revolution ......................................................................................................................................................................... 122 AT: iek = Conservatism..................................................................................................................................................................... 123 AT: Psychoanalysis Colonialism ...................................................................................................................................................... 124 AT: Psychoanalysis RacismSolves Racism .................................................................................................................................. 128 AT: Essentialism.................................................................................................................................................................................... 129 AT: Robinson (K is Not Conservative).................................................................................................................................................. 130 AT: Robinson (He Links to the K)......................................................................................................................................................... 130

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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AT: Butler.............................................................................................................................................................................................. 131 AT: Derrida (responsibility to the other) ............................................................................................................................................... 134 AT: Stavrakakis (K) of Zizek................................................................................................................................................................. 135 AT: No Unconscious (OBrien & Jureidini).......................................................................................................................................... 136

LET US ONCE AGAIN ***AFFIRM***

* AFF: Metaphoric Condensation *....................................................................................................................................................... 137 * AFF: Lack-based K = Radically Conservative * ................................................................................................................................ 138 AFF: Lack-based K = Radically Conservative ...................................................................................................................................... 139 AFF: K replicates problems ................................................................................................................................................................... 140 AFF: Demands on the State Solve the K (perm solvency)..................................................................................................................... 141 AFF: Analyze Only Individual, Not Society.......................................................................................................................................... 142 AFF: Psychoanalysis Is Factually Inaccurate ........................................................................................................................................ 144 AFF: Psychoanalytic Repression Inaccurate.......................................................................................................................................... 145 AFF: No Unconscious & Anthro Turn .................................................................................................................................................. 146 * AFF AT: Traversing the Fantasy * ..................................................................................................................................................... 147 AFF AT: Zizeks Rejection of Democracy............................................................................................................................................ 148 AFF: Alt Violence............................................................................................................................................................................. 149 AFF: Alt Totalitarianism................................................................................................................................................................... 150 AFF: Alt Kills the Left........................................................................................................................................................................... 151 AFF: No AltMisunderstands Problems.............................................................................................................................................. 152 AFF: No Alt(K) is Ahistorical .......................................................................................................................................................... 153 * AFF AT: Everything Symbolic *........................................................................................................................................................ 154 AFF AT: Everything SymbolicMore Evidence ................................................................................................................................. 155 * AFF AT: Law/Symbolic Order Bad *................................................................................................................................................. 156 Impact: No Identification Global Psychosis....................................................................................................................................... 158 AFF AT: Law K..................................................................................................................................................................................... 159 AFF: Psychoanalysis Colonialism .................................................................................................................................................... 160 AFF: Poco Counter-K ............................................................................................................................................................................ 161 AFF: Eurocentrism Impact .................................................................................................................................................................... 162 AFF: (K)s of FGM (S) = Guilt............................................................................................................................................................... 163 AFF: Letter of the LawSmall Demands Better .................................................................................................................................. 165 AFF: Fear of Cooption Bad ................................................................................................................................................................... 166

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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* LINK: COMPASSION *
COMPULSION TO ACT WHEN PRESENTED WITH THE SUFFERINGS OF ABJECT OTHERS IS NOT A SIMPLE, ALTRUISTIC EQUATION. COMPASSION IS PARADOXICALLY A MEANS OF KEEPING OUR DISTANCE FROM OTHERS, OF ASSUAGING THE GUILT WE FEEL WITHOUT EXAMINING THE COMPLEX RELATIONSHIPS THAT PRODUCE THOSE WE FEEL GUILTY TOWARD OR BRING THEIR SUFFERING TO US. WE MUST REFUSE THIS IMPULSE TO ACT IN THE FACE OF ABJECT OTHERNESS, TRAVERSING THE FANTASY THAT LOCKS US INTO THE REPETITION OF THESE CYCLES OF TRAUMA

THE

EDKINS, LECTURER IN POLITICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OF FAMINE, PRACTICES OF AID P. 112-116]

WALES, 2000 [JENNY, WHOSE HUNGER? CONCEPTS

The experience of disaster as an encounter with the Real is one that, like the gaze of the victim, forces us to confront the impossibility of social reality, the void at its heart. The Real is that which cannot be symbolized. The symbolic or social order is always incomplete or impossible. It can only be constituted by the exclusion of some (nonsymbolizable) kernelthe Real. The literature on trauma and post-traumatic stress emphasizes that not only those caught up in a disaster experience this shock of an encounter with the Real, but also those who witness it. Whole communities can be caught up in it; indeed, those who share a traumatic experience of this type feel themselves both part of a new community of a special type (a community made up of those who share a revised view of the world, produced by trauma, that they must continue to bear witness to) and apart from all usual social links. However, for witnesses of disaster the traumatic element is not so much the encounter with the Real as the encounter with "the gaze of the helpless otherchild, animalwho does not know why something so horrifying and senseless is happening to him." It is not, as might be supposed, the gaze of a hero, willingly sacrificing himself, that is so striking to observers of tragedy, but "the gaze of a perplexed victim," the passive, helpless casualty. It is this gaze that gives rise to the compassion felt by outsiders. It is not, as we might think, the outsiders in distant countries who are the passive ones in cases of humanitarian disasters, who do nothing, who do not want to get involved. Rather, it is the people caught up in the events themselves. They see the horrors that are engulfing them but cannot understand how such horrors are possible and are unable to act. Their gaze, the gaze of the uncomprehending victim, is unbearable and gives rise to guilt in witnesses to distant disaster. It is to avoid the pressure of this gaze that we feel compassion toward those in trouble. This compassion can be related to the reflexive nature of human desire, which is always desire for a desire. Compassion is "the way to maintain the proper distance towards a neighbour in trouble." By giving, we present ourselves so that we like what we see when we look at ourselves from the position of the victim. By responding compassionately, we present ourselves as that which is desired by those who are suffering. This account does not in any sense invalidate compassion; on the contrary, it shows why it is so important and necessary. The reaction of the subject of
compassion, the victim, is a separate matter. In the Ethiopian famine, we saw that the

images that provoked an immediate reaction and a strong response were those that portrayed perplexed victims, children in particular, and specifically those that portrayed their passivity and bewilderment. It was precisely that picture

of passivity that formed the basis of so many of the subsequent objections to the media coverage. However, the mediated nature of the image, the fact that it was an image seen on television, leads to another account of the response to disaster. When we watch a television program, we do so from a disembodied space outside and beyond the reach of the scene we are viewing. We ourselves are invisible to the people we are watching. We are not there, they cannot see us, yet we can see them. The same is the case with a theatrical drama on stage, except that there the distance is fictional or posited by convention and can be broken by audience participation or by applause. In a theater, too, people are part of an audience, not alone. When we witness scenes of suffering on television, our subjectivity is suspended. We are like ghosts. It is as if we were already dead. We cannot intervene, and we cannot be harmed by what is going on. Yet, in an important sense

we are not passive. As (apparently) the focus of the victim's perplexed gaze, the viewer is placed in the position of the master signifier, the place of the subject who is supposed to know. This is the place the analyst occupies in psychotherapy. The symbolic or social order can never be complete. It constitutes itself around a lack, a paradoxical element that halts the shifting of signifiers in a "non-founded founding act of violence." This paradoxical element is the master signifier and provides the reference point that holds the symbolic field together. It conceals the void by occupying it and thus enables the social order to be constituted. However, the "master" is always an impostoranyone at the place of the constitutive lack in the structure of the symbolic order will do. The character of master is produced by the position the figure assumes. It is by reference to the master that the symbolic order acquires meaning and purpose, and its emptiness is concealed. The lack, the empty place at the heart of the symbolic order, cannot be abolishedit is constitutive it can only be rendered visible as empty. As witnesses of distant suffering on our television screens, we are placed in that empty place, the void that has to be concealed for the social order to come into being. We are the ones who are supposed to be able to answer the perplexity of the victims about the purpose of their suffering. This is an impossible position to hold. The imposture of the master signifier is usually concealed; however, in this case, we ourselves are interpellated into this position, and we know we are impostors. We know that what we are part of is not real. We cannot help. We cannot answer the appeal. According to Zizek, the accepted interpretation in media studies is that

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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* LINK: COMPASSION *

our perception of violence in a modern society of spectacle is aestheticized by media manipulationwe no longer see reality as such, but reality as spectacle, pseudoreality. Zizek argues that this is not the case: "The problem of contemporary media resides not in their enticing us to confound fiction with reality but, rather, in their 'hyperrealise character by means of which they saturate the void that keeps open the space for symbolic fiction. The symbolic order can function only by

maintaining a minimal distance towards reality, on account of which it ultimately has the status of a fiction. . . . if it is to function normally, symbolic order is not to be taken literally." We are not part of what we see: we cannot take on the role demanded of us. We are watching, helpless to prevent, yet implicated. Not only are we unable to stop the tragedy, we are unable to comfort its victims. We feel the full impact of the ambiguity and ambivalencethe undecidabilitythat is the metasubject. From this empty place we are summoned by the perplexed gaze to provide answers, to respond to the questioning of the victims who cannot understand the horror they have been caught up in. It is not a place we can occupy. There are no answers we can give. There are only (impossible) decisions to be made. Here we see what Zizek meansthe space for the symbolic fiction (the master signifier) has been removed. The scene is the impossible one pictured in a Steve Bell cartoon, which shows the living room of a modern home in semidarkness. Seated on the floor is a figure, its eyes closed and the television set cradled in its arms. On the bright television screen we can see a body lying curled up on a road somewhere. We can just make out what looks like a figure holding a gun in the background. The title is "International Community. This is what Zizek describes as an experience of the sublime. Such an experience takes place when we "find ourselves in the face of some horrifying event whose comprehension exceeds our capacity of representation; it is so overwhelming that we can do nothing but stare at it in horror; yet at the same time this event poses no immediate threat to our physical well-being, so that we can maintain the safe distance of an observer."' We are forced to traverse the fantasy, to face the traumatic void at the heart of the social or symbolic order. We experience the nonexistence of the big Other, that is, the social or symbolic order. What do we do after we have traversed the fantasy? Is this moment, when the symbolic order no longer exists and we experience our own nonexistence as subjects, no more than a gap between two ordersa fleeting, vanishing mediator, "an enthusiastic intermediate moment necessarily followed by a sobering relapse into the reign of the big Other," like a revolution followed by a return to a more repressive regime? One response to this question is a move to produce an alternative social order, one based on a different master signifier. Another response is a return to, or reassertion of, the previous symbolic order. The first leads to an international community of affect, based on compassion, and a humanitarian practice. This claims a neutrality derived from universal basic human values or rights. The second produces a return to developmentalism, which is founded on the scientific search for objective causes of events and a belief in rational, technical solutions. It claims a value-free truth founded on the certainty of objective method. A third response, to which I return later, is the possibility of "tarrying with the negative." Lacanian work allows us to see the various responses in relation to a desire for (impossible) completion, for an overcoming of the lack inherent in la condition humaine as such.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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* LINK: ASSORTED VICTIMHOODS *

ETHICAL/MORAL OBLIGATION ARE NOT BASED IN SOME SELFLESS, RESPECT FOR LIFE. A SELF-SERVING PROTECTION OF THE POWER, SAFETY AND HUMANITARIAN RIGHTEOUSNESS THAT THESE CLAIMS GIVE TO THEIR PLAN. THESE ROLES RIGIDLY ENFORCES USAS PROTECTORS AND THEM AS WEAK , LIMITING OUT ANY ALTERNATIVE DIALOUGUES.

THE AFFS CLAIMS OF THEY ARE MERELY

CAMPBELL, PROFESSOR AT DURHAM UNIVERSITY, 2002 [DAVID VIOLENCE, JUSTICE, AND IDENTITY IN THE BOSNIAN CONFLICT SOVEREIGNTY AND SUBJECTIVITY]
perhaps, but many of the current developments in international politics point in that direction.

Assorted victimhoods is the only universal ideology in the postcold war world according to Jean Baudrillard. An extreme assessment, The "failed state as international victim has become a preeminent security issue, establishing the limit case of concern when the power of the global media is there to gaze upon the plight of its devastated peoples. Whether the site is Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, (Rwanda) or Chechnya the sight is familiar-"generalities of bodies dead, wounded, starving, diseased, and homelessare pressed against the television screen as mass articles." The effect can be strangely comforting for the viewing population: "in their pervasive depersonalisation, this anonymous corporeality functions as an allegory of the elephantine, 'archaic,' and violent histories of external and internal subalterns." Through a peculiar trade, a pitiful eye is cast over the victims, consuming their image as a source for compassion. In return, through a process of "cultural anaesthesia," which banishes "disconcerting, discordant, and anarchic sensory presences and agents that undermine the normalising and often silent premises of everyday life," we are reassured that the horrors evident over there are safely confined and our resultant superiority confirmed

This is the strange morality of pity that Friedrich Nietzsche warned against. In questioning morality so as establish the possibility for a revaluation of values, Nietzsche paid particular attention to "unegoistic" instincts such as pity. Nietzsche regarded the morality of pity as a danger to all right-thinking persons, for it represented a constraint upon the sovereignty of the individual through the transmission of pain from the victim to the observer. But Nietzsche argued the danger was greater than that, for he saw that some "good" persons sought objects of pity as a means to increase their own position and

contro1. The objects of pity would remain victims regardless of the amount of attention directed their way, whereas the pitiers would markedly increase their feeling of superiority. The international community has focused on the abnormality of the conflict through an oft-repeated parade of pathetic images while finding it difficult to confront the normality of life lived in the context of violence. As Slavoj zizek argues, what disturbs us most is not the sense that there is something perversely unique
In few places has this productive complex of pity been more evident than the Bosnian conflict. about Bosnia in general and Sarajevo in particular, though most assessments attempt to make that case: The unbearable is not the difference. The unbearable is the fact that in a sense there is Sarajevo, just normal citizens like us. The moment we take full note of this fact,

no difference: there are no bloodthirsty "Balkanians" in the frontier that separates "us" from "them" is exposed in all its arbitrariness, and we are forced to renounce the safe distance of external observers. To maintain the distance, therefore, we emphasize compassion for the victim. Zizek, like Baudrillard, believes something global has emerged: "Sarajevo is but the special case of what is perhaps the key feature of the ideological constellation that characterises our epoch of world-wide triumph of liberal democracy: the universalisation of the notion of victim." To say as much is not to degrade the evident suffering or downplay the abundant horrors of the violence that has consumed the Bosnian capital (among other areas) since early 1992. To the contrary, in order to come to terms with the violence, it is necessary to highlight the function of compassion and what it conceals if we are to respond more effectively. In this context it might be said, as zizek argues, that "our compassion, precisely in so far as it is 'sincere,' presupposes that in it, we perceive ourselves in the form that we find likeable: the victim is presented so that we like to see ourselves in the position from which we stare at her." In our empathy toward Bosnian victims, we have, especially through the emphasis upon humanitarian aid and intervention, thought of ourselves in a manner that we find congenialthe humanitarians giving charity to the helpless This desirable sense of our self more often than not does little for the other. Moreover, the victims, who are neither so weak nor easily indulged as we think, can plainly see this. Indeed, the "justifiable contempt" held by many Sarajevans toward both their enemy and those Europeans who, with their "hypocritical contrition . . . bronze their good conscience in the sun of solidarity," pierces the phantasm of the pitiful victim and exposes the political deficit of compassion. For what our surfeit of concern conceals is the "immobilising power of fascination . . . [which] thwarts our ability to act" and prevents a political analysis of the conflict in Bosnia. The "ethics of compassion with the victim legitimises the avoidance, the endless postponement, of the act. All 'humanitarian' activity of aiding victims, all food, clothes and medicine for Bosnians, are there to obfuscate the urgency of the act." This is certainly the view of Rony
Brauman, a former president of Medecins sans Frontieres, who has charged the international community with hiding' behind compassion in-the face of genocide.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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* LINK: HELPING AFRICA *

NEXT, IS LIBERAL COMMUNISM: THE AFFS COMPASSIONATE BENEVOLENCE TOWARD THE AFRICAN IS A MEANS OF GUILT ASSUAGING. THE PLANS DISPENSATION OF CHARITY ONLY MAKES US ALL MORE COMFORTABLE AND COMPLACENT IN OUR CONTINUAL PARTICIPATION IN THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC PROCESSES THAT GUARANTEE AFRICAS EMISERATION. ZIZEK, PROF. OF SOCIOLOGY AT UNIV. LJUBLJANA, 2006. [SLAVOJ, NOBODY HAS REVIEW OF BOOKS, VOL. 28 NO. 7]
TO BE

VILE, LONDON

Liberal communists are pragmatic; they hate a doctrinaire approach. There is no exploited working class today, only concrete problems to be solved: starvation in Africa, the plight of Muslim women, religious fundamentalist violence. When there is a humanitarian crisis in Africa (liberal communists love a humanitarian crisis; it brings out the best in them), instead of engaging in anti-imperialist rhetoric, we should get together and work out the best way of solving the problem, engage people, governments and business in a common enterprise, start moving things instead of relying on centralised state help, approach the crisis in a creative and unconventional way.
Liberal communists like to point out that the decision of some large international corporations to ignore apartheid rules within their companies was as important as the direct political struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Abolishing segregation within the company, paying blacks and whites the same salary for the same job etc: this was a perfect instance of the overlap between the struggle for political freedom and business interests, since the same companies can now thrive in post-apartheid South Africa. Liberal communists love May 1968. What an explosion of youthful energy and creativity! How it shattered the bureaucratic order! What an impetus it gave to economic and social life after the political illusions dropped away! Those who were old enough were themselves protesting and fighting on the streets: now they have changed in order to change the world, to revolutionise our lives for real. Didnt Marx say that all political upheavals were unimportant compared to the invention of the steam engine? And would Marx not have said today: what are all the protests against global capitalism in comparison with the internet?

Above all, liberal communists are true citizens of the world good people who worry. They worry about populist fundamentalism and irresponsible greedy capitalist corporations. They see the deeper causes of todays problems: mass poverty and hopelessness breed fundamentalist terror. Their goal is not to earn money, but to change the world (and, as a by-product, make even more money). Bill Gates is already the

single greatest benefactor in the history of humanity, displaying his love for his neighbours by giving hundreds of millions of dollars for education, the fight against hunger and malaria etc. The catch is that before you can give all this away you have to take it (or, as the liberal communists would put it, create it). In order to help people, the justification goes, you must have the means to do so, and experience that is, recognition of the dismal failure of all centralised statist and collectivist approaches teaches us that private enterprise is by far the most effective way. By regulating their business, taxing them excessively, the state is undermining the official goal of its own activity
(to make life better for the majority, to help those in need).
Liberal communists do not want to be mere profit-machines: they want their lives to have deeper meaning. They are against old-fashioned religion and for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation (everybody knows that Buddhism foreshadows brain science, that the power of meditation can be measured scientifically). Their motto is social responsibility and gratitude: they are the first to admit that society has been incredibly good to them, allowing them to deploy their talents and amass wealth, so they feel that it is their duty to give something back to society and help people. This beneficence is what makes business success worthwhile. This isnt an entirely new phenomenon. Remember Andrew Carnegie, who employed a private army to suppress organised labour in his steelworks and then distributed large parts of his wealth for educational, cultural and humanitarian causes, proving that, although a man of steel, he had a heart of gold? In the same way, todays liberal communists give away with one hand what they grabbed with the other.

There is a chocolate-flavoured laxative available on the shelves of US stores which is publicised with the paradoxical injunction: Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate! i.e. eat more of something that itself causes constipation. The structure of the chocolate laxative can be discerned throughout todays ideological landscape; it is what makes a figure like Soros so objectionable. He stands for ruthless financial exploitation combined with its counter-agent, humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. Soross daily routine is a lie embodied: half of his working time is devoted to financial speculation, the other half to humanitarian activities (financing cultural and democratic activities in post-Communist countries, writing essays and books) which work against the effects of his own speculations. The two faces of Bill Gates are exactly like the two faces of Soros: on the one hand, a
cruel businessman, destroying or buying out competitors, aiming at a virtual monopoly; on the other, the great philanthropist who makes a point of saying: What does it serve to have computers if people do not have enough to eat?

According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries are constantly helping undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation of the Third World. As
for the opposition between smart and non-smart, outsourcing is the key notion. You export the (necessary) dark side of production disciplined, hierarchical labour, ecological pollution to non-smart Third World locations (or invisible ones in the First World). The ultimate liberal communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible Third World sweat shops.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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LINK: HELPING
PEOPLE
SACRIFICE THEMSELVES FOR THE OTHER BECAUSE THEY SECRETLY ENJOY THEIR ENGINEERING IT CREATE NARCISSITIC SATISFACTION SUFFERING,

IEK, INSTITUTE

FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, 1998 [SLAVOJ, THE LAW NEED AN OBSCENE SUPPLEMENT? LAW AND THE POSTMODERN MIND, P. ELECTRONIC]

WHY

DOES

Another key philosopher and theologian to be inserted in this series is Nicolas Malebranche, the great Cartesian Catholic who, after his death, was excommunicated and his books destroyed on account of his very excessive orthodoxy. In the best Pascalian tradition, Malebranche laid the cards on the table and "revealed the secret" (the perverted truth) of Christianity: it was not that Christ came to Earth in order to deliver people from sin, from the legacy of Adam's Fall; on the contrary, Adam had to fall in order to enable Christ to come to earth and dispense salvation. (Malebranche applies here to God Himself the "psychological" insight that tells us that the saintly figure who sacrifices himself for the benefit of others, to deliver them from their misery, secretly wants the others to suffer misery so that he will be able to help them-like the proverbial husband who works all day for his poor crippled wife, yet would probably abandon her if she were to regain health and turn into a successful career woman. It is much more satisfying to sacrifice oneself for the poor victim than to enable the other to lose the status of a victim and maybe even to become more successful than ourselves) Malebranche develops this parallel to its conclusion, to the horror of the Jesuits who organized his excommunication: in the same way that the saintly person merely uses the others' suffering to bring about his own narcissistic satisfaction in helping the others in distress, God also ultimately loves only Himself, and merely uses man to promulgate his own glory ... From this reversal, Malebranche draws a consequence worthy of Lacan's famous turnabout of Dostoyevski ("If God doesn't exist," the father says, "then everything is permitted. Quite evidently, a naive notion, for we analysts know full well that if God doesn't exist, then nothing at all is permitted any longer"):3 it is not true that, if Christ were not come to earth to deliver humanity, everybody would be lostquite the contrary, if Christ were not to come, nobody would be lost, i.e., every human being had to fall so that Christ could come and deliver some of them ... What further follows from this is the paradoxical nature of predestination and grace: divine grace is contingently disseminated, it has absolutely no correlation with our good deeds. The moment the link between grace and our deeds were to be directly perceptible, human freedom would be lost: God is not allowed to intervene directly in the universe, i.e., grace has to remain masked, nonperceptible as such, as a direct divine intervention, since its direct transparency would change man into a slavish entity subordinated to God like an animal and would deprive him of faith grounded in free choice.4

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

LINK: MORAL IMPERATIVE

THE AFFIRMATIVES MORAL IMPERATIVE CONSTITUTES A TOTALITARIAN PARALYSIS AND CONTINUITY OF CONSERVATIVE POLITICS WHICH REPLICATE YOUR CASE HARMS. STAVRAKAKIS, PROF PSYCHOANALYSIS @ U ESSEX, 03 [YANNIS , PARALLAX, 2003, VOL. 9, NO. 2, 5671 REACTIVATING THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION: THE POLITICS OF TRANSFORMATION BEYOND REOCCUPATION AND CONFORMISM]
This brings us to the whole discussion around the ethical turn in contemporary political philosophy. Even if one concludes that radical democracy can be a viable and fruitful project for a politics of transformation, what about the prioritization of ethics within recent radical democratic discourse? For example, at a fairly superficial level, it seems as if Zizek questions the importance of ethics in this field, and thus would also seem to question the deployment of the radical democratic attitude at the ethical level. Consider, for example, his outright condemnation of the ethical turn in political philosophy: The return to ethics in todays political philosophy shamefully exploits the horrors of Gulag or Holocaust as the ultimate bogey for blackmailing us into renouncing all serious radical engagement.60 Surely, however, this cannot be a rejection of ethics in toto. Even if only because Zizek himself has devoted a considerable part of his work elaborating the ethics of psychoanalysis in the Lacanian tradition.61 It follows then that it must be a particular form of ethical discourse that constitutes his target. The same is true of Alain Badious argument, to which we will now turn. Badious target is a particular type of ethics, of ethical ideology, which uses a discourse of human rights and humanitarianism in order to silence alternative thought and politics and legitimize the capitalist order. This is an ethics premised on the principle that good is what intervenes visibly against an Evil that is identifiable a priori.62 What Badiou points to here, is what appears as a strange inversion; here the Good is derived from the Evil and not the other way round.63 The result of such an inversion is significant for the theory and politics of transformation: If the ethical consensus is founded on the recognition of Evil, it follows that every effort to unite people around a positive idea of the Good, let alone identify Man with projects of this kind, becomes in fact the real source of evil itself. Such is the accusation so often repeated over the last fifteen years: every revolutionary project stigmatized as utopian turns, we are told, into totalitarian nightmare. Every will to inscribe an idea of justice or equality turns bad. Every collective will to the Good creates Evil [] In reality, the price paid by ethics is a stodgy conservatism.64 This ethic, which is revealed as nothing but a mindless catechism, a miserable moralism,65 is an ethics that can have no relation to a transformative political agenda. 66 This ethics is presented in Badious argument as a distortion of a real ethic of truths, which attempts to restore the logical priority of Good over Evil. Badious ethic of truths is an ethics related to the idea of the event, a category central for his whole philosophical and political apparatus. To put it briefly, the event here refers to a real break which destabilizes a given discursive articulation, a pre-existing order.

ETHICS RESULT IN CONSERVATISM AND THE PRESERVATION OF THE STATUS QUO. JACKSON, DEPT. OF ENGLISH, WAYNE ST. UNIV, 2007. [KEN, THE GREAT TEMPTATION WHY BADIOU HAS BEEN SO IMPORTANT TO IEK IJZS VOL. 1 NO. 2]
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RELIGION:

The reason our attention to ethics can be considered an ideology is two-fold. First, much of the academic world and, in particular, the academic left does not recognize its attention to the other as ethics as such and, indeed, recoils from the notion that they are engaged in primarily ethical pursuits. They are even more horrified when presented with the notion that this ethics, our ethics, is connected somehow to religion. We are, in short, ethically interpellated subjects that can not see our own ideological constitution clearly. Second, as the remarks from iek quoted above suggest, our

ethics actually functions in a conservative fashion, preserving the neoliberal status quo under the guise of challenging hierarchical power structures. As Badiou puts it, the price paid by ethics is a stodgy conservatism. The ethical conception of man, besides the fact that its foundation is either biological (images of victims) or Western (the self-satisfaction of the armed benefactor), prohibits every broad, positive vision of possibilities.what ethics legitimates, is in fact the conservation by the socalled West of what it possesses (2001: 24). We respect the other Badiou points out, but only inasmuch as that other conforms to our vision: Respect for differences, of course? But on the condition that the different be parliamentary-democratic, pro freemarket economics, in favour of freedom of opinion, feminism, the environment(2001: 24). For this reason Badiou shockingly proposes that the whole ethical predication based upon recognition of the other should be purely and simply abandoned (2001: 25).

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

LINK: HUMANITARIANISM
THEIR POLITICS OF HUMANITARIANISM DOES NOT CHALLENGE STATUS QUO POWER RELATIONS BUT CONFIRMS THEM. AID IS NOT SIMPLY BENEVOLENCE, IT IS A NARCISSISTIC WAY OF REINFORCING A RELATIONSHIP OF DEPENDENCY. RELIEVING THE DEBT DOES NOT LIBERATE AFRICANS FROM THE TUTELAGE OF THE UNITED STATES, BUT IRONICALLY REASSERTS THE POWER DIFFERENTIAL ALL WHILE OSTENSIBLY ABSOLVING THE US OF RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE SOCIOPOLITICAL CONDITIONS OF THE CONTINENT. ZIZEK, PROF. OF SOCIOLOGY @ UNIV. LJUBLJANA, 2004 [SLAVOJ, OPERA, LACAN.COM]
the dispensation of mercy is the most efficient constituent of the exercise of power. That is to say, is the relationship between law (legal justice) mercy is by definition dispensed as a free and excessive act, as something that the agent of mercy is free to do or not to do - mercy under compulsion is no mercy but, at its best, a travesty of mercy? What if, at a deeper level, the relationship is the opposite one? What if, with regard to law, we have the freedom to choose (to obey or violate it), while mercy is obligatory, we HAVE to display it - mercy is an unnecessary excess which, as such, HAS
As such, and mercy really the one between necessity and choice? Is it really that one HAS to obey the law, while to occur. (And does the law not always take into account this freedom of ours, not only by punishing us for its transgression, but by providing escapes to being punished by its ambiguity and inconsistency?) Is it not that

showing mercy is the ONLY way for a Master te demonstrate his supra-legal authority? If a Master were merely to guarantee the full application of the
law, of legal regulations, he would be deprived of his authority and turn into a mere figure of knowledge, the agent of the discourse of university. (This is why even a great judge is a Master figure: he always somehow twists the law in its application by way of interpreting it creatively.) This goes even for Stalin himself, a figure which we definitely do not associate with mercy: one should never forget that, as the (now available) minutes of the meetings of the Politburo and Central Committee from the 1930s demonstrate, Stalin's direct interventions were as a rule those of displaying mercy. When younger CC members, eager to prove their revolutionary fervour, demanded instant death penalty for Bukharin, Stalin always intervened and said "Patience! His guilt is not yet proven!" or something similar. Of course this was a hypocritical attitude - Stalin was well aware that he himself generated the destructive fervour, that the younger members were eager to please him - but, nonetheless, the appearance of mercy is necessary here. as the ultimate expression of the weird unity of the And, if anything, opposites that permeates our attitudes. Today's hedonism combines pleasure with constraint - it is no longer the old notion of the right measure between pleasure and constraint, but a kind of pseudo-Hegelian immediate coincidence of the opposites: action and reaction should coincide, the very thing which causes damage should already be the medicine. The ultimate example of it is arguably a chocolate laxative, available in the US, with the paradoxical injunction "Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!", i.e., of the very thing which causes constipation. Do we not find here a weird version of Wagner's famous "Only the spear which caused the wound can heal it" from Parsifal? And is not a negative proof of the hegemony of this stance the fact that true unconstrained consumption (in all its main forms: drugs, free sex, smoking...) is emerging as the main danger? The fight against these dangers is one of the main investments of today's biopolitics. Solutions are here desperately sought which would reproduce the paradox of the chocolate laxative. The main contender is safe sex - a term which makes one appreciative of the truth of the old saying "Is having sex with a condom not like taking a shower with a raincoat on?". The ultimate goal would be here, along the lines of decaf coffee, to invent opium without opium: no wonder marihuana is so popular among liberals who want to legalize it - it already IS a kind of opium without opium.

in our late capitalist societies, this perverse logic of mercy is brought to extreme,

the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity. Commendable as it is in itself, Bill Gates' charitable activity of gigantic proportions in no way redeems his economic pursuits. More generally, charity is, today, part of the game as a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation: in a superegoblackmail of gigantic proportions, the developed countries are constantly helping the undeveloped (with aid, credits, etc.), thereby avoiding the key issue, namely, their COMPLICITY in and co-responsibility for the miserable situation of the undeveloped. And the same paradox occurs even at the military level of the "war on terror." The category of homo sacer, reactualized recently by Giorgio Agamben - those who, according to the ancient Roman law, could have been killed with impunity and whose death was, for the same reason, without any sacrificial value -, is best fitted to cover this newly emerging entity of the excluded, who are not only terrorists, but also those who are on the receiving end of the humanitarian help (Ruandans, Bosnians, Afghanis...): today's homo sacer is the privileged object of the humanitarian biopolitics - in both cases, the population is reduced to an object of biopolitics. It is thus is absolutely crucial to supplement the usual list of today's homo sacer (les sans papiers in France, the inhabitants of the favelas in Brasil, the African-American ghettos in the US, etc.) with the humanitarian side: perhaps, those perceived as the receivers of humanitarian aid are THE figure of homo sacer today. One should therefore assume the paradox that concentration camps and refugee camps for the delivery of humanitarian aid are the two faces, "human" and "inhuman," of the same socio-logical formal matrix. This is another facet of the new global order: we no longer have wars
We encounter the same unity of opposites in the new capitalist ethics, where in the old sense of the regulated conflict between sovereign states in which certain rules apply (the treatment of prisoners, the prohibition of certain weapons., etc.). What remains are two types of conflicts: either struggles between groups of homo sacer, i.e. ethnic-religious conflicts which violate the rules of universal human rights, do not count as wars proper, and call for the humanitarian pacifist intervention of the Western powers, or direct attacks on the US or other representatives of the new global order, in which case, again, we do not have wars proper, but merely unlawful combatants resisting forces of universal order. In this second case, one cannot even imagine a neutral humanitarian organization like the Red Cross mediating between the warring parties, organizing the exchange of prisoners, etc.: one side in the conflict (the US-dominated global force) ALREADY ASSUMES THE ROLE OF THE RED CROSS - it does not perceive itself as one of the warring sides, but as a mediating agent of peace and global order crushing down particular rebellions and, simultaneously, providing humanitarian aid to the local populations. This weird coincidence of the opposites reached its peak when, in April 2002, Harald Nasvik, a Right-wing member of the Norvegian parliament, proposed George W. Bush and Tony Blair as the candidates for the Nobel peace prize, quoting their decisive role in the "war on terror" as the greatest threat to peace today - the old Orwellian motto "War is Peace" finally becomes reality, so that,

We thus no longer have the opposition between war and humanitarian aid: the two are closely connected, THE SAME intervention can function at two levels simultaneously:
sometimes, military action against Taliban is almost presented as a means to guarantee the safe delivery of the humanitarian aid. the toppling of the Taliban regime was presented as part of the strategy to help the Afghani people oppressed by the Taliban - as Tony Blair said in September 2001, perhaps, we will have to throw more bombs on Afghanistan in order to secure the food transportation and distribution. Perhaps,

the ultimate image of the treatment of the local population as homo sacer is that of the American war plane flying above Afghanistan - one is never sure what it will drop, bombs or food parcels. War

itself, the ruthless bombing destined not only to annihilate the enemy, but to produce "shock and awe," is legitimized as being in the service of mercy... It is against this historical background that we should read today Mozart's Clemenza. The entire canon of Mozart's great operas can be read as the deployment of the motif of pardon, of dispensing mercy, in all its variations. The first two masterpieces, Idomeneo and Die Entfuehrung, still rely on the traditional absolutist-monarchic figure of the Master dispensing mercy: at the very point of the lowest despair, when the hero heroically assumes readiness to die, to sacrifice himself for the beloved, the authority intervenes and shows mercy. Le nozze di Figaro marks the first big break: in its finale, it is the Master himself (the Count) who, in the inversion of the normal situation, has to kneal down and ask for mercy from his wife and his subjects, and when he is pardoned by them, the opera can conclude with the assertion of universal brotherhood. Don Giovanni introduces an additional twist: in the terrifying finale, when confronted with the Stone Guest, the hero is offered mercy if he just renounces his sinful past and repents, but don Giovanni proudly rejects the offer, preferring eternal damnation to betraying his existential choice of seducer. The lowest point is reached in Cosi fan tutte, the only Mozart's opera with a failed finale; however, far from condemning this failure, one should perceive it, in an Adornian way, as anh injdication of Mozart's truthfulness - after the abyssal imbroglio of betrayals, any reconciliation of the two couples can only be a fake. With The Magic Flute, the reign of mercy is reinstalled, but with a price: the register shifts from the grim realism of Don Giovanni and Cosi... to the artificially resuscitated fairy-tale magic

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

LINK: HUMANITARIANISM
HUMAN RIGHTS ARE ONLY ATTAINABLE WHEN LIFE IS TRIPPED OF ALL CONTEXTS. ATTEMPTING TO SOLVE HUMAN RIGHTS IN A GREAT SOCIO-POLITICAL CONTEXT ONLY LEGITIMIZES HUMANITARIANISM THAT AMOUNTS TO THE IMPLICIT SPREAD OF NEO-LIBERAL IDEOLOGY AND THE EXPLICIT MILITARY
INTERVENTIONISM

SLAVOJ ZIZEK, NO DATE GIVEN (POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER AND CULTURAL CRITIC) THE OBSCENITY HUMAN RIGHTS: VIOLENCE AS SYMPTOM HTTP://WWW.LACAN.COM/ZIZVIOL.HTM

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From this specific insight, one should make the move to the general level and render problematic the very depoliticized humanitarian politics of "Human Rights" as the ideology of military interventionism serving specific economico-political purposes. As Wendy Brown develops apropos Michael Ignatieff, such humanitarianism "presents itself as something of an antipolitics - a pure defense of the innocent and the powerless against power, a pure defense of the individual against immense and potentially cruel or despotic machineries of culture, state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations or instantiations of collective power against individuals." 3 However, the question is: "what kind of politicization /those who intervene on behalf of human rights/ set in motion against the powers they oppose. Do they stand for a different formulation of justice or do they stand in opposition to collective justice projects?" 4 Say, it is clear that the US overthrowing of Saddam Hussein, legitimized in the terms of ending the suffering of the Iraqi people, not only was motivated by other politico-economic interests (oil), but also relied on a determinate idea of the political and economic conditions that should open up the perspective of freedom to the Iraqi people (Western liberal democracy, guarantee of private property, the inclusion into the global market economy, etc.). The purely humanitarian antipolitical politics of merely preventing suffering thus effectively amounts to the implicit prohibition of elaborating a positive collective project of socio-political transformation. And, at an even more general level, one should problematize the very opposition between the universal (pre-political) Human Rights which belong to every human being "as such," and specific political rights of a citizen, member of a particular political community; in this sense, Balibar argues for the "reversal of the historical and theoretical relationship between 'man' and 'citizen'" which proceeds by "explaining how man is made by citizenship and not citizenship by man." 5 Balibar refers here to Hannah Arendt's insight apropos he XXth century phenomenon of refugees: The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships - except that they were still human. 6 This line, of course, leads straight to Agamben's notion of homo sacer as a human being reduced to "bare life": in a properly Hegelian paradoxical dialectics of universal and particular, it is precisely when a human being is deprived of his particular socio-political identity which accounts for his determinate citizenship, that he, in one and the same move, is no longer recognized and/or treated as human. In short, the paradox is that one is deprived of human rights precisely when one is effectively, in one's social reality, reduced to a human being "in general," without citizenship, profession, etc., that is to say, precisely when one effectively becomes the ideal BEARER of "universal human rights" (which belong to me "independently of" my profession, sex, citizenship, religion, ethnic identity...).

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

LINK: HUMANITARIANISM
EVEN IF THEY WIN THAT HUMANITARIANISM DOES NOT LEAD TO VIOLENCE DIRECTLY, THE WESTS FRAMING OF A CERTAIN ISSUE AS HUMANITARIAN PRECLUDES THE POSSIBLITY OF INTERVING TO STOP STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE LIKE GENOCIDE, CLIMATIC FAMINE, OR OTHER GEOPOLITICAL SITUATIONS SLAVOJ ZIZEK 2004 (POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER AND CULTURAL THESE TIMES HTTP://WWW.LACAN.COM/ZIZEKSLUMS.HTM
CRITIC)

THE FREE WORLD

OF

SLUMS

IN

It is true one can only be shocked by the excessive indifference toward suffering, even when this suffering is widely reported and condemned in the media. Sudan offers a current example, but recall the three-year-long siege of Sarajevo, when the population was starving and exposed to permanent shelling and sniper fire. The enigma here is why, although the media was continually covering the crisis, was neither the U.N. forces, NATO nor the United States willing to impose a corridor in Sarajevo through which people and provisions could circulate freely? The only answer to this enigma was proposed by Rory Brauman, who, on behalf of the Red Cross, coordinated the help to Sarajevo: The very presentation of the crisis of Sarajevo as "humanitarian," the recasting of a politicalmilitary conflict into humanitarian terms, was sustained by a political choice, that of taking the side of Serbia.

OF THEIR SITUATION, THEIR DISPLACEMENT, AND THEIR LACK OF POLITICAL RIGHTS, THE AFFIRMATIVE CRIES, WE MUST FORMAT A PRAGMATIC SOLUTION TO HELP THEM. HISTORY IS ON OUR SIDE, PRAGMATIC HUMANITARIAN SOLUTIONS FAIL BECAUSE OF THE DOMINATING STRUCTURE IN WHICH RIGHTS ARE RETURNED TO SENDER.

BECAUSE

SLAVOJ ZIZEK 2004 (POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER AND CULTURAL THESE TIMES HTTP://WWW.LACAN.COM/ZIZEKSLUMS.HTM

CRITIC)

THE FREE WORLD

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What, then, happens to Human Rights when they are reduced to the rights of those excluded from the political process-i.e, when they become useless, since they are the rights of those who, precisely, have no rights? Jacques Ranciere, the French philosopher, recently gave this answer: They become humanitarian rights, the rights of those who cannot enact them, the victims of the absolute denial of right. For all this, they are not void, Political names and political places never become merely void. The void is filled by somebody or something else. ... If those who suffer inhuman repression are unable to enact Human Rights that are their last recourse, then somebody else has to inherit their rights in order to enact them in their place. This is what is called the "right to humanitarian interference"-a right that some nations assume to the supposed benefit of the victimized populations, and very often against the advice of humanitarian organizations themselves. The "right to humanitarian interference" might be described as a sort of "return to sender:" the disused right that had been sent to the rightless are sent back to the senders. Thus, in the reigning discourse of humanitarian intervention, the developed West is effectively getting back from the victimized Third World its own message in its true form. This is also where we should look for candidates to fill the position of "universal individual," a particular group whose fate stands for the injustice of today's world: Palestinians, Guantnamo prisoners, etc. Palestine today presents us with the "opportunity" of Ash's subtitle because all of the standard "pragmatic" solutions to the "Middle East crisis" have repeatedly failed, which suggests that a utopian invention of a radical new space may be the only "realistic" choice.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

LINK: HUMANITARIANISM
ITS A GUISE FOR YET ANOTHER FORM OF STATE CONTROL OVER OUR LIVES. BY TRUSTING THE STATE TO SAVE PEOPLE, WE GIVE IT AN ARENA TO CREATE A STATE OF EMERGENCY IN WHICH TO PROVE ITS CAPABILITIES. THIS DEPOLITICIZES THE DECISIONS MADE INVOLVING AID, AS THEY WILL ALWAYS ERR IN FAVOR OF THE STATE.

EDKINS, PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WALES, 2003 [JENNY, TRAUMA AND THE MEMORY OF POLITICS, 211-212]
One reason why the tale of the concentration camp survivor is so compelling is that although it is presented as a space of exception, the camp is nothing more than the coming to fruition of the horror contained in everyday existence under the sway of sovereign politics in the west. Thus our response to the camps is in part a recognition of our own predicament as participants in the reduction of life to bare life and politics to biopolitics. As Foucault reminds us `we are all governed and, to that extent, in solidarity'. But this is of no use if our invocation of the trope of humanitarian crisis repeats the metaphor that reinforces the very power that produces the humanitarian emergency in the first place. As Agamben puts it: It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals' lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves. This double-sidedness, of course, recalls Jacques Derrida's double contradictory imperative where the question, for example, of whether and in what way to intervene in a humanitarian emergency is a dilemma that has to be resolved in any particular instance by a decision. Aid cannot be both offered and withheld: only one course of action can take place. But to seek general rules, applicable overall to aid organizations and their operations, is to duck the very question of the political that is inherently involved. Agamben's work enables us to analyze what is at stake in the politics of the decision. He elaborates how sovereign power operates through the state of emergency and how the very posing of the question through the trope of emergency is always already on the side of sovereignty. The implication of the argument in the final part of the chapter is that although the power of the sovereign state over the lives of its populations has been successfully challenged in the post-cold war period and the notion of humanitarian concern as overriding sovereignty widely accepted, this is not a liberation or an emancipation but merely the beginning of another and more authoritarian form of sovereign control over life. Just as the role of the revolution in the transition to modern state rule can be seen as an ironic strengthening of central authority, the role of humanitarian intervention can be seen as a tightening of a global structure of authority and control.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

LINK: REFUGEES
THE FRAMING OF THE REFUGEE AND THE SUFFERING AFRICAN IS SET UP TO MAKE US FEEL PITY FOR THEIR EXISTENCE AND NATURAL DISPLACEMENT AND MAKE US FEEL BETTER ABOUT HELPING THEM ONCE THEY ARE SYMBOLICALLY DISTINGUISHED FROM THE WEST IN CAMPS. FAIR AND PARKS, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR IN THE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNICATION AND ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF FILM STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-SANTA BARBARA RESPSECTIVELY. 2001[JOE ELLEN AND LISA RESPECTIVELY AFRICA ON CAMERA: TELEVISION NEWS COVERAGE AND AERIAL IMAGING OF RWANDAN REFUGEES AFRICA TODAY PROJECT MUSE]
Television news coverage not only referred to refugees as pure flow, but also exhibited preferences in its selection of video footage to construct refugees as a slowly moving fluid that overruns the borders of nation-states, refugee camps, and relief agency resources. Stories use five distinct visual strategies to track refugees movement. First, static panoramic perspectives show refugees continuously passing through the frame one after the other. Second, handheld tracking shots follow refugees in transit, often showing them from behind as they return home. Third, close ups of refugees walking feet graphically reveal the traumatic physical effect of constant movement. Often the feet shown are bare, swollen, and injured, with particular emphasis on childrens feet. Fourth, close ups of refugees faces show them walking toward the camera, only to exit the frame quickly. Such images put a face on the moving refugee, but the line of faces stretches beyond the frame, as if to imply the refugees infinite replacement. Finally, the editing of such images together has the effect of multiplying the sense of refugees movement, placing the American spectator in vertigo of displacement, as refugees are shown moving in different directions. Neither the refugees movement, nor the screen direction of the editing, is unidirectional. Rather refugees and the shots scatter unpredictably in all directions. In contrast to the images discussed so far, where refugees are constructed as constantly moving, other sequences in news stories represent refugees as confined to particular spaces, such as camps, tents, medical wards, and even stretchers. Enticed by aid agencies that were counting on publicity to further their assistance efforts and to gain attention and funding, broadcast journalists arrived ready to report on a story already seemingly written from previous encounters with the refugee situated in the campsite, where s/he now is thought to belong (Girardet 1996; Pottier 1996; Rosenblatt 1996a). Journalists often begin their stories with images of refugees contained by fences, many of them barbed, or by ropes and guarded posts. In doing so, they reinforce the physical and cultural distance between American television viewers and Rwandan refugees (e.g., CNN, 22 May 1996; CNN,29 October 1996; ABC, 3 November 1996; CNN, 28 November 1996; ABC, 30 November 1996). These camp barriers literally and symbolically link refugees to the place in which they are confined. Physically, the cordons contain any threat of movement. Symbolically, the fences isolate refugees as a marginalized people to be monitored, taken care of, and pitied.That people labeled as refugees are confined to refugee camps is fully consonant with a long-naturalized association of nonwestern peoplewith place. Appadurai calls this association the spatial incarceration of the native, where nonwestern people are confined to a place in which they are thought to belong (Appadurai 1988: 3649). In Appadurais sense of spatial incarceration, Rwandan refugees are doubly incarcerated. First, they are incarcerated within a western imaginary that conflates them with the dark continent, a place of ongoing tribal warfare. Second, Rwandan refugees are physically incarcerated by the conditions of their displacement and statelessness. While their placement in refugee camps assures some access to humanitarian aid, it also positions them as objects of knowledge. Certainly, the broadcast segments reinforce this spatial incarceration by monitoring and carefully packaging the indignities of refugee life.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

LINK: REFUGEES
INSTEAD
OF ENGAGING IN AFRICA AS SPECTATOR WITH SOME MORAL IMPERATIVE TO RIGHT THE SHITTY EXISTENCE OF AFRICA WE SHOULD DO NOTHING. FUCK THE SYSTEM OF SYMBOLS AND REPRESENTATIONS, EMBRACING THE NEGATIVE AND UNSTRIATED SPACE OF AFRICA DOES NOT REQUIRE US INTERVENTION. THE ALTERNATIVE ACKNOWLEDGES OUR IMPERFECT RELATIONSHIP TO THE THIRD WORLD THROUGH A WITNESSING OF THE TRAUMA THAT WE CONTRIBUTE TOO BY BELEIVING THAT WE MUST FIT AFRICA INTO OUR GEOPOLITICAL AND LIBIDINAL UNDERSTANDING OF POLITICS.

FAIR AND PARKS, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR IN THE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNICATION AND ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF FILM STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-SANTA BARBARA RESPSECTIVELY. 2001[JOE ELLEN AND LISA RESPECTIVELY AFRICA ON CAMERA: TELEVISION NEWS COVERAGE AND AERIAL IMAGING OF RWANDAN REFUGEES AFRICA TODAY PROJECT MUSE]
Witnessing someone elses pain allows both the maker and consumer of images to enjoy the privilege of distance. The spectacle of the refugee is not just a simple series of images designed to help the viewer understand the situation or feel the need to donate money. Rather, to engage the viewer, the spectacle emphasizes the pain of others, thereby revealing difference between those who are witnessing and those are living as refugees (Scarry 1985; Chow 1992). As Guy DeBord would remind us, The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images (DeBord 1983: no. 4). In our particular case of Rwanda, television cameras and aerial images placed refugees within a field of vision where the consumer of these images could pass judgments about refugees, their plights, their needs, and in doing so, be an active participant in the production of knowledge about refugees. As objects of the spectacle, refugees voices are most often silenced and accounts of their lived experiences ignored in favor of knowledge produced from the outside by observers (Escobar 1995: 154211; Malkki 1995: 10552; Thayer 1998). We have been particularly interested in images of Rwandan refugees presented to American viewers at two extreme scales: the close range of the video camera and the long-range impression of the aerial imaging. Did images at these two scales contribute to analysis and understanding of the Rwandan situation, or did they make Rwanda seem impossible or unnecessary to understand? Close-up images of sufferers almost certainly evoked emotional responses by television viewers. Long-range aerial images gave a larger picture, and perhaps the coarse impression of a regional purview. However, neither an emotional response nor a sense of the scale of a problem amounts to analysis or understanding. Images at these two scales invite the viewer to witness, but they do not engage history or complexity. They sate the viewer without beckoning him or her to seek deeper understanding. Witnessing should be more than looking at images. It should be an effort to intervene in the discursive construction of the refugee by challenging how visual technologies themselves are used, what they make visible, and to whom. In this sense, witnessing involves seeing the refugee not simply as another of Africas problems, but as a product of state-sanctioned violence, a very specific colonial and postcolonial history, and western imagery of Africa. The witness is no longer an authoritative bystander whose gaze verifies or validates an event
from a distance. Rather, witnessing is a more situated and embodied practiceone that involves being accountable for what one sees. In the case of the Rwandan genocide, witnessing, either for the news reporter or the news consumer, would involve examining U.S. media images of Rwandan refugees in relation to the one million people that now lay buried in Rwanda. U.S. television coverage of refugees in eastern Zaire/Congo and Rwanda in late 1996 positioned Rwandan refugees as either constantly moving or as inhabiting incarcerated spaces. The effect of these images was to strip refugees of place, identity, history, and culture, thereby creating a humanitarian story that reinforced notions of western benevolence and African need. But aerial vantages revealed the massive scale of refugee conditions in a way that ground-based news cameras simply could not. While aerial images provided a graphic and compelling display of refugees, they further elaborated western

detachment from refugees conditions by presenting them as electronic dots on a high tech map. As conflict in eastern Zaire/Congo grew and conditions worsened, news crews and relief workers evacuated refugee camps in the region, and aerial images became the only means by which western relief workers and political officials could see events that they otherwise were not there to witness. If witnessing involves accepting responsibility for and developing affinity with what one sees, then witnessing television news images of Rwandan refugees involves understanding these events as more than an isolated natural disaster. Witnessing demands the direct connection of large-scale movement of refugees from eastern Zaire/Congo, Tanzania, and Burundi in late 1996 to the complex political events that allowed state-sanctioned genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and permitted the U.S. government until only recently to refuse public acknowledgment of genocide. Witnessing Rwandan refugees images means seeing them not purely as victims to be inspected but as individuals who are part of a larger social and political body engaged in struggles for autonomy, place, and identity. It means recognizing publicly the pain and trauma of enforced displacement and demanding that the guilty be called to account. Witnessing, then, calls for reporters and viewers to engage with the story rather to record and watch with cynical detachment. Only engaged reporters and active spectators can force televised video footage and aerial images to bear witness to events that our political leaders refuse to see.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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LINK: REFUGEES
PRODUCING
KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE REFUGEE IN THE GLOBAL SENSE MIGHT ALLOW FOR AN APPORIATE REACTION TO GEOPOLITICS, BUT IT INEVITABLY IGNORES THE SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL SYSTEMS THAT CAUSE STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE-REDUCING THE AFFIRMATIVE TO COMPLICITY WITH GENOCIDE. FAIR AND

PARKS, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR IN THE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNICATION AND ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF FILM STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-SANTA BARBARA RESPSECTIVELY. 2001[JOE ELLEN AND LISA RESPECTIVELY AFRICA ON CAMERA: TELEVISION NEWS COVERAGE AND AERIAL IMAGING OF RWANDAN REFUGEES AFRICA TODAY PROJECT MUSE]
The framing of news coverage of the Rwandan genocide as localized Hutu -Tutsi warfare made news reports simpler to produce and easier for U.S. television audiences to digest. Still, the Rwandan genocide was not a good news story for many U. S. news organizations. Media attempts to peg events neatly as one tribe pitted against another demanded that reporters be able to identify which tribal side U.S. audiences should support. The problem with the Rwandan genocide story was that reporters at the outset were unable to make clear distinctions as to which side was good or bad. This ambiguity caused the genocide story to receive far less coverage than subsequent movements of thousands of refugees into settlement camps in 1995 and 1996 (Minear et al. 1996; Murison 1996; De Waal 1997). Following refugees was easier than reporting about mass murder. Moreover, refugees made good visuals because they evoked the now familiar images of famine and conflict in Africa (Fair 1996). In the year following the 1994 genocide, as many as 1.5 to 2 million Rwandan refugees entered the neighboring countries of Zaire/Congo,4 Burundi, and Tanzania (Refugees International 1996a; Prunier 1997: 37389). From October through December 1996, refugees who had settled in eastern Zaire/Congo found themselves trapped between fighting Zairian Armed Forces and an alliance of local militias, assisted by the militaries of neighboring countries. At the request of Zairian/Congolese officials, aid workers helped supervise an exit corridor from eastern Zaire/Congo to Rwanda, facilitating the exodus of more than 500,000 Banyamoulenge (Zairian Tutsis) and Rwandan Hutu refugees fleeing violence in the region (Refugees International 1996a). Despite efforts to relocate people in an organized manner, heavy fighting throughout the region sent refugees in many directions. Most Hutu refugees returned to Rwanda. Others fled west to nearby mountain regions, traveling through lava fi elds with little water or food, fearful of retaliation if they returned home. Many died there in early November 1996. Others were murdered in the mountains by Zairian/Congolese militia. In late October and early November, aid workers announced that hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees were missing. After their evacuation from eastern Zaire/Congo on 22 October, aid workers called on the U.S. government to provide satellite images to help locate the lost refugees (Refugees International 1996b). In this paper, we analyze televised video footage of the four major U.S. news outletsABC, CBS, CNN, and NBCand aerial images of Rwandan refugee movements made available on the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) web site. We examine both on-the-ground perspectives of television news cameras, as well as aerial images, because together they provided the dual vantage points that increasingly are used to manage global crises and media events: the human tragedy at close range, and the impression from afar. Both video footage and aerial images were used by news organizations and a host of international organizations to report on and monitor refugees movements in 1996, when Hutu refugees were forced to flee encampments in eastern Zaire/Congo.5 News organizations used on-the-ground video footage to give viewers close-up, seemingly personalized, accounts of the lives of refugees. By contrast, international organizations offered networks and governmental agencies alike aerial photos of refugees, whose movements and containment in camps were tracked from the sky, rendering them distant and anonymous. As important as both kinds of images can be, their use made it easy for news organizations to ignore the middle scale, the site of politics, social organization, and history. Relying heavily on close-up and remote images, while neglecting the infinitely more complex, historical, and politicized middle scale, U.S. news organization, especially television, had no coherent explanation of events happening in and around Rwanda. We suggest that televised video footage and aerial images of Rwandan refugees must be examined together in the context of U.S. news organizations inability to represent the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Our analysis explores how these two kinds of images represented refugees as a deterritorialized mass unanchored from the historical realities that unfolded in Rwanda in 1994. We argue that these refugees became the living traces of genocide and the shadow focus of media attention. Forced into exile because of the conflict, refugees became the only signs by which television viewers might come to know about the genocide that went largely unacknowledged by U.S. news organizations and political leaders. By observing refugees both from the vantage of on-the-ground video footage and from overhead aerial photos, the U.S. public was kept distant and safe from any actual conflict, and from the complications of explanation. Yet, the public inevitably became an unwitting participant in the production of knowledge about who should live or die in lands far off from the United States.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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LINK: REFUGEES
OUR UNDERSTANDING OF AFRICAN SUFFERING IS INFINTELY BOUND TO THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR WHO FEELS PITY FOR THE HELPLESS VICTIM. THE DISCUSIVE AND IMAGERIAL CONSTRUCTION OF AFRICAN ONLY FURTHERS THESE INEQUAL POWER RELATIONS. FAIR AND PARKS, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR IN THE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNICATION AND ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF FILM STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-SANTA BARBARA RESPSECTIVELY. 2001[JOE ELLEN AND LISA RESPECTIVELY AFRICA ON CAMERA: TELEVISION NEWS COVERAGE AND AERIAL IMAGING OF RWANDAN REFUGEES AFRICA TODAY PROJECT MUSE]
With some camps the size of small cities, containing upwards of one hundred eighty thousand people, the barriers and people standing behind them were most often shot from a distance. They were shot in such a way to show the great numbers of people, and perhaps, (since incarceration signals imprisonment) the potential for violence contained in the camps. When reporters began to discuss the need for assistance, cameras then closed in on one individual or a small group to personalize the refugees plight. Refugees personal pain is shown for viewers in images of mothers attempting to care for their children, of children crying, of women gathering firewood or cooking, of teens milling about, and of despondent men sitting alone. In particular, women and children are used to evoke sympathy. Often viewed as innocents, without political attachments and involvement, they embody a sense of pure humanity because being refugees has made them into pure victims (Malkki 1995: 817; Fair 1996). News cameras are used to construct and inspect refugees pain: flaccid breasts depict womens inability to feed their children, and childrens swollen stomachs and red hair suggest malnutrition. Indeed, in many closing scenes of news stories, viewers are left to look into the sad eyes of a child. For instance, a CNN report (22 May 1996) about crowded camp conditions featured a reporter who ended his story with a discussion of whether the United States ought to intervene in the region. As he begins his voiceover narration, The United States and its allies could justify intervention on humanitarian and moral grounds, a close up shot of a young boy appears. Continuing, the reporter suggests that such intervention might solve the long-running refugee problem left by the last round of massacres. Viewers then see a distant, wide-angle shot of refugees in camps and in transit, and the reporter concludes with the suggestion that intervention would not only stop future massacres but would avoid the impression that the world would stand aside once again until it is too late to prevent another tragedy. During his commentary, we see a shot of women huddled together, which is replaced by a close-up of the sharp barbs of a wire fence. The camera racks focus from the barbed wire to an extreme closeup of a toddlers face contained just behind the barrier. Many of the reports close with a single lasting image that asks the television viewer to look into the eyes of an individual refugee, often a child. In attempting to establish a connection between American television viewers and the anonymous and voiceless refugee, news stories often use the eyes of children as points of entry into, and sympathy for, Rwandans. What these images frequently accomplish is not to create rapport but to reduce refugees to a part of their bodiestheir eyes wide openin an attempt to symbolize their plight. In doing so, television viewers are encouraged to view crisis through childrens eyes, and to see Africa itself as incarcerated space on the far side of the television news camera. In this space, the history, culture, and identity of Rwandan refugees is erased. The effect of such images is to establish a relationship between the refugee victim and the American citizen as spectator. In one particularly striking image, two Hutu children are displayed through a metal-framed window, peering out of the darkness toward the cameras. They are incarcerated by the metal frame of the object that protects them from violence, and they are trapped in the incarcerated space of the television cameras caricature of their experience. In the end, by framing their faces, the story attempts to transform them into portraits that convey a condensed tell-all version of the conflict.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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LINK: FAMINE
THEIR RESPONSE TO IMAGES OF SUFFERING FAMINE VICTIMS IS A ONE THAT ATTEMPTS TO ASSUAGE OUR GUILT AT ENJOYING IN A WORLD WHERE OTHERS SUFFERINGTHIS MECHANISM DOES NOT COPE WITH THE TRAUMA IN THE SITAUTION, BUT ALLOWS US TO RELOCATE OUR OWN FEARS AND OUR OWN COMPLICITIES ONTO SUFFERING OTHERS, PRODUCING VICTIMS THAT WE NEED IN ORDER TO ENJOY OUR OWN LIVES EDKINS, LECTURER IN POLITICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OF FAMINE, PRACTICES OF AID P. 123-124] WALES, 2000 [JENNY, WHOSE HUNGER? CONCEPTS

Famine images, like the sexual images they parallel, embody the lack that must be concealed if the subject is to be constituted. Hunger as desire is at the root of the constitution of subjectivity. Famine itself can be read as a symptom: a point of overdetermination, of condensation of differentstrands of meaning. In that sense, there is a fantasy space reserved for it. I looked at the relation of famine and scarcity to market economics in chapter 2. To explore this further, I look at Zizek's account of the role of desire in late capitalism. For Zizek, late-capitalist liberal-democracy has an impasse at its heart centering around the role of desire. In Lacan's work desire is not something that can be satisfied as such. As Zizek expresses it, "desire is sustained by lack and therefore shuns its satisfaction, that is, the very thing for which it 'officially' strives." Desire is sustained by the unattainability of its object and by the gap between its official motivation and its actual function, which is to provide a way of accommodation with a primordial lack, a lack inherent in the human condition as such. In Lacan, an empirical object fills out the role of the primordially lost Thing and becomes the object-cause of desire. Whereas Freud might
argue that the obstacles of convention that are put in place to prevent the attainment of the object of desirethe sexual object, for exampleserve to heighten desire, in Lacan's account these obstacles are there precisely to avoid the possibility of the discovery that the object is unattainable as such: "external hindrances that

thwart our access to the object are there precisely to create the illusion that without them, the object would be directly accessible what such hindrances thereby conceal is the inherent impossibility of attaining the object." In late capitalism, the immediate satisfaction of desire through superabundance, permissiveness, and accessibility of objects threatens to suffocate desire. We are approaching a position where for some of us the attainment of all possible empirical objects of desire is conceivable in practice. This will become even more so, Zizek claims, with the advent of so-called virtual reality. Superabundance threatens desire by supplying the means for its satisfaction; the function of the object-cause of desire is thwarted by this. Although officially desire exists to be satisfied, in Lacanian terms desire provides a means of transcending a primordial lack; it exists precisely because it has to be insatiable. By providing an impossible object, the impossibility of fulfillment itself is sublimated. this superabundance is not without its opposite: scarcity and deprivation. For Zizek, drawing on Hegel, universal abundance is impossible, since in capitalism "abundance itself produces deprivation." Excess and lack are structurally interdependent in a capitalist economy. The system produces both together. Some live in abundance and plenty while others live in scarcity and deprivation. Superabundance goes hand in hand with its opposite.
However, This does not mean that notions of desire are irrelevant in the context of a world where for large numbers of people the necessities of life itselffood, water, shelter, and freedom from violenceare hard to come by. On the contrary, Zizek's account of notions of desire as a concealment of an inherent lack and the need to sustain desire in conditions of superabundance can help us to understand some of the paradoxes of responses to events such as famines and the sight of incredible suffering in these and other disasters.

the irony of

The object of "Ending Hunger" functions as just such an impossible or unattainable object-cause of desire in the Lacanian sense. Here we have a desire sustained by the object of removing the very thingdeprivationthat is indissolubly linked with the superabundance that threatens desire. Rather than the question of "Why, when there is such an abundance of food, do so many people starve?" the question becomes "Why, when we are so well provided for with an abundance of everything we can possibly desire, do we desire the one thing we cannot have, that is, a world without others who are deprived?" At least part of the answer, I argue, can be found in the Lacanian account of desire.

Not only do we desire the thing we cannot attain, but we put obstacles of convention in the way of attaining it. These obstacles are seen in arguments of developmentalists that portray famine as complex: it needs further research, we have to act carefully and take into account the feelings of those we want to help, and so on. Thus in famine we have an answer to Zizek's question: "So the big enigma is: how, through what kind of limitation of access, will capitalism succeed in reintroducing lack and scarcity into this saturation?" Lack and scarcity are reintroduced as someone else's lack and scarcityas hunger, the stranger that waits outside some other door. For those of us who live in an excess of abundance, desire becomes the (impossible) desire for a world free from scarcity: a hunger for a world free from hunger.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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UTNIF 2007

IMPACT: HUMANITARIANISM BIOPOLITICS

LIBERAL DEMOCRACYS DREAM OF A TRIUMPH OF MORALITY AND EXPLUSION OF OPRESSION IS ILL GROUNDED. THE IDE THAT WE, AS THE WEST, HAVE THE RIGHT TO GIVE HUMAN RIGHTS TO SUFFERING AFRICANS IMPLIES THAT THEY HAVE NO RIGHTS NOW OR NEED HUMANITARIAN ASSITANCE. IN A GEOPOLITICAL SENSE, THIS DEPOLITIZATION OF THE THIRD WORLD JUSTIFIES THE RADICAL VERSION OF BIOPOLITICS WHERE THE SPECTER OF THE CAMP AND GENOCIDE BECOME TOOLS TO MOLD AFRICA IN THE PERFECT CONTINENTTHE AFFIRMATIVE LEGITIMIZES VIOLENCE ON A SCALE NOT SEEN IN HUMAN HISTORY IN ORDER TO PROVE THEIR WORLDVIEW. SLAVOJ ZIZEK, NO DATE GIVEN (POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER AND CULTURAL CRITIC) THE OBSCENITY HUMAN RIGHTS: VIOLENCE AS SYMPTOM HTTP://WWW.LACAN.COM/ZIZVIOL.HTM
OF

We thus arrived at a standard "postmodern," "anti-essentialist" position, a kind of political version of Foucault's notion of sex as generated by a multitude of the practices of sexuality: "man," the bearer of Human Rights, is generated by a set of political practices which materialize citizenship - is, however, this enough? Jacques Ranciere 7 proposed a very elegant and precise solution of the antinomy between Human Rights (belonging to "man as such") and the politicization of citizens: while Human Rights cannot be posited as an unhistorical "essentialist" Beyond with regard to the contingent sphere of political struggles, as universal "natural rights of man" exempted from history, they also should not be dismissed as a reified fetish which is a product of concrete historical processes of the politicization of citizens. The gap between the universality of Human Rights and the political rights of citizens is thus not a gap between the universality of man and a specific
political sphere; it, rather, "separates the whole of the community from itself," as Ranciere put it in a precise Hegelian way. 8 Far from being pre-political,

"universal Human Rights" designate the precise space of politicization proper: what they amount to is the right to universality as such, the right of a political agent to assert its radical non-coincidence with itself (in its particular identity), i.e., to posit itself - precisely
insofar as it is the "surnumerary" one, the "part with no part," the one without a proper place in the social edifice - as an agent of universality of the Social as such. The paradox is thus a very precise one, and symmetrical to the paradox of universal human rights as the rights of those reduced to inhumanity: at the very moment

when we try to conceive political rights of citizens without the reference to universal "meta-political" Human Rights, we lose politics itself, i.e., we reduce politics to a "post-political" play of negotiation of particular interests. - What, then, happens to Human Rights when they are reduced to the rights of homo sacer, of those excluded from the political community, reduced to "bare life" i.e., when they become of no use, since they are the rights of those who, precisely, have no rights, are treated as inhuman? Ranciere proposes here an extremely salient dialectical reversal:

/.../ when they are of no use, you do the same as charitable persons do with their old clothes. You give them to the poor. Those rights that appear to be useless in their place are sent abroad, along with medicine and clothes, to people deprived of medicine, clothes, and rights. It is in this way, as the result of this process, that the Rights of Man become the rights of those who have no rights, the rights of bare human beings subjected to inhuman repression and inhuman conditions of existence. They become humanitarian rights, the rights of those who cannot enact them, the victims of the absolute denial of right. For all this, they are not void. Political names and political places never become merely void. The void is filled by somebody or something else. /.../ if those
who suffer inhuman repression are unable to enact Human Rights that are their last recourse, then somebody else has to inherit their rights in order to enact them in their place. This is what is called the "right to humanitarian interference" - a right that some nations assume to the supposed benefit of

victimized populations, and very often against the advice of the humanitarian organizations themselves. The "right to humanitarian interference" might be described as a sort of "return to sender": the disused rights that had been send to the rightless are sent back to the senders. 9 So, to put it in the Leninist way: what today, in the predominant Western discourse, the "Human Rights of the Third World suffering victims" effectively mean is the right of the Western powers themselves to intervene - politically, economically, culturally, militarily - in the Third World countries of their choice on behalf of the defense of Human Rights. The reference to Lacan's formula of communication (in which the sender gets back from the receiver-addressee his own message in its inverted, i.e. true, form) is here up to the point: in the reigning discourse of humanitarian interventionism, the developed West is effectively getting back from the victimized Third World its own message in its true form. And the moment Human Rights are thus depoliticized, the discourse dealing with them has to change to ethics: reference to the pre-political opposition of Good and Evil has to be mobilized. Today's "new reign of Ethics," 10 clearly discernible in,
say, Michael Ignatieff's work, thus relies on a violent gesture of depoliticization, of denying to the victimized other political subjectivization. And, as Ranciere pointed out, liberal humanitarianism a la Ignatieff unexpectedly meets the "radical" position of Foucault or Agamben with regard to

this depoliticization: the Foucauldian-Agambenian notion of "biopolitics" as the culmination of the entire Western thought ends up getting caught in a kind of "ontological trap" in which concentration camps appear as a kind of "ontological destiny: each of us would be in the situation of the refugee in a camp. Any difference grows faint between democracy and totalitarianism and any political practice proves to be already ensnared in the biopolitical trap." 11

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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UTNIF 2007

AT: PERM (COMPASSION LINK)

DETACHMENT DATHE
PERMUATION IS JUST ANOTHER DISTANCING STRATEGY THAT PROMOTES A FALSE RECONCILIATION WITH THE TRAUMA OF OUR DESIRES AND OUR COMPLICITY IN SUFFERING

EDKINS, LECTURER IN POLITICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WALES, 2000 [JENNY, WHOSE HUNGER? CONCEPTS OF FAMINE, PRACTICES OF AID P. 120]
If facing images of distant hunger is an experience of the traumatic real, what follows, in the response that we make, is the reconstitution of subjectivity and community through a reinstatement of what we call social reality/social fantasy. For Zizek, social fantasy is to be seen as an escape from the traumatic real, a way of concealing antagonism and the impossibility of the social order. It produces the master signifier and masks the "nothing" behind the curtain. Critics point to the role of the ideological in Live Aid. The discourse of charitable response to disaster, the narrative of the West as rescuer, performs the ideological role of concealing the "true" causes of famine and suffering that lie in the dominance of the West and its exploitation of Africa. For these critics, famine has deep causes, for example, in the effects of colonization and structural inequalities, and the Live Aid narrative is ideological in that it provides a way of avoiding the need to confront these truths. This view of famine as a disaster with a scientific causewhether the science in question is Marxist economics or natural scienceleads to a detachment from disaster relief in favor of a search for further knowledge, which alone can provide a reason to act. It contrasts with the humanitarian approach that calls for action without knowledge to save lives in the immediate future without waiting for a political analysis. This approach is validated by a different detachment or objectivity, one that in its own way equally repudiates involvement and empathy with suffering. It is based on a strict separation of humanitarian and political actions, on an assumption of neutrality, and on a valuation that holds the preservation of human life to be above and distinct from any political

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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UTNIF 2007

IMPACT: CONSERVATISM (HELPING AFRICA)

THIS MAKES THE AFF ETHICALLY INDISTINCT FROM, AND POLITICALLY MORE DANGEROUS THAN, EVEN THE MOST BASE CONSERVATISMS. THE MAY MARGINALLY CONTRIBUTE TO THE REMEDIATION OF SOME OF THE VIOLENCE SYMPTOMATIC OF GLOBAL POWER RELATIONS, BUT THEY DO SO WHILE FUNDAMENTALLY REINFORCING THE VERY STRUCTURES WHICH MAINTAIN THEM. ZIZEK, PROF. OF SOCIOLOGY AT UNIV. LJUBLJANA, 2006. [SLAVOJ, NOBODY HAS REVIEW OF BOOKS, VOL. 28 NO. 7]
TO BE

VILE, LONDON

We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today. All other enemies religious fundamentalists, terrorists, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracies depend on contingent local circumstances. Precisely because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and religious
obscurantism, but its important to remember exactly what they are up to. Etienne Balibar, in La Crainte des masses (1997), distinguishes the two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in todays capitalism: the objective (structural) violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism (the automatic creation of excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the unemployed), and the subjective violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious (in short: racist) fundamentalisms. They may fight subjective violence, but liberal communists are the agents of the structural

violence that creates the conditions for explosions of subjective violence. The same Soros who gives millions to fund education has ruined the lives of thousands thanks to his financial speculations and in doing so created the conditions for the rise of the intolerance he denounces.

IMPACT: VICTIMIZATION (HUMANITARIANISM)

THE AFFS PRETENDED BENEVOLENCE TOWARD AFRICA ACTUALLY DOES THE WORST FORM OF VIOLENCE TO THOSE WHO LIVE THERE. THEIR SUFFERING IS INSTRUMENTALIZED, THEIR LIVES DEPOLITICIZED AND REDUCES TO THE DOCILE RECIPIENTS OF OUR MERCY. JACKSON, DEPT. OF ENGLISH, WAYNE ST. UNIV, 2007. [KEN, THE GREAT TEMPTATION WHY BADIOU HAS BEEN SO IMPORTANT TO IEK IJZS VOL. 1 NO. 2]
OF

RELIGION:

If the be all and end all of political activity (and much academic study) is the respect of the other -- and some quick, honest reflection on the ultimate aim of any number of academic work will reveal this characterization as accurate -- we are not in position to discover truth. This emphasis on truth rather than ethics may sound reactionary, but only because the term truth has become associated with a certain absolutist or essentialist perspective. As iek makes clear, for example, our attention to ethics tends actually to depoliticize those we would be ethical towards, leaving them only at the depoliticized mercy of some vagaries we call human rights: Todays new reign of ethics . . . relies on a violent gesture of depoliticization, of denying the victimized other any political subjectization beyond our mercy (2006: 341). Badiou includes in hiscritique of this ethical ideology all its socialized variants, things near and dear to the
academic heart: the doctrine of human rights, the victimary conception of Man, humanitarian interference, bio-ethics, shapeless democratism, the ethics of differences, cultural relativism, moral exoticism, and so on (2001: 90). iek will come to say towards the end of The Parallax View that withdrawing from global capitalism also involves withdrawing from these sorts of

things, global capitalisms more palatable supplements.

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1NC CLITERODECTOMY SHELL

GLOBALIZED WORLD IS POPULATED BY SUFFERING VICTIMS, AND THAT IS JUST THE WAY THAT IDEOLOGY LIKES IT. THE OVER-ABUNDANCE OF TOLERANCE FOR THOSE WHO SUFFER ABJECTLY AND MEEKLY ASK FOR OUR HELP IS THE FLIP-SIDE FOUR OUR INTOLERANCE TO THOSE WHO CHALLENGE OUR VISION OF A PEACEFUL WORLD WITH A HOME DEPOT ON EVERY CORNER AND A WOMAN EMPOWERED IN EVERY VILLAGE IN AFRICA. THE AFFIRMATIVES CRUSADE AGAINST CLITERODECTOMY IS A FANTASY OF A WORLD WITHOUT ANTAGONISM, A WORLD THAT NEEDS THE VICTIMS THEY REPRESENT AND PRODUCES THEM WHEN NECESSARY.

TODAYS

IEK, INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, 2001 [SLAVOJ, THE ONE MEASURE OF TRUE LOVE IS: YOU CAN INSULT THE OTHER, INTERVIEW BY SABINE REUL AND THOMAS DEICHMAN, SPIKED, 15 NOVEMBER, HTTP://WWW.LACAN.COM/ZIZEK-MEASURE.HTM]
what is sold to us today as freedom is something from which this more radical dimension of freedom and democracy has been removed - in other words, the belief that basic decisions about social development are discussed or brought about involving as many as possible, a majority. In this sense, we do not have an actual experience of freedom today. Our freedoms are increasingly reduced to the freedom to choose your lifestyle.
Slavoj Zizek: I do claim that Question: Has 11 September thrown new light on your diagnosis of what is happening to the world? SZ: One of the endlessly repeated phrases we heard in recent weeks is that nothing will be the same after 11 September. I wonder if there really is such a substantial change. Certainly, there is change at the level of perception or publicity, but I don't think we can yet speak of some fundamental break. Existing attitudes and fears were confirmed, and what the media were telling us about terrorism has now really happened. In my work, I place strong emphasis on what is usually referred to as the virtualisation or digitalisation of our environment. We know that 60 percent of the people on this Earth have not even made a phone call in their life.

At all levels of our life we seem to live more and more with the thing deprived of its substance. You get beer without alcohol, meat without fat, coffee without caffeine...and even virtual sex without sex. Virtual reality to me is the climax of this process: you now get reality without reality...or a totally regulated reality. But there is another side to this. Throughout the entire twentieth century, I see a counter-tendency, for which my good philosopher friend Alain Badiou invented a nice name: 'La passion du rel', the passion of the real. That is to say, precisely because the universe in which we live is somehow a universe of dead conventions and artificiality, the only authentic real experience must be some extremely violent, shattering experience. And this we experience as a sense that now we are back in real life.
But still, 30 percent of us live in a digitalised universe that is artificially constructed, manipulated and no longer some natural or traditional one. Q: Do you think that is what we are seeing now? SZ: I think this may be what defined the twentieth century, which really began with the First World War. We all remember the war reports by Ernst J?nger, in which he praises this eye-to-eye combat experience as the authentic one. Or at the level of sex, the archetypal film of the twentieth century would be Nagisa Oshima's Ai No Corrida where the idea again is that you become truly radical, and go to the end in a sexual encounter, when you practically torture each other to death. Another emblematic figure in this sense to me is the so-called 'cutter'- a widespread pathological phenomenon in the USA. There are two million of them, mostly women, but also men, who cut themselves with razors. Why? It has nothing to do with masochism or suicide. It's simply that they don't feel real as persons and the idea is: it's only through this pain and when you feel warm blood that you feel reconnected again. So I think that this tension is the background against which one should appreciate the effect of the act. Q: Does that relate to your observations about the demise of subjectivity in The Ticklish Subject? You say the problem is what you call 'foreclosure'- that the real or the articulation of the subject is foreclosed by the way society has evolved in recent years. SZ: The starting point of my book on the subject is that almost all philosophical orientations today, even if they strongly oppose each other, agree on some kind of basic anti-subjectivist stance. For example, Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida would both agree that the Cartesian subject had to be deconstructed, or, in the case of Habermas, embedded in a larger inter-subjective dialectics. Cognitivists, Hegelians - everybody is in agreement here. I am tempted to say that we must return to the subject - though not a purely rational Cartesian one. My idea is that the subject is inherently political, in the sense that 'subject', to me, denotes a piece of freedom - where you are no longer rooted in some firm substance, you are in an open situation. Today we can no longer simply apply old rules. We are engaged in paradoxes, which offer no immediate way out. In this sense, subjectivity is political. Q: But this kind of political subjectivity seems to have disappeared. In your books you speak of a post-political world. SZ: When I say we live in a post-political world, I refer to a wrong ideological impression. We don't really live in such a world, but the existing universe presents itself as post-political in the sense that there is some kind of a basic social pact that elementary social decisions are no longer discussed as political decisions. They are turned into simple decisions of gesture and of administration. And the remaining conflicts are mostly conflicts about different cultures. We have the present form of global capitalism plus some kind of tolerant democracy as the ultimate form of that idea. And, paradoxically, only very few are ready to question this world. Q: So, what's wrong with that? SZ: This post-political world still seems to retain the tension between what we usually refer to as tolerant liberalism versus multiculturalism. But for me - though I never liked Friedrich Nietzsche - if there is a definition that really fits, it is Nietzsche's old opposition between active and passive nihilism. Active nihilism, in the sense of wanting nothing itself, is this active self-destruction which would be precisely the passion of the real - the idea that, in order to live fully and authentically, you must engage in self-destruction. On the other hand, there is passive nihilism, what Nietzsche called 'The last man' - just living a stupid, self-satisfied life without great passions. The problem with a post-political universe is that we have these two sides which are engaged in kind of mortal dialectics. My idea is that, to break out of this vicious cycle, subjectivity must be reinvented. Q: You also say that the elites in our Western world are losing their nerve. They want to throw out all old concepts like humanism or subjectivity. Against that, you say it is important to look at what there is in the old that may be worth retaining. SZ: Of course, I am not against the new. I am, indeed, almost tempted to repeat Virginia Woolf. I think it was in 1914 when she said it was as though eternal human nature had changed. To be a man no longer means the same thing. One should not, for example, underestimate the inter-subjective social impact of cyberspace. What we are witnessing today is a radical redefinition of what it means to be a human being. Take strange phenomena, like what we see on the internet. There are so-called 'cam' websites where people expose to an anonymous public their innermost secrets down to the most vulgar level. You have websites today even I, with all my decadent tastes, was shocked to learn this - where people put a video-camera in their toilets, so you can observe them defecating. This a totally new constellation. It is not private, but also it is also not public. It is not the old exhibitionist gesture. Be that as it may, something radical is happening. Now, a number of new terms are proposed to us to describe that. The one most commonly used is paradigm shift, denoting that we live in an epoch of shifting paradigm. So New Age people tell us that we no longer have a Cartesian, mechanistic individualism, but a new universal mind. In sociology, the theorists of second modernity say similar things. And psychoanalytical theorists tell us that we no longer have the Oedipus complex, but live in an era of universalised perversion. My point is not that we should stick to the old. But these answers are wrong and do not really register the break that is taking place. If we measure what is happening now by the standard of the old, we can grasp the abyss of the new that is emerging. Here I would refer to Blaise Pascal. Pascal's problem was also confrontation with modernity and modern science. His difficulty was that he wanted to remain an old, orthodox Christian in this new, modern age. It is interesting that his results were much more radical and interesting for us today than the results of superficial English liberal philosophers, who simply accepted modernity.

There must be extreme violence for that encounter to be authentic.

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You see the same thing in cinema history, if we look at the impact of sound. Okay, 'what's the problem?', you might say. By adding the sound to the image we simply get a more realistic rendering of reality. But that is not at all true. Interestingly enough, the movie directors who were most sensitive to what the introduction of sound really meant were generally conservatives, those who looked at it with scepticism, like Charlie Chaplin (up to a point), and Fritz Lang. Fritz Lang's Das Testament des Dr Mabuse, in a wonderful way, rendered this spectral ghost-like dimension of the voice, realising that voice never simply belongs to the body. This is just another example of how a conservative, as if he were afraid of the new medium, has a much better grasp of its uncanny radical potentials. The same applies today. Some people simply say: 'What's the problem? Let's throw ourselves into the digital world, into the internet, or whatever....' They really miss what is going on here. Q: So why do people want to declare a new epoch every five minutes? SZ: It is precisely a desperate attempt to avoid the trauma of the new. It is a deeply conservative gesture. The true conservatives today are the people of new paradigms. They try desperately to avoid confronting what is really changing. Let me return to my example. In Charlie Chaplain's film The Great Dictator, he satirises Hitler as Hinkel. The voice is perceived as something obscene. There is a wonderful scene where Hinkel gives a big speech and speaks totally meaningless, obscene words. Only from time to time you recognise some everyday vulgar German word like 'Wienerschnitzel' or 'Kartoffelstrudel'. And this was an ingenious insight; how voice is like a kind of a spectral ghost. All this became apparent to those conservatives who were sensitive for the break of the new. In fact, all big breaks were done in such a way. Nietzsche was in this sense a conservative, and, indeed, I am ready to claim that Marx was a conservative in this sense, too. Marx always emphasised that we can learn more from intelligent conservatives than from simple liberals. Today, more than ever, we should stick to this attitude. When you are surprised and shocked, you don't simply accept it. You should not say: 'Okay, fine, let's play digital games.' We should not forget the ability to be properly surprised. I think, the most dangerous thing today is just to flow with things. Q: Then let's return to some of the things that have been surprising us. In a recent article, you made the point that the terrorists mirror our civilisation. They are not out there, but mirror our own Western world. Can you elaborate on that some more? SZ: This, of course, is my answer to this popular thesis by Samuel P Huntington and others that there is a so-called clash of civilisations. I don't buy this thesis, for a number of reasons.

Today's racism is precisely this racism of cultural difference. It no longer says: 'I am more than you.' It says: 'I want my culture, you can have yours.' Today, every right-winger says just that. These people can be very postmodern. They acknowledge that there is no natural tradition, that every culture is artificially constructed. In France, for
example, you have a neo-fascist right that refers to the deconstructionists, saying: 'Yes, the lesson of deconstructionism against universalism is that there are only particular identities. So, if blacks can have their culture, why should we not have ours? ' We should also consider the first reaction of the American 'moral majority', specifically Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, to the 11 September attacks. Pat Robertson is a bit eccentric, but Jerry Falwell is a mainstream figure, who endorsed Reagan and is part of the mainstream, not an eccentric freak. Now, their reaction was the same as the Arabs', though he did retract a couple of days later. Falwell said the World Trade Centre bombings were a sign that God no longer protects the USA, because the USA had chosen a path of evil, homosexuality and promiscuity.

According to the FBI, there are now at least two million so-called radical right-wingers in the USA. Some are quite violent, killing abortion doctors, not to mention the Oklahoma City bombing. To me, this shows that the same anti-liberal, violent attitude also grows in our own civilisation. I see that as proof that this terrorism is an aspect of our time. We cannot link it to a particular civilisation.
Regarding Islam, we should look at history. In fact, I think it is very interesting in this regard to look at ex-Yugoslavia. Why was Sarajevo and Bosnia the place of violent conflict? Because it was ethnically the most mixed republic of ex-Yugoslavia. Why? Because it was Muslim-dominated, and historically they were definitely the most tolerant. We Slovenes, on the other hand, and the Croats, both Catholics, threw them out several hundred years ago. This proves that there is nothing inherently intolerant about Islam. We must rather ask why this terrorist aspect of Islam arises now. The tension between tolerance and fundamentalist violence is within a civilisation.

Take another example: on CNN we saw President Bush present a letter of a seven-year-old girl whose father is a pilot and now around Afghanistan. In the letter she said that she loves her father, but if her country needs his death, she is ready to give her father for her country. President Bush described this as American patriotism. Now, do a simple mental experiment - imagine the same event with an Afghan girl saying that. We would immediately say: 'What cynicism, what fundamentalism, what manipulation of small children.' So there is already something in our perception. But what shocks us in others we ourselves also do in a way. Q: So multiculturalism and fundamentalism could be two sides of the same coin? SZ: There is nothing to be said against tolerance. But when you buy this multiculturalist tolerance, you buy many other things with it. Isn't it symptomatic that multiculturalism exploded at the very historic moment when the last traces of working-class politics disappeared from political space? For many former leftists, this multiculturalism is a kind of ersatz working-class politics. We don't even know whether the working class still exists, so let's talk about exploitation of others. There may be nothing wrong with that as such. But there is a danger that issues of economic exploitation are converted into problems of cultural tolerance.
And then you have only to make one step further, that of Julia Kristeva in her essay 'Etrangers nous mmes', and say we cannot tolerate others because we cannot tolerate otherness in ourselves. Here we have a pure pseudopsychoanalytic cultural reductionism. Isn't it sad and tragic that the only relatively strong - not fringe - political movement that still directly addresses the working class is made up of right-wing populists? They are the only ones. Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, for example. I was shocked when I saw him three years ago at a congress of the Front National. He brought a black Frenchman, an Algerian and a Jew on the podium, embraced them and said: 'They are no less French than I am. Only the international cosmopolitan companies who neglect French patriotic interests are my enemy.' So the price is that only right-wingers still talk about economic exploitation. The second thing I find wrong with this

multiculturalist tolerance is that it is often hypocritical in the sense that the other whom they tolerate is already a reduced other. The other is okay in so far as this other is only a question of food, of culture, of dances. What about clitoridectomy? What about my friends who say: 'We must respect Hindus.' Okay, but what about one of the old Hindu customs which, as we know, is that when a husband dies, the wife is burned. Now, do we An even more important problem is that this notion of tolerance effectively masks its opposite: intolerance. It is a recurring theme in all my books that, from this liberal perspective, the basic perception of another human being is always as something that may in some way hurt you.
Q: Are you referring to what we call victim culture?

respect that? Problems arise here.

The discourse of victimisation is almost the predominant discourse today. You can be a victim of the environment, of smoking, of sexual harassment. I find this reduction of the subject to a victim sad. In what sense? There is an extremely narcissistic notion of personality here. And, indeed, an intolerant one, insofar as what it means is that we can no longer tolerate violent encounters with others - and these encounters are always violent.
SZ:

[INSERT ARMACHAIR ACTIVISM LINK]

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IN THE SAME WAY, THE NEGATIVES CONCERN FOR CLITERODECTOMY IS NOT A NEUTRAL DESIRE TO HELP THOSE WHO SUFFER DOMINATION, BUT ENMESHED IN THE SOCIO-POLITICS OF OUR OWN CULTURES DOMINATION OF WOMEN. THIS FOCUS ALLOWS THE AFFIRMATIVE TO ASSUAGE THEIR GUILT OVER OUR OWN CULTURES PRACTICES OF FEMALE MUTILATION BY TURNING TOWARD A MORE DISTANT OTHER WHO SUFFERS MORE PURELY, LESS CONTEXTUALLY. IT IS EASY TO HELP THE OTHER BECAUSE THEIR OPPRESSION IS SO SIMPLE AND ROMANTIC TAMIR, UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR HUMAN VALUES AT PRINCETON, 1996 [YAEL, HANDS OFF CLITORIDECTOMY, BOSTON REVIEW, SUMMER, HTTP://BOSTONREVIEW.NET/BR21.3/TAMIR.HTML]
In discussions about multiculturalism, clitoridectomy is now the trump card, taking over the role once played by cannibalism, slavery, lynchings, or the Indian tradition of Sati: "Is this the kind of tradition you would like to protect?" liberals ask embarrassed multiculturalists, who immediately qualify their cultural pluralism. Clitoridectomy defines the boundary between us and them, between cultures we can tolerate and those we must condemn.
Not since Masters and Johnson has the clitoris -- or its absence -- been a topic of such intense debate. Clitoridectomy is obviously a deplorable practice. It is, among other things, an extremely painful, traumatizing mutilation of young girls that leaves them permanently disfigured and deprived of sexual enjoyment. We should express no sympathy toward those who practice it, and support those who struggle to end it.

references to clitoridectomy commonly reveal a patronizing attitude toward women, suggesting that they are primarily sexual beings. Moreover, those references involve a certain degree of dishonesty. They intentionally widen the gap between our culture and those in which clitoridectomy is practiced, thus presenting those other cultures as incommensurable with ours. The effect of this distancing is to disconnect criticism of their practices from criticism of our own, and turn reflection on other cultures into yet another occasion for celebrating our special virtues. We should
But we also should be suspicious about the role of clitoridectomy in current political debate. Despite their liberal appearance, resist such self-congratulation. And if we do, the debate about clitoridectomy takes on an entirely different cast.

The most straightforward objection to clitoridectomy is that it is a painful procedure, imposed on young girls, and performed in conditions which could lead to permanent damage. This is all true, and part of what makes the practice so objectionable. But it could not be the whole of the matter. After all, removing a tooth is also a painful procedure, often imposed on children, and if performed in non-hygienic conditions, it can produce permanent damage. But we are not horrified and disgusted by
evidence that such treatments are the norm in some parts of the world, and that many children suffer greatly as a result.

Moreover, we are all aware of painful practices of body piercing, tattooing, and abnormal elongation of lips, ear lobes, and necks. National Geographic runs cover photos of women and men who have undergone such severe malformations, not in protest but as a neutral representation of other ways of life with their different conceptions of beauty. So hostility to clitoridectomy is not driven principally by concerns about physical suffering. Those who object to it would be no less hostile if it were performed in hygienic conditions under anesthesia. It might be said that these examples are all irrelevant as they do not include the mutilation of the body. But when is the body improved and when is it mutilated? Are parents who force their children to wear braces mutilating their children's teeth or improving them? In most cases, the answer depends on one's conception of beauty. Because we
tend to see straight, white teeth as beautiful, and a sign of good health, we spend lots of money inflicting pain and inconvenience upon our children to achieve this goal. To be sure, parents say (sincerely) that these treatments will improve their children's life chances, self-image, and social standing. But

parents who perform clitoridectomy on their daughters invoke precisely the same

arguments. estern conceptions of female beauty encourage women to undergo a wide range of painful, medically unnecessary, and potentially damaging processes -- extreme diets, depilation, face lifts, fat pumping, silicone implants. Of course, adult women do these things to their own bodies, and, it is said, their decisions are freely made. But would our gut reaction to female circumcision be very different if it were performed on consenting adults? It is not unlikely that girls at the age of 13 or 14, who are considered in traditional societies as adults mature enough to wed and bear children, would "consent" to the mutilation of their bodies if they were convinced that marriage and children were
Furthermore, it seems clear that W contingent on so doing. Many women who followed the tradition of Sati seemed to do it as a matter of choice. Did their "consent" make this tradition defensible? Women "consent" to such practices because the alternative is even more painful -- a life of solitude, humiliation, and deprivation. One may argue that these traditions are objectionable because their persistence fosters false consciousness, which in turn leads women to make such choices. But our own culture fosters false beliefs of a similar kind. According to Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, some 75 percent of women aged 18-35 believe that they are fat, whereas only 25 percent are medically overweight.1 Still more heartbreaking is the fact that the majority of the 30,000 women who responded to a Glamour questionnaire preferred losing 10-15 pounds to success in work or in love. So the fostering of such beliefs cannot differentiate their culture from our own and explain our hostility to it. Perhaps, then, we object to clitoridectomy because it is performed on minors. But think of the parents in our culture who foster in their daughters bad eating habits that might destroy their teeth or their vital organs, or, in more tragic cases, lead to life-threatening eating disorders. Are we ready to judge these parents as harshly as we judge parents who require clitoridectomies? In both cases, parents sincerely believe that they are serving the interests of their children and allowing them to live what is, according to their conception of the good, a meaningful life. Both cases may thus be taken to demonstrate that parents are not the most trustworthy guardians of their children, but why should one case be more harshly judged than the other? Because clitoridectomy is permanent, whereas other undesirable outcomes are reversible? Yet irreversibility is a problem only if the outcome is undesirable. In what way are the consequences of clitoridectomy undesirable? The common answer is that clitoridectomy damages women's sexual organs, thus depriving them of sexual enjoyment -- a basic need, perhaps even a right. One may wonder, however, when precisely our society became so deeply committed to women's sexual enjoyment.

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many features of our society turn women against their own bodies and encourage them to suppress their sexuality. The high frequency of rapes or attempted rapes, childhood sexual abuse, the battering of women, and exposure to pornography limits women's sexual expression and enjoyment. Bodily self-hatred, encouraged by the introduction of unrealizable standards of beauty -- teenage models, Barbie dolls, or even children's fairy-tales -- fosters frustration and feelings of inadequacy.
As we know -- from Masters and Johnson to the Hite report -- many women in our own society rarely, if at all, experience sexual enjoyment. We are also aware that From Cinderella to Lady D., from Playboy to children's cartoons, the ideal woman is portrayed as a thin, delicate creature with large breasts, a narrow waist, and a limited intellect. Those who do not measure up may spend a lifetime of "self-improvement" and encounter permanent feelings of failure and disgust. Feminists have argued that these phenomena have devastating effects on the ability of women to enjoy sex, and yet very little is done in our society to change the nature of this oppressive reality. Perhaps, then, we are not as committed to assuring women the ability to experience sexual enjoyment as we seem to be when we condemn clitoridectomy. The difference may be that the damage to women's sexual lives is an unintended consequence of the undesirable features of our own society, whereas this is the aim of clitoridectomy. Perhaps the intentionality makes the act particularly repellent. If so, we should be much less forgiving of parents who, for religious reasons, teach their daughters that sex in general and masturbation in particular are obscene, thus eliciting fear and revulsion at sexual activities. This damage may be psychological rather than physical. But if limited sexual enjoyment is the issue, why should the particular nature of the harm matter so much? It is indeed a striking feature of our society that we are so much more liberal with parents who inflict permanent psychological damage on their children than with parents who slap them or do not take proper care of their clothing or personal hygiene. The different ways in which we react to visible and invisible damages is disturbing; though our reaction to visible injuries is based on aesthetic as well as moral disgust, it is inconsistent with what we know of the severity of mental injuries.

An implicit assumption in these arguments is that if there were no physiological barrier to sexual enjoyment, women's lives would greatly improve. But perhaps we should remind ourselves that women are not merely sexual agents, that their ability to lead rich and rewarding lives does not depend solely on the nature of their sex life. Are we moving from an age in which female orgasms could not be publicly discussed, in which women were supposed to "endure" sex for the sake of childbearing, to one in which the
We come closer to the reason why arguments against clitoridectomy are so troubling if we focus on what is special about sex organs. right to multiple orgasms will be the principal emblem of women's liberation?

One cannot help thinking that the gut reaction of many men against clitoridectomy reflects the fact that in our society the sexual enjoyment of women is seen as a measure of the sexual power and achievements of men. Men in our society are more intimidated by women who do not enjoy orgasms than by those who do. In societies in which clitoridectomies are performed, men are more intimidated by women who do enjoy their body and their sexuality. In both cases, a masculine yardstick measures the value of female sexuality.
It is important to remember that the first champion of women's right to sexual pleasure, the sexologist Havelock Ellis, strongly opposed women's social liberation. He opposed women's employment outside the home, and firmly believed that "every healthy woman ought to exercise her productive function at least once in her lifetime, and asserted that women's brains were in a certain sense . . . in their womb."2 The right of women to enjoy their sexuality, he argued, was independent of their right to equal standing in the society; the former right, he thought, was to be seen as prior to, or worse, a substitute for, a whole set of political and economic freedoms. A fulfilling sex life is certainly one good, but there are others. Nuns take an oath of celibacy, but we do not usually condemn the church for preventing its clergy from enjoying an active sex life. Moreover, most of us do not think that Mother Teresa is leading a worse life than Chichulina, though the latter claims to have experienced an extensive number of orgasms. It is true that nuns are offered spiritual life in exchange for earthly goods, but in the societies where clitoridectomy is performed, the fulfilling life of motherhood and child bearing are offered in exchange. Some may rightly claim that one can function as a wife and a mother while still experiencing sexual pleasures. Others believe that full devotion to God does not require an oath of celibacy. Yet these views are, after all, a matter of convention. Hence, the problem with clitoridectomy cannot be the deprivation of sexual experiences. A thought experiment might be helpful here. Suppose that anthropologists discover a new tribe in the woods of Libidia. In this tribe young females who reach the age of sexual maturity are forced to go through a ceremony in which their clitoris is manipulated in a way that they are more likely to experience lengthy and extremely enjoyable orgasms. The ceremony is quite pleasant, performed by women, and not at all humiliating. As a result, the women of Libidia turn nymphomaniac. Consequently, they lack the concentration needed to perform any serious task. They drop out of school, have limited career prospects, and become completely dependent on male support. Hence, women are marginalized socially, economically, and politically: They own no property, hold no political or economic positions, do not participate in the political process, and have no social influence. In protest against this tradition, members of a feminist group decide to undergo clitoridectomy. They follow the Amazons, who, according to legend, would amputate their right breast to be able to comfortably carry quivers and be free in the exercise of warfare. In mutilating themselves, the women of Libidia free themselves of any reliance on men and are able to pursue their social and political goals. Sexual enjoyment, they argue, is important, but experiencing it is no assurance of living a meaningful life. Is there anything wrong with such a practice? Sexual enjoyment has acquired a mythical status in our society, advocated both as the most sublime and most corruptive pleasure. Advocates of clitoridectomy see the corruption: Performing clitoridectomy will restrict the sexual desires of women, thereby turning them into more chaste and righteous wives and mothers. They believe that the pursuit of sexual pleasures may lead a person astray, and that women are more likely to be influenced by such desires and act unscrupulously. Both assumptions are also well grounded in the Western tradition. The failure to control the pursuit of sexual pleasures was seen by religious thinkers, as well as by many secular liberals, as undermining virtue, fostering bad habits and pernicious behavior, and hindering the possibility of true love (either of God or of other human beings). In the Christian tradition celibacy was affirmed as the highest ideal, and "sex within marriage was regarded as an evil necessary for the continuation of the species."3 The assumption that women are weak-willed and feeble-minded is also well founded in Western schools of thought. From Plato to Kant to Kohlberg, a long line of philosophers and social thinkers has urged that women are naturally lighthearted, prone to temptation, and therefore less able to practice self-restraint and think in moral terms. More likely than men to be corrupted, they need special guidance, restraint, and protection. Freud added that women who require clitoral stimulus are victims of arrested development. Mature individuals redirect their sexual desires "into creativity in the arts, sciences, politics, business, religion, and other non-sexual activities. Repression takes its toll on the individual psyche, but a necessary toll. Repression is civilization.4

What is wrong with this attitude toward female sexuality -- whether expressed by clitoridectomy, the Libidian tradition, or our own culture -- is its social purpose: to use sex as a means of subjecting women and depriving them of their chance to participate in society as equals. The major problem with clitoridectomy, then, is socio-political. Clitoridectomy is yet another way of oppressing women and locking them at home, of seeing them as the producers of
children and as a source of pleasure to others. But if we will object to clitoridectomy on these grounds, the argument will seem very familiar, and will have clear implications for our own society. Michael Walzer has argued that every morality has both a thin universal dimension and a thick contextualized content.5 The same is true of wickedness. Societies discriminate, dominate, and abuse their members in various ways, but there is something common to all expressions of oppression. We should place this core aspect, repeated in all traditions in different forms, at the center of our criticism. In the cases discussed here, it is not a particular practice but a set of ill-motivated efforts to control the sexuality of women and to restrict their ability to compete for social and political resources that we should find reprehensible.

Does the overwhelming disgust at clitoridectomy signal an emerging social commitment to structural change -- to ensuring equal social, economic, and political status for women? I'm afraid not. Of course, the absence of such commitment is no justification for clitoridectomy. My purpose, however, is not to justify clitoridectomy, but to expose the roots of the deep hostility to it -- to reveal the smug, unjustified self-satisfaction lurking behind the current condemnation of clitoridectomy. Referring to clitoridectomy, and emphasizing the distance of the practice from our own conventions, allows us to condemn them for what they do to their women, support the struggle of their women against their primitive, inhuman culture, and remain silent on the status of women in our society.

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HISTORICALLY, CLITERODECTOMY HAS BEEN A PRIMARY VEHICLE FOR THE DEMONIZATION OF ARAB WOMEN. SENSATIONALIZED DEPICTIONS OF CLITERODECTOMY IN THE WEST SERVE TO FUEL WESTERN IMPERIALISM NABER ET AL, ARAB WOMENS SOLIDARITY ASSOCIATION, 2001 [NADINE, THE FORGOTTEN ISM: AN ARAB AMERICAN WOMENS PERSPECTIVE ON ZIONISM, RACISM AND SEXISM,HTTP://WWW.INCITENATIONAL.ORG/ISSUES/WARINFO/FORGOTTEN_ISM.PDF, 7-8, FOOTNOTE INCLUDED]
The demonization of Arab women within Western academic and cultural traditions has deep historical roots (Kahf 1999; Said 1978) and is often blamed on Islam. Kahf writes that, ever since the eighteenth century, central to Western discourse on Islam is the idea that Islam is innately and immutably oppressive to women, that the veil and segregation epitomized that oppression, and that these customs were the fundamental reasons for the general and comprehensive backwardness of Islamic societies. (Ahmed1992: 152, cited in Kahf 1999: 1). In different historical periods, this image has been refashioned depending on historical circumstances.14 We explore three images that shape our research participants everyday confrontations with racism to depict the ways that race and gender intersect in the demonization of Arab women. They are the
images of the inadequate Palestinian mother,15 the super-oppressed Arab woman, and the nameless veiled woman. These images often overlap within our research participants narratives.
14

In the contemporary U.S., racist fascinations with Arab womens oppression have become a normalized component of U.S. popular culture. These images serve to uphold, rationalize, justify, or explain U.S. foreign policy/U.S. imperialism in the Arab world (Naber 2000). Mainstream filmmakers, artists, and writers in the U.S. rely on sensationalized images of oppressed Arab women to gain notoriety. Hollywood films regularly produce films about a highly sexist Arab culture that targets both Arab and Western women. News media, such as the New York Times, regularly sensationalizes Arab womens issues, highlighting cliterodectomy,
15

This image emerged in the context of the Intifada that began in October 2000 as part of the Zionist projects strategy for justifying and explaining the Israeli states brutal aggression against Palestinian civilians.

AND, THIS

IS NOT JUST AN ABSTRACT IMPERIALISM IMPACTTHE REPRESENTATION OF ABJECT SUFFERING OF ARAB WOMEN SERVES AS A JUSTIFICATION OF THE U.S. WAR ON TERROR

CLOUD, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF COMMUNICATION STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, 2004 [DANA L., TO VEIL THE THREAT OF TERROR: AFGHAN WOMEN AND THE <CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS> IN THE IMAGERY OF THE U.S. WAR ON TERRORISM, QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH, 90 (3), AUGUST, 286-287]
the imagery of civilization clash has long been as important as verbal political rhetoric in warranting U.S. policies of war and occupation.8 Although the strategy of contrasting images of Others is not new to political discourse, it was prominent and influential in the political and cultural discourses justifying the 2001 2002 war with Afghanistan that began after terrorist attacks on U.S. targets on September 11, 2001. This article explores the role of widely circulated images of Afghans, with emphasis on those of Afghan women, in national news magazines and their web sites during this war, arguing that images of Afghan women and men establish a binary opposition between a white, Western, modern subject and an abject foreign object of surveillance and military action. These images construct the viewer as a paternalistic savior of women and posit images of modern civilization against depictions of Afghanistan as backward and pre-modern. Through the construction of binary oppositions of self and Other, the evocation of a paternalistic stance toward the women of Afghanistan, and the figuration of modernity as liberation, these images participate in justifications for the war that belie the actual motives for the war. This contradiction has a number of implications for democratic deliberation and public life during wartime. The main purpose of this article is to document the ways that the imagery of the war on terrorism justifies the imperial thrust of U.S. foreign policy. In addition,
This article is an attempt to answer the question, What does the clash of civilizations look like? This question is significant because however, this study has implications for theory, criticism, and practical politics. For rhetorical theory, this article extends the idea of the visual ideograph introduced by Janis Edwards and Carol Winkler.9 I argue below that visual ideographs are more than recurring iconic images that shift in meaning depending on context; they also index verbal ideographic slogans, making abstractions such as <clash of civilizations> concrete. For criticism, the essay defends what John Thompson calls depth hermeneutics, seeking underlying truths veiled by a misleading ideological common sense.10 Finally, for politics, the article exhorts readers to answer the real (rather than only the image of) clash of war with protest and solidarity across national borders. This article proceeds as follows: First, it describes the verbal rhetoric of civilization clash, arguing that this phrase and its accompanying imagery operate in an ideographic way, summing up and exhorting conformity to a sense of American-ness established through negation of the self-governing humanity of the Other. The role of images of Afghan women in this discourse is to establish the barbarity of a society in which women are profoundly oppressed. After a brief survey of relevant concepts from the literature on visual rhetoric, the essay proceeds to an analysis of photographs from the website Time.com to demonstrate the way that these images have warranted the use of force in Afghanistan on allegedly humanitarian grounds. In Kiplings terms, U.S. forces are there to serve their captives needs. After analyzing these aspects of the images of Afghan women, I argue that the humanitarian justifications encapsulated in the rhetoric of civilization clash are contradicted by evidence suggesting that other economic and geopolitical motives for U.S. intervention were primary among makers of foreign policy.

[INSERT ALTERNATIVE]

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THEIR CRITIQUE OF CLITERODECTOMY PRESENTS ITS FANTASMIATIC STRUCTURE THROUGH ITS IGNORANCECLITERODECTOMIES ARE ACOMMON PRACTICE IN THE UNITED STATES, CANADA, AND EUROPE, POLICING GENITAL ABNORMALITY IN INFANTS TO MAINTAIN OUR SYSTEM OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE HIRD, SCHOOL OF SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL POLICY AT QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY (BELFAST), 2003 [MYRA J., CONSIDERATIONS FOR A PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY OF GENDER IDENTITY AND SEXUAL DESIRE: THE CASE OF INTERSEX, SIGNS: JOURNAL OF WOMEN IN CULTURE AND SOCIETY 28 (4), JOURNALS.UCHICAGO.EDU]
More than ten years ago Suzanne Kessler explored the medical management of intersexed individuals in Signs (1990). In this seminal article, Kessler argued that while medical protocols ostensibly rely on a host of biological indices for managing intersex, these indices (chromosomes, gonads, hormones, clitoris and penis size, reproductive capacity) are ultimately utilized through "cultural understandings of gender" (4).1 Kessler noted that almost all published material on intersex convenes on surgical and hormonal management rather than on the legion of social protocols involved in directly influencing medical and social discourses that maintain the modern Western system of gender difference.2

one in every hundred births shows some morphological "anomaly," which is observable enough in one in every 2,000 births to initiate questions about a child's gender. Accounts differ as to the statistical frequency of intersexuality. Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000) suggests that 2 percent of live births,
Cheryl Chase (1998) estimates that approximately 80,000 births per year, demonstrate some genital anomaly. Out of those, approximately 2,600 children a year are born with genitals that are not immediately recognizable as female or male. Milton Diamond estimates the incidence slightly lower, at 1.7 percent of the population (2000). Intersex is an umbrella term under which a variety of conditions are placed, including androgen insensitivity syndrome, progestin-induced virilization, adrenal hyperplasia, and Klinefelter syndrome.3

Infants born with genitals that are neither clearly "female" nor "male" present a profound challenge to those cultures dependent on a two-gender system.4 The alliance between bodies (female or male) and gender identity (girl or boy, woman or man) is taken for granted in Western society, and intersexed children are routinely surgically and hormonally gender reassigned.5 Kessler's analysis of intersex medical management in Signs
has developed further (1998), as have a number of other feminist analyses.6 Nevertheless, feminist interventions remain sparse compared with the tremendous interest shown by Western medicine and psychiatry since the 1950s. Literally hundreds of medical journal articles have deliberated on surgical and hormonal techniques for managing intersex, and the careers of pediatricians, endocrinologists, and surgeons have been built on the medical management of intersex.7 ______________________________________________________________________________ I wish to gratefully acknowledge the critical comments of the anonymous referees of an earlier version of this article. I also gratefully acknowledge the input of Nina Williams and Karen McElrath. I thank Mike Tomlinson for providing me with access to the interlibrary loan vouchers I needed to complete the revisions. 1 The term gender is employed to reflect the contention that gender produces sex. See Delphy 1994; Hood-Williams 1996; and Bray and Colebrook 1998. 2 Elsewhere (Hird 2000; Hird and Germon 2001) I have argued that intersex fundamentally challenges Western notions of dimorphic sexual difference. 3 For a fuller explanation of intersex conditions, see http://www.isna.org/faq.html. Following Meyer-Bahlburg 1994, I use the term intersex to refer to both hormonal and nonhormonal categories of gender ambiguity. 4 The current medical management of intersexed people is based on the work of John Money and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s (Money, Hampson, and Hampson 1955; Money and Ehrhardt 1972; Money 1994). 5 Perhaps one of the most subtle and clear indications of the salience of the Western assumption of sexual difference is to be found in feminist analyses of genital mutilation. For instance, in "Shades of Othering: Reflections on Female Circumcision/Genital Mutilation" (1998), Stanlie James offers a critique of Alice Walker's Warrior Marks. Although James's analysis extends beyond the "Third World" to Western societies, genital mutilation here is confined to historythere is no recognition that clitoridectomies routinely take place in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Given that up to 2 percent of all children in the United States undergo genital mutilation each year without their consent, the absence of comparative analyses is telling. For a valuable critique of Western feminist approaches to sexual difference, see Oyewumi 1998. 6 See Fausto-Sterling 1993, 1995, 2000; Chase 1994, 1998; Dreger 1998a, 1998b, 1999; Hird 2000; Hird and Germon 2001. 7 See Hird 2000 for further discussion of the medical model for managing intersex.

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THE WAY WE VIEW AND TALK ABOUT THOSE AFFECTED BY GENITAL MUTILATION AND THE PRACTICE ITSELF MAKES US VIEW THESE PEOPLE AS THE OTHER IN WHICH WE COMPARE OURSELVES TO. JAMES, CHAIR OF THE AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIES DEPARTMENT AND PROFESSOR OF AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES AND WOMEN'S STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON, 1998 [STANLIE M., SHADING OF THE OTHER: REFLECTION ON FEMALE CIRCUMCISION/ GENITAL MUTILATION, VOL. 23, NO.4, SIGNS, P.1031-1032]
Early in the film and companion text Warrior Marks, Walker recounts the unfortunate story of how her brother shot and blinded her in one eye; she rightly characterizes it as a "patriarchal wound." She suggests that her injury is analogous to the female circumcision/genital mutilation d o n s of women have experienced over thousands of years and that this "visual mutilation" has helped her to "see" more clearly the subject of genital mutilation (Walker and Parmar 1993a, 18; 1993b). I find the analogy drawn between her personal misfortune and pervasive traditions of circumcision/ mutilation to be particularly problematic. While little boys with BB guns are emblematic of violent patriarchal societies, the logic of the analogy suggests that boys shooting and blinding their sisters is a traditional ceremonial practice sanctioned by this society in much the same fashion as female circumcision is in other societies. Although Walker is certainly imbued with a sympathetic perspective, centering her own story within this international struggle for women's human rights seems to have the unintentional consequence of "othering" or marginalizing the very people she wishes her audience to support.

GENITAL MUTILATION IS SEEN AS SIMPLY A HORRID TRADITIONAL PRACTICE WITH NO AVENUE OPEN TO SEE THE WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY IT HAS PROVIDED TO WOMEN JAMES, CHAIR OF THE AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIES DEPARTMENT AND PROFESSOR OF AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES AND WOMEN'S STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON, 1998 [STANLIE M., SHADING OF THE OTHER: REFLECTION ON FEMALE CIRCUMCISION/ GENITAL MUTILATION, VOL. 23, NO.4, SIGNS, P. 1032]
Walker compiled an impressive array of interviews for Warrior Marks, including women who have been circumcised/mutilated, the mother of a girl who will undergo the procedure, and activists who are struggling to eradicate these practices. Curiously, these interviews are interspersed with a dancer's almost erotic depiction of the horrors of circumcision. One stunning interview was with a weeping young woman, Aminata Diop, who had refused to undergo circumcision/mutilation and was seeking sanctuary in Europe. She had been disowned by her parents, and her father had divorced her mother and thrown her into the street for failing to control her daughter's behavior, thereby bringing shame upon him. Linata's fiance had broken their engagement. In another interview, Walker spoke with a woman who had traumatic memories of her own experience but felt compelled, albeit regretfully, to continue the tradition with her own daughter. Outraged and censorious, Walker interviewed circumcisers in a manner that failed to articulate or even recognize that such traditional practices have provided some women with opportunities to attain respect and income in societies where there are often precious few avenues available to women to attain such critically limited resources.

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VIEWING THESE WOMEN AS HELPLESS VICTIMS COMPELS US TO SAVE THEM FROM THEMSELVES AND TRADITIONS MAKING THEM THE IGNORANT OTHER. JAMES, CHAIR OF THE AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIES DEPARTMENT AND PROFESSOR OF AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES AND WOMEN'S STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON, 1998 [STANLIE M., SHADING OF THE OTHER: REFLECTION ON FEMALE CIRCUMCISION/ GENITAL MUTILATION, VOL. 23, NO.4, SIGNS, P.1033-1034]
Female circumcision, sometimes referred to as genital mutilation (FGM), depending on one's political perspective, are terms used for traditional practices that involve cutting away all or part of the external female genitalia.' Before Walker's widely publicized venture into this subject matter, female circumcision/genital mutilation had already elicited horrified responses from some colonial missionaries (Presley 1992), outraged the sensibilities of a few informed Western feminists and activists, provided anticolonialists with he1 for traditional nationalist struggles, and been almost surreptitiously defined as a health matter by the United Nations (Slack 1988; Smith 1992).2 It is within that context that Walker shares these and other stories. She challenges a deeply entrenched and difficult practice that is detrimental to the health and well-being of women and girls, but she does so in a way that invites the characterization of African women as victims without agency. Indeed, Walker seems "possessed" of the pernicious notion that she can and must rescue those unfortunate women from themselves, from their ignorance, and from their patriarchal traditions. Patricia Stamp has argued that third world women have often been treated as "passive targets of oppressive practices and discriminatory structures," a conceptualization that "colludes with sexist ideologies that construct women as naturally inferior, passive and consigned to a private apolitical world" (1991,845). Privileged Western women (and I must include myself at least at the margin of this particular category) must be mindful of the sin that Marilyn Frye has termed "arrogant perception" (1983) and that Isabelle R. Gunning describes as the view that one is the center of the universe, thus distancing herself from the "other" (1992). In "The Discourse of the Veil at the Turn of Two Centuries" (1993), Leila Ahmed argues that nascent Western feminist stirrings were deflected from Western conditions to focus on the veil as the ultimate symbol of Islamic oppression of women. This redirected emphasis communicates too readily that oppression occurs only "elsewhere" and that "native" women can be rescued by encouraging them to abandon their own religion, customs, and culture and to adopt those of the West. Ultimately this form of arrogant perception is supportive of colonialism and its institutions (Ahmed 1993). Arrogant perception is apparent in the West's horrified, condemnatory responses to practices such as the Indian tradition of sati, Chinese foot binding, and Arab customs of veiling and Purdah. It is apparent in Western facile insensitivity to the unfamiliar. Arrogant perception nourishes ethnocentrism even as it obscures visions of the multifaceted complexity of those characterized as oppressed "others:' as well as their inter: and.interrelationships within and between societies.

CIRCUMCISION IS A TRADITION IN MANY CULTURE SIGNIFIES THE PASSAGE INTO ADULT HOOD AND THE TRANSFORMATION FROM AN ADOLESCENT TO A SELF RESPECTING MEMBER OF THE TRIBE. JAMES, CHAIR OF THE AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIES DEPARTMENT AND PROFESSOR OF AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES AND WOMEN'S STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON, 1998 [STANLIE M., SHADING OF THE OTHER: REFLECTION ON FEMALE CIRCUMCISION/ GENITAL MUTILATION, VOL. 23, NO.4, SIGNS, P.1035]
Perhaps the most famous discussion of the customary practice of clitoridectomy was provided in Jomo Kenyatta's ethnographic Facing Mount Kenya (1965). Kenyatta, Kenya's first postcolonial leader, describes Gikuyu ceremonies of circumcision of girls and boys as a critical aspect of sacred rites of passage. The ritual was embedded in a series of activities that symbolized the rebirth of a child, not as a child of individuals, but as a child of the entire tribe, and culminated in the acceptance of the child as an adult member of the society. Kenyatta argues that the tradition was critical to the identity of the Gikuyu and ultimately to the survival of the society. According to Kenyatta, no self-respecting Gikuyu woman or man would consider marrying an uncircumcised individual because that person was by definition an immature child (132-33). He also indicates that although male circumcision did not serve the same function, female circumcision provided a way of controlling the sexuality of girls and women. Kenyatta's study was conceived and written with at least two motives and audiences in mind. Presented to the British academy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree in anthropology, Kenyatta's work endeavored to portray the Gikuyu as possessors of a rich and complex culture comparable to, albeit different from, European culture. At the same time, writing as an anticolonial spokesperson and a self-appointed guardian of tradition, he offers his people an idealized version of precolonial life in which Gikuyus lived harmoniously in a democratic (and patriarchal) society. Exhorting his countrymen to return to the "correct" ways of their ancestors, he goes so far as to argue that those who would stray from his representations of their culture have been detribalized and should no longer consider themselves, or be considered, Gikuyu.

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THE AFFIRMATIVES PREMONITIONS OF ECOLOGICAL ARMAGEDDON CONSTRUCT A FANTASY OF A NATURAL WORLD OUT OF BALANCE. THIS PARANOIC PROJECTION IS ONLY NARCISSISM. THE AFF IS SURE THAT THEY MUST DO SOMETHING TO SAVE THE WORLD. IN THE MEANTIME, THEY VEIL THE RADICAL COMPLEXITY AND
CHAOTIC PROCESSES OF THE EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT BEHIND A FAADE OF HARMONIOUS UNITY WAITING TO BE REALIZED. THESE FANTASY FORMATIONS HAVE THE DELETERIOUS CONSEQUENCE OF MAKING ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS SEEM A MATTER OF GRANDIOSE POLITICAL STRATEGIES, FURTHER DISTANCING US FROM REAL CHANGES IN THE SOCIO-POLITICAL FABRIC OF SOCIETY.

SWYNGEDOUW, DEPT OF GEOGRAPHY, SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT, MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY, 2006. [EIRK, IMPOSSIBLE SUSTAINABILITY AND THE POST-POLITICAL CONDITION, FORTHCOMING IN: DAVID GIBBS AND ROB KRUEGER (EDS.) SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, HTTP://WWW.LIV.AC.UK/GEOGRAPHY/SEMINARS/SUSTAINABILITYPAPER.DOC]
Slavoj iek suggests in Looking Awry that the current ecological crisis is indeed a radical condition that not only constitutes a real and present danger, but, equally importantly, questions our most unquestionable presuppositions, the very horizon of our meaning, our everyday understanding of nature as a regular, rhythmic process (Zizek, (1992) 2002: 34). It raises serious questions about what were long considered selfevident certainties. He argues that this fundamental threat to our deepest convictions of what we always thought we knew for certain about nature is co-constitutive of our general unwillingness to take the ecological crisis completely serious. It is this destabilising effect that explains the fact that the typical, predominant reaction to it still consists in a variation of the famous disavowal, I know very well (that things are deadly serious, that what is at stake is our very survival), but just the same I dont really believe, and that is why I continue to act as if ecology is of no lasting consequence for my everyday life (page 35). The same unwillingness to question our very assumptions about what nature is (and even more so what natures might become) also leads to the typical obsessive reactions of those who DO take the ecological crisis seriously. iek considers both the case of the environmental activist, who in his or her relentless and obsessive activism to achieve a transformation of society in more ecologically sustainable ways expresses a fear that to stop acting would lead to catastrophic consequences. In his words, obsessive acting becomes a

tactic to stave off the ultimate catastrophe, i.e. if I stop doing what I am doing, the world will come to an end in an ecological Armageddon. Others, of course, see all manner of transcendental signs in the revenge of nature, read it as a message that signals our destructive intervention in
nature and urge us to change our relationship with nature. In other words, we have to listen to natures call, as expressed by the pending environmental catastrophe, and respond to its message that pleas for a more benign, associational relation with nature, a post-human affective connectivity, as a cosmopolitical partner in dialogue. While the first attitude radically ignores the reality of possible ecological disaster, the other two, which are usually associated with actors defending sustainable solutions for our current predicament, are equally problematic in that they both ignore, or are blind to the inseparable gap

between our symbolic representation (our understanding) of Nature and the actual acting of a wide range of radically different and, often contingent, natures. In other words, there is of necessity an unbridgeable gap, a void, between our dominant view of Nature (as a predictable and determined set of processes that tends towards a (dynamic) equilibrium but one that is disturbed by our human actions and can be rectified with proper sustainable practices) and the acting of natures as an (often) unpredictable, differentiated, incoherent, open-ended, complex, chaotic (although by no means unordered or un-patterned) set of processes. The latter implies the existence not only of
many natures, but, more importantly, it also assumes the possibility of all sorts of possible future natures, all manner of imaginable different human-non human assemblages and articulations, and all kinds of different possible socio-environmental becomings. The inability to take natures seriously is dramatically illustrated by the controversy over the degree to which disturbing environmental change is actually taking place and the risks or dangers associated with it. Lomborgs The Sceptical Environmentalist captures one side of this controversy in all its phantasmagorical perversity (Lomborg, 1998), while climate change doomsday pundits represent the other. Both sides of the debate argue from an imaginary position of the

presumed existence of a dynamic balance and equilibrium, the point of good nature, but one side claims that the world is veering off the correct path, while the other side (Lomborg and other sceptics) argues that we are still pretty much on natures course. With our gaze firmly fixed on capturing an imaginary idealised Nature, the controversy further solidifies our conviction of the possibility of a harmonious, balanced, and fundamentally benign ONE Nature if we would

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just get our interaction with it right, an argument blindly (and stubbornly) fixed on the question of where Natures rightful point of benign existence resides. This futile debate, circling around an assumedly centred, known, and singular Nature, certainly permits -- in fact invites -- imagining ecological catastrophe at some distant point (global burning (or freezing) through climate change, resource depletion, death by overpopulation). Indeed, imagining catastrophe and fantasising about the final ecological Armageddon seems considerably easier for most environmentalists than envisaging relatively small changes in the socio-political and cultural-economic organisation of local and global life here and now. Or put differently, the worlds premature ending in a climatic Armageddon seems easier to imagine (and sell to the public) than a transformation of (or end to) the neo-liberal capitalist order that keeps on practicing expanding energy use and widening and deepening its ecological footprint. It is this sort of considerations that led Slavoj iek controversially to state that nature does not exist. Of course, he does not imply that there are no such
things as quarks or other subatomic particles, black holes, tsunamis, sunshine, trees, or HIV viruses. Even less would he decry the radical effects of CO2 and other greenhouse gases on the climate or the lethal consequences of water contamination for the worlds poor. On the contrary, they are very real, many posing serious environmental problems, occasionally threatening entire populations (AIDS, for example), but he insists that the Nature we see and

work with is necessarily radically imagined, scripted, symbolically charged; and is radically distant from the natures that are there, which are complex, chaotic, often unpredictable, often radically contingent, risky, patterned in endlessly complex ways, ordered along strange attractors. In other words, there is no balanced, dynamic equilibrium based nature out there that needs or requires salvation in name of either Nature itself or of an equally imagined universal human survival. Nature simply does not exist. There is nothing foundational in nature that needs, demands, or requires sustaining. The debate and controversies over nature and what do with it, in contrast, signals rather our political inability to engage in directly political and social argument and strategies about re-arranging the social co-ordinates of everyday life and the arrangements of socio-metabolic organisation (something usually called capitalism) that we inhabit. In order words, imagining a benign and sustainable Nature avoids asking the politically sensitive, but vital, question as to what kind of socio-environmental arrangements do we wish to produce, how can this be achieved, and what sort of natures do we wish to inhabit.

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THE AFFIRMATIVE IS TYPICAL OF A TECHNO-MANAGERIAL APPROACH TO THE ENVIRONMENT. THIS APPROACH OCCLUDES AN APPRECIATION FOR NATURES MULTIPLICITY BY OBJECTIFYING AND REDUCING MANY NATURES TO A UNIFIED AND MANIPULABLE NATURE. THE RESULT IS A FORECLOSURE OF POLITICAL CONTESTATION AND THE SUBMISSION OF ALL OF NATURAL AND SOCIAL LIFE TO BUREAUCRATIC REGIMES OF MANAGEMENT AND CONTROL. SWYNGEDOUW, DEPT OF GEOGRAPHY, SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT, MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY, 2006. [EIRK, IMPOSSIBLE SUSTAINABILITY AND THE POST-POLITICAL CONDITION, FORTHCOMING IN: DAVID GIBBS AND ROB KRUEGER (EDS.) SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, HTTP://WWW.LIV.AC.UK/GEOGRAPHY/SEMINARS/SUSTAINABILITYPAPER.DOC]
Environmentalists (whether activists or scientists) invariably invoke the global physical processes that threaten our existence, and insist on the need to re-engineer nature, so that it can return to a sustainable path. Armed with their charts, formulas, models, numbers, and grant applications, to which activists usually add the inevitable pictures of scorched land, factories or cars emitting carbon fumes, dying animals and plants, suffering humans, apocalyptic rhetoric, and calls for subsidies and financial support, scientists, activists, and all manner of assorted other human and non-human actants enter the domain of the social, the public, and, most importantly, the political. Thus natures enter the political. A particular and symbolically enshrined nature enters the parliament of politics, but does so in a duplicitous manner. It is a treacherously deceitful Nature that enters politics, one that is packaged, numbered, calculated, coded, modelled, represented by those who claim to possess, know, understand, speak for the real Nature. In other words, what enters the domain of politics is the coded and symbolised versions of nature mobilised by scientists, activists, industrialists and the like. This is particularly evident in examples such as the debate over GMOs, global climate change, BSE, biodiversity loss, and other equally pressing issues. Invariably, the acting of Nature -- as scripted by the bearers of natures knowledge enters the political machinery as coded language that also already posits its political and social solution and does not tolerate, in the name of Nature, dissent other than that framed by its own formulations. It is in this sense of course that the argument about climate change is exclusively formulated in terms of believers and non-believers, as a quasi-religious faith, but the weapons of the struggle in this case
are matters of fact like data, models, and physico-chemical analysis. And the solutions to the question of sustainability are already pre-figured by the way in which nature is made to speak. Creeping increases in long term global temperatures, which will cause untold suffering and damage, are caused by CO2 output. Hence, the solution to future climate ills resides in cutting back on CO2 emissions. Notwithstanding the validity of the role of CO2 in co-constituting the process of climate change, the problematic of the future calamities the world faces is posited primarily in terms of the physical acting of one of natures components, CO2 as is its solution found in bringing CO2 within our symbolic (socio-economic) order, futilely attempted with the Kyoto agreement or other neo-liberal market-based mechanisms. Questioning the politics of climate change in itself is already seen as an act of treachery, as an unlawful activity, banned by Nature itself.

Although there may be no Nature, there certainly is a politics of nature or a politics of the environment. The collages of apparently contradictory and
overlapping vignettes of the environmental conditions outlined above share one common threat that many of us, Bush and Blair, my son and Greenpeace, Oxfam and the World Bank, agree on. The world is in environmental trouble. And we need to act politically now.
Both the 2004 Tsunami and New Orleanss Katrina brought the politicisation of Nature home with a vengeance. Although the Tsunami had everything to do with the earths geodetic acting out and with the powerless of South East Asia drowning in its consequences and absolutely nothing with climate change or other environmentally degrading practices, the Tsunami calamity was and continues to be staged as a socio-environmental catastrophe, another assertion of the urgent need to revert to more sustainable socio-environmental practices. New Orleans socio-environmental disaster was of a different kind. While there may be a connection between the number and intensity of hurricanes and climate change, that of course does account neither for the dramatic destructions of poor peoples lives in the city nor for the plainly blatant racist spectacles that were fed into the media on a daily basis in the aftermath of the hurricanes rampage through the city. The imaginary staged in the aftermath of the socio-environmental catastrophe of New Orleans singled out disempowered African Americans twice, first as victims, then as criminals. Even the New York Times conceded that 80% of the reported crimes taking place in unruly and disintegrating New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricanes devastations were based on rumour and innuendo. A perverse example of how liberal humanitarian concern is saturated with racialised coding and moral disgust with the poorest and most excluded parts of society. Of course, after the poor were hurricaned out of New Orleans, the wrecked city is rapidly turning into a fairy-tale playground for urban developers and city boosters who will make sure, this time around, that New Orleans will be rebuilt in their image of a sustainable capitalist city: green, white, rich, conservative, and neo-liberal (Davis, 2006).

the barrage of apocalyptic warnings of the pending catastrophes wrecked by climate change and the need to take urgent remedial action to engineer a retro-fitted balanced climate are perfect examples of the tactics and configurations associated with the present post-political condition, primarily in the US and Europe. Indeed, a politics of sustainability, predicated upon a radically conservative and reactionary view of a singular and ontologically stable and harmonious Nature is necessarily one that eradicates or evacuates the political from debates over what to do with natures. The key political question is one that centres on the question of what kind of natures we which to inhabit, what kinds of natures we which to preserve, to make, or, if need be, to wipe off the surface of the planet (like the HIV virus, for example), and on how to get there. The fantasy of sustainability imagines the possibility of an originally fundamentally harmonious Nature, one that is now out-of-synch but, which, if properly managed, we can and have to return to by means of a series of technological, managerial, and organisational fixes. As suggested above, many, from different social, cultural, and philosophical positionalities, agree with this dictum. Disagreement is allowed, but only with respect to the choice of technologies, the mix of organisational fixes, the detail of the managerial adjustments, and the urgency of their timing and implementation. Natures apocalyptic future, if unheeded, symbolises and nurtures the solidification of the post-political condition. And the excavation and critical assessment of this post-political condition nurtured and embodied by most
The popular response to Katrina,

of current Western socio-environmental politics is what we shall turn to next.

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THE IMPACT IS ENVIRONMENTAL POPULISM. THE AFF PROMOTES ENVIRO-DOOM AS A THREAT TO COMMON HUMANITY, PAINTING A TOTALLY EQUITABLE ECO-PICTURE, MASKING GRAVE INEQUALITIES IN THE SOCIAL FIELD. IT ALSO PROMOTES A POLITICS OF THE TECHNOCRAT, PROLIFERATING THE RISKS OF HUMAN CONTROL OF THE ENVIRONMENT. THIS IS ALL JUSTIFIED BY THEIR IMAGINATION OF IMPENDING APOCALYPSE, WHICH ITSELF CALLS UPON A COLLECTIVE HUMANITY THREATENED BY AN ALWAYS EXTERNALIZED ENEMY IN NEED OF MANAGEMENT. THIS PROCESS OF EXTERNALIZATION FURTHER DISPATCHES THE SYSTEM ITSELF TO SMOOTH OVER THE CONTRADICTIONS THAT IT GENERATES. THIS IS PROVEN BY THEIR APPEAL TO EXPERTS AND POLITICIANS, AN APPEAL THAT ITSELF MAINTAINS SYSTEMS OF PRIVILEGE AND CONFIGURATIONS OF POWER. FINALLY, THE DEMAND OF THE AFFIRMATIVE IS NECESSARILY PARTICULAR AND UNNAMED IN NATURE ITS FORECLOSES A UNIVERSALIZATION OF POLITICS NECESSARY TO RADICALLY ALTER EXISTING SOCIOPOLITICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ARRANGEMENTS. SWYNGEDOUW, DEPT OF GEOGRAPHY, SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT, MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY, 2006. [EIRK, IMPOSSIBLE SUSTAINABILITY AND THE POST-POLITICAL CONDITION, FORTHCOMING IN: DAVID GIBBS AND ROB KRUEGER (EDS.) SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, HTTP://WWW.LIV.AC.UK/GEOGRAPHY/SEMINARS/SUSTAINABILITYPAPER.DOC]
invokes THE Environment and THE people if not Humanity as whole in a material and philosophical manner. All people are affected by environmental problems and the whole of humanity (as well as large parts of the non-human) is under threat from environmental catastrophes. At the same time, the environment is running wild, veering off the path of (sustainable) control. As such, populism cuts across the idiosyncrasies of different human and non-human natures and their specific acting outs, silences ideological and other constitutive social differences and papers over conflicts of interests by distilling a common threat or challenge to both Nature and Humanity. Second, populism is based on a politics of the people know best (although the latter category remains often empty, unnamed), supported by an assumedly neutral scientific technocracy, and advocates a direct relationship between people and political participation. It is assumed that this will lead to a good, if not optimal, solution, a view strangely at odds with the presumed radical openness, uncertainty and undecidability of the excessive risks associated with Becks or Giddens second modernity. The architecture of populist governing takes the form of stakeholder
participation or forms of participatory governance that operates beyond-the-state and permits a form of self-management, self-organisation, and controlled selfdisciplining (see Dean, 1999; Swyngedouw, 2005; Lemke, 1999; Crouch, 2004), under the aegis of a non-disputed liberal-capitalist order. Third, populism customarily invokes the spectre of annihilating apocalyptic futures if no direct and immediate action is taken. The classic racist invocation of Enoch Powells notorious 1968 Streams of Blood speech to warn of the immanent dangers of unchecked immigration into the UK has of course become the emblematic populist statement as are many of the slogans assembled in Table 1. If we refrain from acting (in a technocratic-managerial First, populism

manner now), our worlds future is in grave danger. Fourth, populist tactics do not identify a privileged subject of change (like the proletariat for Marx, women for feminists, or the creative class for competitive capitalism), but instead invoke a common condition or predicament, the need for common humanity-wide action, mutual collaboration and co-operation. There are no internal social tensions or internal generative conflicts. Instead the enemy is always externalised and objectified. Populisms fundamental fantasy is of an Intruder, or more usually a group of intruders, who have corrupted the system. CO2 stands here as the classic example of a fetishised and externalised foe that requires dealing with if sustainable climate futures are to be attained. Problems therefore are not the result of the system, of unevenly distributed power relations, of the networks of control and influence, of rampant injustices, or of a fatal flow inscribed in the system, but are blamed on an outsider. That is why the solution can be found in dealing with the

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pathological phenomenon, the resolution for which resides in the system itself. It is not the system that is the problem, but its pathological syndrome (for which the cure is internal). While CO2 is externalised as the socio-climatic enemy, a potential cure in the guise of the Kyoto
principles is generated from within the market functioning of the system itself. The enemy is, therefore, always vague, ambiguous, socially empty or vacuous, and homogenised (like CO2 ); the enemy is a mere thing, not socially embodied, named, and counted. Fifth, populist demands are always addressed to the elites. Populism as a project always addressed demands to the ruling elites; it is not

about changing the elites, but calling the elites to undertake action. A non-populist politics is exactly about obliterating the elite, imagining the impossible nicely formulated in the following joke: An IRA man in a balaclava is at the gates of heaven when St Peter comes to him and says, 'I'm
afraid I can't let you in'. 'Who wants to get in?' the IRA man retorts. 'You've got twenty minutes to get the fuck out.' Sixth, no proper names are assigned to a post-political populist politics (Badiou, 2005a). Post-political

populism is associated with a politics of not naming in the sense of giving a definite or proper name to its domain or field of action. Only vague concepts like climate change policy, biodiversity policy or a vacuous sustainable policy replaces the proper names of politics. These proper names, according to Rancire (1995) (see also Badiou (2005b)) are what constitutes a genuine democracy, that is a space where the unnamed, the uncounted, and, consequently, un-symbolised become named and counted. Consider, for example, how class struggle in the 19th and 20th century was exactly about that remain particular and foreclose universalisation as a positive socio-environmental project. In other words, the environmental problem does not posit a positive and named socio-environmental situation, an embodied vision, a desire that awaits its realisation, a fiction to be realised. In that sense, populist tactics do not solve problems, they are moved around. Consider, for example, the current argument over how the nuclear option is again portrayed as a possible sustainable energy future and as an alternative to deal both with CO2 emissions and peakoil. It hardly arouses the passions for what sort of better society might arise from this.
naming the proletariat, its counting, symbolisation and consequent entry into the techno-machinery of the state. Seventh, populism becomes expressed in particular demands (get rid of immigrants, reduce CO2)

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AND THE AFFS FANTASY OF HARMONIOUS NATURE WILL ALWAYS ENCOUNTER RESISTANCE. A KERNEL OF NEGATIVITY PERSISTS. WE PERCEIVE THIS IMPOSSIBILITY OF WHOLENESS IN NATURES ENEMIES, INTRUDING ALIEN THREATS. THESE PERPETUALLY RECURRING NIGHTMARE SCENARIOS JUSTIFY THE STIGMATIZATION AND EXTERMINATION OF NATURES MOST UNSIGHTLY PARTS IN A MURDEROUS RAGE TO RETURN TO A FICTIONAL BALANCE. STAVRAKAKIS, DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, DIRECTOR OF IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS PROGRAM 1999 [YANNIS, LACAN AND THE POLITICAL, P.62-65]
nature which is still generally thought as a hard reality, existing and being accessible independently of any fantasmatic scenario. This idea of nature is closely associated with an overwhelming consensus, forming the foundation of the science of ecology, that the natural, original state of nature was balance (a consensus that
In order to illustrate further this point let us return to the example of our constructions of nature, a was hegemonic until a new generation of ecologists began to question all these old ideas and metaphors and to assert that nature is inherently unbalanced or chaotic.Worster, 1994:389). The fact that this view of nature had to repress all the evidence for any other representation of nature, until that proved to be impossible (when chaos kept boiling out from nowhere, breaking down order and balance.Worster, 1994:389), shows that, for humans, reality needs to be coherent, and since it does not seem to be by itself it has to be constructed as a coherent harmonious whole (at least a harmonious whole in the making). Of course, this harmony can be of many different forms. In the construction of nature, for example, one can trace a movement from the divine order of nature in Linnean ecology to the romantic holistic and animistic conception of nature. This trajectory culminates, within modern ecology, in the organismic idea of a climax of nature introduced by Clements, in Odums ecosystemic view and Lovelock.s Gaia. No matter how different these representations of nature were they are all positing a harmonious nature. Take for example Worster.s point about Odum and Clements, two of the most important figures in the science of ecology: Eugene Odum may have used different terms than his predecessor Frederic Clements, and he may even have had a radically different picture of nature; but he did not depart from Clements. notion that the law of organic nature was to bring order and harmony out of the chaotic materials of existence. (Worster, 1994:367) Mac Arthur, Odum and Clements, like Isaac Newton, .had tried to make nature into a single, coherent picture where all the pieces fitted firmly together.. All of them tried to reduce the disorderliness or the unknown qualities of nature to a single all-encompassing metaphysical idea (Worster, 1994:400). Even conceptions of nature stressing the element of conflict, such as the Darwinian one, sometimes feel the need to subject this non-perfect image to some discernible goal of nature (for example the .constantly increasing diversity of organic types in one area, Worster, 1994:161) which introduces a certain harmony through the back door. What constantly emerges from this exposition is that when harmony is not present it has to be somehow introduced in order for our reality to be coherent. It has to be introduced through a fantasmatic social construction. One should not get the impression though that this is a mere philosophical discussion. In so far as our constructions of reality influence our behaviour and this is what they basically do.our fixation on harmony has direct social and political consequences. Reality construction does not take place on a superstructural level. Reality is forced to conform to our constructions of it not only at the spiritual or the intellectual, but also at the material level. But why does it have to be forced to conform? This is due, for instance, to the gap between our harmonious fantasmatic constructions of nature and nature itself, between reality and the real.

Our constructions of reality are so strong that nature has to conform to them and not they to nature; reality is conceived as mastering the real. But there is always a certain leftover, a disturbing element destabilising our constructions of nature. This has to be stigmatised, made into a scapegoat and exterminated. The more beatific and harmonious is a social fantasy the more this repressed destabilising element
will be excluded from its symbolisation.without, however, ever disappearing. In this regard, a vignette from the history of nature conservation can be revealing. As is well known nature conservation was developed first in the United States; what is not so well known is that a major feature of the crusade for resource conservation was a deliberate campaign to destroy wild animals .one of the most efficient, well-organized, and well-financed such efforts in all of man.s history. (Worster, 1994:261). All this, although not solely attributable to it, was part of a .progressive. moralistic ideology which conceived of nature together with society as harbouring ruthless exploiters and criminals who should be banished from the land (Worster, 1994:265). The driving force behind this enterprise was clearly a particular ethically distinctive construction of nature articulated within the framework of a conservation ideology. According to this construction what was, had to conform to what .should be. and what should be, that is to say nature without vermin (coyotes and other wild predators), was accepted as more natural more harmonious than what was: .These conservationists were dedicated to reorganizing the natural economy in a way that would fulfil

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their own ideal vision of what nature should be like. (Worster, 1994:266). This construction was accepted by the Roosevelt administration in the USA
(1901-9) and led to the formation of an official programme to exterminate vermin. The job was given to a government agency, the Bureau of the Biological Survey (BBS) in the Department of Agriculture, and a ruthless war started (in 1907 alone, 1,700 wolves and 23,000 coyotes were killed in the National Parks and this policy continued and expanded for years) (Worster, 1994:263). What is this dialectic between the beatific fantasy of nature and the demonised vermin doing if not illustrating the Lacanian dialectic between the two sides of fantasy or between fantasy and symptom? Since we will explore the first of these two Lacanian approaches to fantasy in Chapter 4, we will concentrate here on the fantasy/symptom axis. As far as the promise of filling the lack in the Other is concerned, fantasy can be better understood in its relation to the Lacanian conception of the symptom; according to one possible reading, fantasy and symptom are two inter-implicated terms. It is the symptom that interrupts the consistency of

the field of our constructions of reality, of the object of identification, by embodying the repressed jouissance, the destabilising part of nature excluded from its harmonious symbolisation. The symptom here is a real kernel of enjoyment; it is the repressed jouissance that returns and does not
ever .stop in imposing itself [on us]. (Soler, 1991:214). If fantasy is .the support that gives consistency to what we call reality. (.i.ek, 1989:49) on the other hand reality is always a symptom (Zizek, 1992). Here we are insisting on the late Lacanian conception of the symptom as sinthome. In this conception, a signifier is married to jouissance, a signifier is instituted in the real, outside the signifying chain but at the same time internal to it. This paradoxical role of the symptom can help us understand the paradoxical role of fantasy. Fantasy gives discourse its consistency because it opposes the symptom (Ragland-Sullivan, 1991:16). Hence, if the symptom is an encounter with the real, with a traumatic point that resists symbolisation, and if the discursive has to arrest

the real and repress jouissance in order to produce reality, then the negation of the real within fantasy can only be thought in terms of opposing, of stigmatising the symptom. This is then the relation between symptom and fantasy. The self-consistency of a symbolic construction of reality depends on the harmony instituted by fantasy. This fantasmatic harmony can only be sustained by the neutralisation of the symptom and of the real, by a negation of the generalised lack that crosses the field of the social. But how is this done? If social fantasy produces the self-consistency of a certain construction it can do so only by presenting the symptom as .an alien, disturbing intrusion, and not as the point of eruption of the otherwise hidden truth of the existing social order. (.i.ek, 1991a:40). The social fantasy of a harmonious social or natural order can only be sustained if all the persisting disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder. To return to our example, the illusory character of our harmonious construction of nature is shown in the fact that there is a part of the real which escapes its schema and assumes a symptomatic form (vermin, etc.); in order for this fantasy to remain coherent, this real symptom has to be stigmatised and eliminated. It cannot be accepted as the excluded truth of nature; such a recognition would lead to a dislocation of the fantasy in question. When, however, the dependence of fantasy on the symptom is revealed, then the play the relation between the
symptom and fantasy reveals itself as another mode of the play between the real and the symbolic/imaginary nexus producing reality.

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OUR ALTERNATIVE IS TO VOTE NEGATIVE. THIS SHOULD NOT BE UNDERSTOOD AS MERELY CASTING A BALLOT FOR ONE TEAM OVER ANOTHER, BUT AS A WAY TO METAPHORICALLY CONDENSE A UNIVERSAL POLITICS AIMED AT FUNDAMENTALLY RESTRUCTURING THE ENTIRE SOCIAL FABRIC. CONTRAST THIS WITH THE AFFIRMATIVE WHICH INSTRUMENTALIZES PARTICULAR DEMANDS FOR PURELY MANAGERIALIST ENDS, SO AS TO AVOID INTERRUPTING THE SMOOTH FUNCTIONING OF THE NEO-LIBERAL ORDER. POLITICS REQUIRES A UNIVERSALIZING, AND THUS CONTROVERSIAL, POSITIONING A DRAWING OF LINES IN THE SAND. REJECTING THE AFFIRMATIVE IS MEANS TO SIGNAL A GLOBAL OPPOSITION AGAINST THE TECHNOCRATIC POLITICS OF THE STATUS QUO. SWYNGEDOUW, DEPT OF GEOGRAPHY, SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT, MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY, 2006. [EIRK, IMPOSSIBLE SUSTAINABILITY AND THE POST-POLITICAL CONDITION, FORTHCOMING IN: DAVID GIBBS AND ROB KRUEGER (EDS.) SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, HTTP://WWW.LIV.AC.UK/GEOGRAPHY/SEMINARS/SUSTAINABILITYPAPER.DOC]
A genuine politics, therefore, is the moment in which a particular demand is not simply part of the negotiation of interests but aims at something more, and starts to function as the metaphoric condensation of the global restructuring of the entire socials space (iek 1999b: 208). It is about the recognition of conflict as constitutive of the social condition, and the naming of the socio-ecological spaces that can become. The political becomes for iek and Rancire the space of litigation (iek, 1998), the space for those who are not-All, who are uncounted and unnamed, not part of the police (symbolic or state) order. A true political space is always a space of contestation for those who have no name or no place. As Diken and Laustsen (2004: 9) put it: Politics in this sense is the ability to debate, question and renew the fundament on which political struggle unfolds, the ability to radically criticise a given order and to fight for a new and better one. In a nutshell, then, politics necessitates accepting conflict. A radical-progressive position should insist on the unconditional primacy of the inherent antagonism as constitutive of the political. (iek 1999a: 29). Post-political parliamentary rule, in contrast, permits the politicization of everything and anything, but only in a non-committal way and as non-conflict. Absolute and irreversible choices are kept away; politics becomes something one can do without making decisions that divide and separate (Thomson, 2003). A consensual post-politics arises thus, one that either eliminates fundamental conflict (i.e. we all agree that climate change is a real problem that requires urgent attention) or elevates it to antithetical ultra-politics. Those who deny the realities of a dangerous climate change are blinded radicals that put themselves outside the legitimate social (symbolic) order. The same fundamentalist label is of course also put on those who argue that dealing with climate change requires a fundamental reorganisation of the hegemonic neo-liberal-capitalist order. The consensual times we are currently living in have thus eliminated a genuine political space of disagreement. However, consensus does not equal peace or absence of fundamental conflict (Rancire, 2005a: 8). Under a postpolitical condition, [e]verything is politicised, can be discussed, but only in a non-committal way and as a non-conflict. Absolute and irreversible choices are kept away; politics becomes something one can do without making decisions that divide and separate. When pluralism becomes an end in itself, real politics is pushed to other arenas (Diken and Laustsen, 2004: 7), in the present case to street rebellion and protest, and terrorist tactics (cfr animal lib movement in the UK).

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THE ALTERNATIVE IS A POLITICIZATION OF DISAGREEMENT WITH THE AFF. THIS FORM OF DIVISIVE POLITICS IS NECESSARY TO NAME ALTERNATIVE FUTURES TO THE STATUS QUO AND ALTERNATIVE POSSIBILITIES TO GIVEN SOCIO-POLITICAL ARRANGEMENTS. A RADICAL AND CRITICAL DISTANCE FROM THE AFF OPENS UP POSSIBILITIES FOR IMAGINING ALTERNATIVES TO THE AFFS VISION OF NATURE AS ORDERLY AND PREDICTABLE AND THE MANAGERIAL POLITICS THAT ATTENDS IT. SWYNGEDOUW, DEPT OF GEOGRAPHY, SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT, MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY, 2006. [EIRK, IMPOSSIBLE SUSTAINABILITY AND THE POST-POLITICAL CONDITION, FORTHCOMING IN: DAVID GIBBS AND ROB KRUEGER (EDS.) SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, HTTP://WWW.LIV.AC.UK/GEOGRAPHY/SEMINARS/SUSTAINABILITYPAPER.DOC]
A true politics for Jacques Rancire (but also for others like Badiou, iek, or Mouffe) is a democratic political community, conceived as: A community of interruptions, fractures, irregular and local, through with egalitarian logic comes and divides the police community from itself. It is a community of worlds in community that are intervals of subjectification: intervals constructed between identities,
between spaces and places. Political being-together is a being-between: between identities, between worlds . Between several names, several identities, several statuses (Rancire, 1998: 137-138). Rancieres notion of the political is characterised in terms of division, conflict, and polemic (Valentine, 2005: 46). Therefore, democracy always works against the pacification of social disruption, against the management of consensus and stability . The concern of

democracy is not with the formulation of agreement or the preservation of order but with the invention of new and hitherto unauthorised modes of disaggregation, disagreement and disorder (Hallward, 2005: 34-35). The politics of sustainability and the environment, therefore, in their populist post-political guise are the antithesis of democracy, and contribute to a further hollowing out of what for Rancire and others constitute the very horizon of democracy as a radically heterogeneous and conflicting one. Therefore, as Badiou (2005a) argues, a new radical politics must revolve around the construction of great new fictions that create real possibilities for constructing different socio-environmental futures. To the extent that the current post-political condition, which combines apocalyptic environmental visions with a hegemonic neoliberal view of social ordering, constitutes one particular fiction (one that in fact forecloses dissent, conflict, and the possibility of a different future), there is an urgent need for different stories and fictions that can be mobilised for realisation. This requires foregrounding and naming different socio-environmental futures, making the new and impossible enter the realm of politics and of democracy, and recognizing conflict, difference, and struggle over the naming and trajectories of these futures. Socio-environmental conflict, therefore, should not be subsumed under the homogenizing mantle of a populist environmentalist-sustainability discourse, but should be legitimised as constitutive of a democratic order.

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GORILLAS SERVE AS REPOSITORY FOR BROADER HUMAN ANXIETIES, THE IMAGE OF A MORE AUTHENTIC RELAITON TO THE WORLD UNCOMPLICATED BY OUR HUMANITY DEBJANI GANGULY AND MANDY THOMAS HEAD OF THE HUMANITIES RESEARCH CENTRE- CULTURAL POLITICS AND ICONOGRAPHY - 2004 HTTP://WWW.ANU.EDU.AU/HRC/PUBLICATIONS/HR/ISSUE1_2004/1INTRODUCTION-HRC11.PDF
Going Gaze, the image of the gorilla as emblematic of the indeterminate boundaries between humans and animals is explored. By analysing the reactions of visitors to the gorilla enclosure at Taronga Park Zoo in Sydney, Bishop reveals the human fascination for the indistinct and problematic nature of the boundary between animal and human. While the gorilla is viewed as both a mirror of humanness as well as a spectacle of primitiveness and animality in the contemporary desire to save the gorilla from extinction, it also appears to represent the desire of a benevolent humanity to protect both the image of human origins and the natural world. In unravelling the many complex ways that gorillas are viewed and imagined, Bishop generates an understanding of the mythologies surrounding human/animal boundaries and transgressions. The gorilla, like the Lady of the Realm in Vietnam, accrues new meanings in different historical milieux but in all these different cultural contexts, continues to be a representative par excellence of categorical ambiguity. The specific role of iconography in the negotiation of popular consumption, public memory, social identity, and larger political movements are themes which run through the collection of essays. We hope the volume opens up new insights into the relationship between the strategic use of iconographic forms and their recontextualisation for different audiences and in different historical contexts. Where there is uncertainty over meaning, societies often employ icons to seize meaning, distil it and reconstitute public discourse. The icon as a medium of values establishes a cohesive set of public discourses and collective identities. But it also runs the risk of subsequent demolition and the consequent dissolution of established norms_of_public_sociality. To that extent, the study of icons allows us to trace the rise and fall of diverse public spheres around the_globe.

THE

AFF IS NOT A DEPARTURE FROM, BUT THE CONFIRMATION OF MODERN POWER RELATIONS. THE NONHUMAN IS INTERPELLATED BY THE AFFIRMATIVE TO BE AN OSTENSIBLY ACTIVE PARTICIPANT IN A CONSENSUAL COMMUNITY, JUST AS WE ARE ALL SUPPOSEDLY EQUAL PARTICIPANTS IN THE INSTITUTIONS OF POWER NOW.

SWYNGEDOUW, DEPT OF GEOGRAPHY, SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT, MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY, 2006. [EIRK, IMPOSSIBLE SUSTAINABILITY AND THE POST-POLITICAL CONDITION, FORTHCOMING IN: DAVID GIBBS AND ROB KRUEGER (EDS.) SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, HTTP://WWW.LIV.AC.UK/GEOGRAPHY/SEMINARS/SUSTAINABILITYPAPER.DOC]
Anthony Giddens (1991; 1994; 1998) has also been a key intellectual interlocutor of this post-political consensus. He argues that globalised modernity has brought in its wake all manner of uncertainties as a result of humans proliferating interventions in nature and in social life, resulting in an explosive growth of all sorts of environmental and life-related issues. The ensuing life politics is about the challenges that face collective humanity (Giddens, 1994: 10). What is required now, in a context of greater uncertainty but also with enhanced individual autonomy to make choices, is to generate active trust achieved through a dialogic democracy. Such dialogic mode is exactly the consensual politics Jacques defines as post-democratic (Rancire, 1995; 2005b). As Chantal Mouffe (2005: 45) maintains, [a]ctive trust implies a reflexive engagement of lay people with expert systems instead of their reliance on expert authority. Bruno Latour, in his politics of nature, of course equally calls for such new

truly democratic cosmo-political constitution through which both human and non-human actants enter in a new public sphere, where matters of fact are turned into matters of concern, articulated and brought together through heterogeneous and flat networks of related and relationally constituted human/non-human assemblages (Latour, 2004; 2005). Nothing is fixed, sure, or given, everything continuously in doubt, negotiated, brought into the political field. Political space is not a contingent space where that what has no name is brought into the discussion, is give a name, and is counted, but rather things and people are hailed to become part of the consensual dialogue, of the dialogic community. The question remains of course of who does what sort of hailing. Thinking about true and false, doubt and certainty, right or wrong, friend or foe, would no longer be possible, the advent of a truly cosmopolitan order in a truly cosmopolitical (Stengers, 2003) constitution looms around the corner as the genuine possibility in the new modernity.

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THEIR SEEMINGLY RADICAL IDENTIFICATION WITH THE NON-HUMAN CONSTRUCTS A FANTASY OF A NATURAL WORLD OUT OF BALANCE. THIS PARANOIC PROJECTION IS ONLY NARCISSISM. THE AFF IS SURE THAT THEY MUST DO SOMETHING TO SAVE THE APE. IN THE MEANTIME, THEY VEIL THE RADICAL COMPLEXITY AND CHAOTIC PROCESSES OF THE EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT BEHIND A FAADE OF HARMONIOUS UNITY WAITING TO BE REALIZED. THESE FANTASY FORMATIONS HAVE THE DELETERIOUS CONSEQUENCE OF MAKING ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS SEEM A MATTER OF GRANDIOSE POLITICAL STRATEGIES, FURTHER DISTANCING US FROM REAL CHANGES IN THE SOCIO-POLITICAL FABRIC OF SOCIETY. SWYNGEDOUW, DEPT OF GEOGRAPHY, SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT, MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY, 2006. [EIRK, IMPOSSIBLE SUSTAINABILITY AND THE POST-POLITICAL CONDITION, FORTHCOMING IN: DAVID GIBBS AND ROB KRUEGER (EDS.) SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, HTTP://WWW.LIV.AC.UK/GEOGRAPHY/SEMINARS/SUSTAINABILITYPAPER.DOC]
Slavoj iek suggests in Looking Awry that the current ecological crisis is indeed a radical condition that not only constitutes a real and present danger, but, equally importantly, questions our most unquestionable presuppositions, the very horizon of our meaning, our everyday understanding of nature as a regular, rhythmic process (Zizek, (1992) 2002: 34). It raises serious questions about what were long considered self-evident certainties. He argues that this fundamental threat to our deepest convictions of what we always thought we knew for certain about nature is co-constitutive of our general unwillingness to take the ecological crisis completely serious. It is this destabilising effect that explains the fact that the typical, predominant reaction to it still consists in a variation of the famous disavowal, I know very well (that things are deadly serious, that what is at stake is our very survival), but just the same I dont really believe, and that is why I continue to act as if ecology is of no lasting consequence for my everyday life (page 35). The same unwillingness to question our very assumptions about what nature is (and even more so what natures might become) also leads to the typical obsessive reactions of those who DO take the ecological crisis seriously. iek considers both the case of the environmental activist, who in his or her relentless and

obsessive activism to achieve a transformation of society in more ecologically sustainable ways expresses a fear that to stop acting would lead to catastrophic consequences. In his words, obsessive acting becomes a tactic to stave off the ultimate catastrophe, i.e. if I stop doing what I am doing, the world will come to an end in an ecological Armageddon. Others, of course, see all manner of transcendental signs in the revenge of nature, read it as a message that signals our destructive intervention in nature and urge us to change our relationship with nature. In other words, we have to listen to natures call, as expressed by the pending environmental catastrophe, and respond to its message that pleas for a more benign, associational relation with nature, a post-human affective connectivity, as a cosmopolitical partner in dialogue. While the first attitude radically ignores the reality of possible ecological disaster, the other two, which are usually associated with actors defending sustainable solutions for our current predicament, are equally problematic in that they both ignore, or are blind to the inseparable gap between our symbolic representation (our understanding) of Nature and the actual acting of a wide range of radically different and, often contingent, natures. In other words, there is of necessity an unbridgeable gap, a void, between our dominant view of Nature (as a predictable and determined set of processes that tends towards a (dynamic) equilibrium but one that is disturbed by our human actions and can be rectified with proper sustainable practices) and the acting of natures as an (often) unpredictable, differentiated, incoherent, open-ended, complex, chaotic (although by no means unordered or un-patterned) set of processes.
The latter implies the existence not only of many natures, but, more importantly, it also assumes the possibility of all sorts of possible future natures, all manner of imaginable different human-non human assemblages and articulations, and all kinds of different possible socio-environmental becomings. The inability to take natures seriously is dramatically illustrated by the controversy over the degree to which disturbing environmental change is actually taking place and the risks or dangers associated with it. Lomborgs The Sceptical Environmentalist captures one side of this controversy in all its phantasmagorical perversity (Lomborg, 1998), while climate change doomsday pundits represent the other. Both sides of the debate

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LINK: GREAT APES

argue from an imaginary position of the presumed existence of a dynamic balance and equilibrium, the point of good nature, but one side claims that the world is veering off the correct path, while the other side (Lomborg and other sceptics) argues that we are still pretty much on natures course. With our gaze firmly fixed on capturing an imaginary idealised Nature, the controversy further solidifies our conviction of the possibility of a harmonious, balanced, and fundamentally benign ONE Nature if we would just get our interaction with it right, an argument blindly (and stubbornly) fixed on the question of where Natures rightful point of benign existence resides. This futile debate, circling around an assumedly centred, known, and singular Nature, certainly permits -- in fact invites -- imagining ecological catastrophe at some distant point (global burning (or freezing) through climate change, resource depletion, death by overpopulation). Indeed, imagining catastrophe and fantasising about the final ecological Armageddon seems considerably easier for most environmentalists than envisaging relatively small changes in the socio-political and cultural-economic organisation of local and global life here and now. Or put differently, the worlds premature ending in a climatic Armageddon seems easier to imagine (and sell to the public) than a transformation of (or end to) the neo-liberal capitalist order that keeps on practicing expanding energy use and widening and deepening its ecological footprint.
It is this sort of considerations that led Slavoj iek controversially to state that nature does not exist. Of course, he does not imply that there are no such things as quarks or other subatomic particles, black holes, tsunamis, sunshine, trees, or HIV viruses. Even less would he decry the radical effects of CO2 and other greenhouse gases on the climate or the lethal consequences of water contamination for the worlds poor. On the contrary, they are very real, many posing serious environmental problems, occasionally threatening entire populations (AIDS, for example), but he insists that the Nature we see and work with is necessarily radically imagined, scripted, symbolically charged; and is radically distant

from the natures that are there, which are complex, chaotic, often unpredictable, often radically contingent, risky, patterned in endlessly complex ways, ordered along strange attractors. In other words, there is no balanced, dynamic equilibrium based nature out there that needs or requires salvation in name of either Nature itself or of an equally imagined universal human survival. Nature simply does not exist. There is nothing foundational in nature that needs, demands, or requires sustaining. The debate and controversies over nature and what do with it, in contrast, signals rather our political inability to engage in directly political and social argument and strategies about re-arranging the social co-ordinates of everyday life and the arrangements of socio-metabolic organisation (something usually called capitalism) that we inhabit. In order words, imagining a benign and sustainable Nature avoids asking the politically sensitive, but vital, question as to what kind of socio-environmental arrangements do we wish to produce, how can this be achieved, and what sort of natures do we wish to inhabit.

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LINK: ENVIRO = POST-POLITICS

ENVIRONMENTALISM
IS THE WORST FORM OF POST-POLITICS. IT EXTERNALIZES CONTESTATION AND OBFUSCATES REAL POLITICAL STRUGGLE TO CHANGE THE IDEOLOGICAL COORDINATES OF THE STATUS QUO.

SWYNGEDOUW, DEPT OF GEOGRAPHY, SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT, MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY, 2006. [EIRK, IMPOSSIBLE SUSTAINABILITY AND THE POST-POLITICAL CONDITION, FORTHCOMING IN: DAVID GIBBS AND ROB KRUEGER (EDS.) SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, HTTP://WWW.LIV.AC.UK/GEOGRAPHY/SEMINARS/SUSTAINABILITYPAPER.DOC]
The environment and debates over the environment and nature are not only perfect expressions of such a post-political order, but in fact, the mobilisation of environmental issues is one of the key arenas through which this post-political consensus becomes constructed, when politics proper is progressively replaced by expert social administration (iek, 2005: 117). The fact that Bush does
not want to play ball on the climate change theme is indeed seen by both the political elites in Europe and by the environmentalists as a serious threat to the post-political consensus. That is why both political elites and opposition groups label him as a radical conservative. Bill Clinton, of course, embodied the post-political consensus in a much more sophisticated and articulated manner, not to speak of his unfortunate successor, Al Gore, who recently resurfaced as a newborn climate change warrior (The Independent, 22 May 2006). The post-political environmental consensus, therefore, is one that is radically reactionary, one that forestalls the articulation of

While alternative futures in the past were named and counted (for example, communism, socialism, anarchism, libertarianism, liberalism), the desired sustainable environmental future has no name and no process, only a state or condition. This is as exemplified by the following apocalyptic warning in which the celebrated quote from Marxs Communist Manifesto and its invocation of the the spectre of communism that is haunting the world (once the celebrated name of hope for liberation) is replaced by the spectre of Armageddon: A specter is haunting the entire world: but it is not that of communism. .. Climate change - no more, no less than natures payback for what we are doing to our precious planet - is day by day now revealing itself. Not only in a welter of devastating scientific data and analysis but in the repeated extreme weather conditions to which we are all, directly or indirectly, regular observers, and, increasingly, victims (Levene, 2005).

divergent, conflicting, and alternative trajectories of future socio-environmental possibilities and of human-human and human-nature articulations and assemblages. It holds on to a harmonious view of nature that can be recaptured while re-producing if not solidifying a liberal-capitalist order for which there seems to be no alternative. Much of the sustainability argument has evacuated the politics of the possible, the radical contestation of alternative future socio-environmental possibilities and socio-natural arrangements, and silences the radical antagonisms and conflicts that are constitutive of our socio-natural orders by externalising conflict. In climate change, for example, the conflict is posed as one of society versus CO2. In fact, the sustainable future desired by sustainablity pundits has no name.

Climate Change is of course not a politics, let only a political programme or socio-environmental project; it is pure negation, the negativity of the political; one we can all concur with, around which a consensus can be built, but which eludes conflict, evacuates the very political moment. By doing so, it does not translate Marxs dictum for the contemporary period, but turns it into its radical travesty.

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*LINK: NATURE*
THE BALANCED
CIRCUIT OF NATURE IS A COMFORTING MYTHOLOGY THAT HAS EMERGED IN ORDER TO JUSTIFY A NAIVEE POLITICS THAT AT THE SAME TIME ENGAGES IN FRENETIC ACTIVITY AND DISAVOWS THE DANGER IT CLAIMS TO BE RESPONDING TO. AT THE

IEK, SENIOR RESE ARCHER LOOKING AWRY, 34-37]

INSTITUTE

OF

SOCIAL STUDIES

AT

LJUBLJANA, 1991 [SLAVOJ,

Is not the ultimate form of the "answer of the real" confronting all of us today in the ecological crisis? Is not the disturbed, derailed course of nature an "answer of the real" to human praxis, to the human encroachment upon nature, "mediated" and organized by the symbolic order? The radical character of the ecological crisis is not to be underestimated. The crisis is radical not only because of its effective danger, i.e. it is not just that what is at stake is the very survival of humankind. What is at stake is our most unquestionable presuppositions, the very horizon of our meaning, our everyday understanding of "nature" as a regular, rhythmic process. To use the terms of the late Wittgenstein, the ecological crisis bites into "objective certainty"-into the domain of self-evident certitudes about which, within our established "form of life," it is simply meaningless to have doubts. Hence our unwillingness to take the ecological crisis completely seriously; hence the fact that the typical, predominant reaction to it still consists in a variation on the famous disavowal, "I know very well (that things are deadly serious, that what is at stake is our very survival), but just the same ... (I don't really believe it, I'm not really prepared to integrate it into my symbolic universe, and that is why I continue to act as if ecology is of no lasting consequence for my everyday life)." Hence also the fact that the typical reaction of those who do take the ecological crisis seriously ison the level of the libidinal economyobsessional. Wherein lies the kernel of the obsessional's economy? The obsessional participates in frenzied activity, he works feverishly all the timewhy? To avoid some uncommon catastrophe that would take place if his activity were to stop; his frenetic activity is based on the ultimatum, "If Idon't do this (the compulsive ritual), some unspeakably horrible X will take place." In Lacanian terms, this X can be specified as the barred Other, i.e., the lack in the Other, the inconsistency of the symbolic order; in this case, it refers to the disturbance of the established rhythm of nature. We must be active all the time so that it does not come to light that "the Other does not exist" (Lacan). The third reaction to the ecological crisis is to take it as an "answer of the real," as a sign bearing a certain message. AIDS operates this way in the eyes of the "moral majority," who read it as a divine punishment for our sinful life. From this perspective, the ecological crisis appears as a "punishment" for our ruthless exploitation of nature, for the fact that we have treated nature as a stack of disposable objects and materials, not as a partner in dialogue or the foundation of our being. The lesson drawn by those who react in this way is that we must cease our derailed, perverted way of life and begin to live as part of nature, accommodating ourselves to its we must learn to accept the real of the ecological crisis in its senseless actuality, without charging it with some message or meaning. In this sense, we could read the three above-described reactions to the ecological crisis--"I know very well, but just the same ... "; obsessive activity; grasping it as a sign bearing some hidden meaning as three forms of avoiding an encounter with the real: a fetishistic split, an acknowledgment of the fact of the crisis that neutralizes its symbolic efficacy; the neurotic transformation of the crisis into a traumatic kernel; a psychotic projection of meaning into the real itself. The fact that the first reaction presents a fetishistic disavowal of the real of the crisis is self-evident. What is not so obvious is that the other two reactions also hinder an adequate response to the crisis. For, if we grasp the ecological crisis as a traumatic kernel to be kept at a distance by obsessive activity, or as the bearer of a message, a call to find new roots in nature, we blind ourselves in both cases to the irreducible gap separating the real from the modes of its symbolization. The only proper attitude is that which fully assumes this gap as something that defines our very condition humaine, without endeavoring to suspend it through fetishistic disavowal, to keep it concealed through obsessive activity, or to reduce the gap between the real and the symbolic by projecting a (symbolic) message into the real. The fact that [hu]man is a speaking being means precisely that [it]he is, so to speak, constitutively "derailed," marked by an irreducible fissure that the symbolic edifice attempts in vain to repair. From time to time, this fissure erupts in some spectacular form, reminding us of the frailty of the symbolic edifice-the latest went by the name of Chernobyl. The radiation from Chernobyl represented the intrusion of a radical contingency. It was as if the "normal" enchainment of cause and effect were for a moment suspendednobody knew what its exact consequences would be. The experts themselves admitted that any determination of the "threshold of danger" was arbitrary; public opinion oscillated between panicked anticipation of future catastrophes and acceptance that there was no cause for alarm. It is precisely this indifference to its mode of symbolization that locates the radiation in the dimension of the real. No matter what we say about it, it continues to expand, to reduce us to the role of impotent witnesses.
rhythms, taking root in it. What can a Lacanian approach tell us about the ecological crisis? Simply that

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LINK: NATURE
THE UNSTABLE AND CONSTANTLY CHANGING NATURE OF THE NATURAL WORLD PRODUCES ANXIETY FOR THE PERSPECTIVE THAT SEEKS AN ETERNAL HARMONY AND UNCHANGABLE UTOPIA THE RESPONSE IS TO ATTEMPTS TO DOMINATE AND MASTER THAT NATUREAL WORLD BY DEFINING A SINGLE, IMMUTABLE VERSION OF IT. YANNIS STAVRAKAKIS, DEPARTMENT OF GOVT AT UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, 2000 [ON THE EMERGENCE OF GREEN IDEOLOGY: THE DISLOCATION FACTOR IN GREEN POLITICS, DISCOURSE THEORY AND POLITICAL ANALYSIS, EDS: HOWARTH, NORBAL AND STAVRAKAIS]
The field of our relationship to nature is one of the fields in which the real is continuously intersecting with our symbolic and imaginary reality, with our constructions of objectivity. It is in that sense that Zizek presents ecological crisis as initiating a period of continuous, everyday encounter with the rea1. Here, the real, as introduced by Lacan, is that which always escapes our attempts to incorporate it in our constructions of reality, constructions that are articulated at the level of the image (imaginary level) or the signifier (symbolic level). The encounter with this impossible is exactly what dislocates our imaginary/symbolic constructions (ideologies, paradigms, and so on). Ecological crisis is characterised by such a dislocatory dimension. In fact, the unpredictability and severity of natural forces have forced people from time immemorial to attempt to understand and master them through processes of imaginary representation and symbolic integration. This usually entails a symbolisation of the real of nature, the part of the natural world exceeding our discursive grasp of nature. The product of this symbolisation has been frequently described as a 'story' or a 'paradigm' about how the world works. We can trace such a story, or many competing stories, in any civilisation or cultural ensemble. In modern secular techno-scientific societies it is usually science that provides the symbolic framework for the symbolisation of nature. Predicting the unpredictable, mastering the impossible, reducing the unexpected to a system of control, in other words symbolising, integrating the real of nature, is attempted through the discourse of science and its popularisation in the media. Now, as we have pointed out, these discursive mediations instituting human reality are not eternal or transcendental but change over time. It seems that today we are witnessing such a gradual but important change. What is asserted by many analysts of the environmental crisis is that 'a new story about the relationship between humans and nature is emerging in western societies that contrasts sharply with the story that currently dominates public discourse'. Indeed if we call this story a paradigm, generalising the Kuhnian application of the term, if we understand it as a discursively constructed belief structure that organises the way people perceive and interpret their relation to nature, then we could assert that we are witnessing a gradual paradigm shift. It has been suggested that this is a shift from a Dominant Social Paradigm (DSP) to a New Environmental Paradigm (NEP). Most importantly, this shift is produced by the dislocation of the old paradigm and the need for a new discursive structure to fill the lack produced by this dislocation. At this point, it is important to keep in mind that the lack of meaning produced by a dislocation can activate a plurality of reactions. As Zizek has put it, one can continue to stick to the old paradigm, pretending that the dislocation does not affect it, or engage in frenetic environmental activism, identifying with new paradigms, new stories, new ideologies. The direction of the response depends on the course of action which seems to be more capable of neutralising the terrorising presence of this impossible real, more capable of covering over the lack of meaning in question and of providing the greater feeling of 'security'. This means that subjective responses to such situations cannot be predicted in advance nor do they follow any rational rules. In cases where the dislocation is severe and the symbolic means to articulate a new response are not available it is even possible for social actors to ignore its implications for their life. In fact, as Beck has put it: as the hazards increase in extent, and the situation is subjectively perceived as hopeless, there is a growing tendency not merely to accept the hazard, but to deny it by every means at one's disposal. One might call this phenomenon, paradoxical only at first glance, the 'death-reflex of normality'. There is a virtually instinctive avoidance, in the face of the greatest possible danger, of living in intolerable contradiction; the shattered constructs of normality are upheld, or even elevated, as if they remained intact.

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LINK: CHOCOLATE LAXATIVE

THE
AFFIRMATIVES TO SOLVE THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS WITHIN THE TERMS OF NEO-LIBERAL CAPITALISM IS A TREATMENT OF THE SYMPTOM WITH THE CONDITION THAT CAUSES IT. MODERN SOCIOPOLITICAL ARRANGEMENTS ARE THEMSELVES THE CAUSE OF THE ECODISASTER, ONLY AN ALTERNATIVE WHICH RADICALLY ALTERS THESE CAN AVERT CATASTROPHE.

SWYNGEDOUW, DEPT OF GEOGRAPHY, SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT, MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY, 2006. [EIRK, IMPOSSIBLE SUSTAINABILITY AND THE POST-POLITICAL CONDITION, FORTHCOMING IN: DAVID GIBBS AND ROB KRUEGER (EDS.) SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, HTTP://WWW.LIV.AC.UK/GEOGRAPHY/SEMINARS/SUSTAINABILITYPAPER.DOC]
This post-political frame is of course politically correlative to the theoretical argument, advanced most coherently by sociologists like Ulrich Beck or Anthony Giddens. They argue that adversarial politics organised around collective identities that were shaped by the internal relations of class-based capitalism are replaced by an increasingly individualised, fragmented, reflexive series of social conditions. For Beck, for example, simple modernization ultimately situates the motor of social change in categories of instrumental rationality (reflection), reflexive modernization conceptualizes the motive power of social change in categories of the side-effect
(reflexivity). Things at first unseen and unreflected, but externalized, add up to structural rupture that separates industrial from new modernities in the present and the future (Beck 1997: 38). From this perspective, the distinction between danger (characteristic of pre-modern and modern societies) and risk (the central aspect of late modern risk society) refers to technological

transition from danger to risk can be related to the process of the weakening of the state. In risk society what is missing is an authority that can symbolise what goes wrong. Risk is, in other words, the danger that cannot be symbolised (Diken and Laustsen (2004: 11; see also iek 1999b: 322-347); that what has no name. Politicisation, then, is to make things enter the parliament of politics (see Latour, 2004), but the post-democratic condition does so in a consensual conversation in tune with the post-political evacuation of real antagonism. The environmental apocalypse in the making puts the state on the spot (cfr. BSE, avian flue, climate change), yet exposes the impotence of the state to solve or divert the risk, and undermines the citizens sense of security guaranteed by the state.
change. However, the

It is these side-effects identified by Ulrich Beck (such as, for example, the accumulation of CO2) that are becoming the key arenas around which political configuration and action crystallise, and of course, (global) environmental problems are the classic example of such effects, unwittingly produced by modernization itself, but now requiring second reflexive modernization to deal with. The old left/right collective politics that were allegedly generated from within the social relations that constituted modernity are no longer, if they ever were, valid or performative. This, of course, also means that the traditional theatres of politics (state, parliament, parties, etc) are not any longer the exclusive terrain of the political: the political constellation of industrial society is becoming unpolitical, while what was unpolitical in industrialism is becoming politicals (Beck, 1994: 18). It is exactly the side-effects (the risks) of modernising globalisation that need management, that require politicization. A new form of politics (what Rancire, iek, and Mouffe exactly define as post-politics) thus arises, what Beck calls sub-politics:
Sub-politics is distinguished from politics in that (a) agents outside the political or corporatist system are allowed also to appear on the stage of social design (this group includes professional and occupational groups, the technical intelligentsia in companies, research institutions and management, skilled workers, citizens initiatives, the public sphere and so on), and (b) not only social and collective agents but individuals as well compete with the latter and each other for the emerging power to shape politics (Beck, 1994: 22). Chantal Mouffe (2005: 40-41) summarizes Becks prophetic vision of a new democracy as follows:

In a risk society, which has become aware of the possibility of an ecological crisis, a series of issues which were previously considered of a private character, such as those concerning the lifestyle and diet, have left the realm of the intimate and the private and have become politicized. The relation of the individual to nature is typical of this transformation since it is now inescapably interconnected with a multiplicity of global forces from which it is impossible to escape. Moreover, technological progress and scientific development in the field of medicine and genetic engineering are now forcing people to make decisions in the field of body politics hitherto unimaginable. . What is needed is the creation of forums where a consensus could be built between the experts, the politicians, the industrialists and citizens on ways of establishing possible forms of co-operation among them. This would require the transformation of expert systems into democratic public spheres. This post-political constitution, which we have elsewhere defined as new forms of autocratic governance-beyond-the-state (Swyngedouw 2005), reconfigures the act of governing to a stakeholder based arrangement of governance in which the traditional state forms (national, regional, or local government) partakes together with experts, NGOs, and other responsible partners (see Crouch, 2004). Not only is the political arena evacuated from radical dissent, critique, and fundamental conflict, but the parameters of democratic governing itself are being shifted, announcing new forms of governmentality, in which traditional disciplinary society is transfigured into a society of control through disembedded networks (like the Kyoto Protocol; the Dublin Statement, the Rio Summit, etc.). These new global forms of
governance are expressive of the post-political configuration (Mouffe, 2005: 103): Governance entails an explicit reference to mechanisms or organized and coordinated activities appropriate to the solution of some specific problems. Unlike government, governance refers to policies rather than politics because it is not a binding decision-making structure. Its recipients are not the people as collective political subject, but the population that can be affected by global issues such as the environment, migration, or the use of natural resources (Urbinati, 2003: 80).

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LINK: CHOCOLATE LAXATIVE

AND, POST-POLITICS RESULTS IN EXCEPTIONALISM AND VIOLENT EXCLUSION. SWYNGEDOUW, DEPT OF GEOGRAPHY, SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT, MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY, 2006. [EIRK, IMPOSSIBLE SUSTAINABILITY AND THE POST-POLITICAL CONDITION, FORTHCOMING IN: DAVID GIBBS AND ROB KRUEGER (EDS.) SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, HTTP://WWW.LIV.AC.UK/GEOGRAPHY/SEMINARS/SUSTAINABILITYPAPER.DOC]
Difficulties and problems, such as environmental concerns that are generally staged and accepted as problematic need to be dealt with through compromise, managerial and technical arrangement, and the production of consensus. Consensus means that whatever your personal commitments, interests and values may be, you perceive the same things, you give them the same name. But there is no contest on what appears, on what is given in a situation and as a situation (Rancire, 2003; 4). The key feature of consensus is the annulment of dissensus .. the end of politics (Rancire, 2001; 32). The most utopian alternative to capitalism left to our disposal is to develop postpolitical alternatives to creating a more just and sustainable society, since it would not make any economic sense not to do so. Of course, this postpolitical world eludes choice and freedom (other than those tolerated by the consensus). And in the absence of real politicization of particulars, the only position of real dissent is that of either the traditionalist (those stuck in the past who refuse to accept the inevitability of the new global neo-liberal order) or the fundamentalist. The only way to deal with them is by sheer violence, by suspending their humanitarian

and democratic rights. The post-political relies on either including all in a consensual pluralist order and on excluding radically those who posit themselves outside the consensus. For them, as Agamben (20005) argues, the law is suspended; they are literally put outside the law and treated as extremists and terrorists.

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LINK: GREEN IDEOLOGY = COMPLETION FANTASY

ORIENTATION TOWARD THE ENVIRONMENT IS A UTOPIAN LONGING FOR COMPLETION, OF RADICAL RECONCILIATION OF WITH THE BROADER WORLD, BUT THE FLIP-SIDE OF THIS RECONCILIATION IS THE DRIVE TO MASTER ALL ELEMENTS THAT INEVITABLE ESCAPE FROM MASTERY

THEIR

YANNIS STAVRAKAKIS, DEPARTMENT OF GOVT AT UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, 2000 [ON THE EMERGENCE OF GREEN IDEOLOGY: THE DISLOCATION FACTOR IN GREEN POLITICS, DISCOURSE THEORY AND POLITICAL ANALYSIS, EDS: HOWARTH, NORBAL AND STAVRAKAIS]
What I mean by 'theory of dislocation' is a set of theoretical assumptions and analytical tools articulated around the concept of dislocation as it is introduced by Ernesto Laclau. A theory of dislocation, which is here understood as an integral part of 'discourse theory', differs from other more traditional forms of analysis in the sense that it elevates to the epicentre of our discourse what is foreclosed in more traditional approaches. It focuses on the element of negativity inherent in human experience, on the element of rupture and crisis threatening and subverting our social ideological forms, the field of social objectivity. Starting from a negative ontological framework, according to which all human constructions constitute attempts to institute an impossible object (society) and master an eccessive element (the real in Lacanian terms) which always escapes our means of representation, theory of dislocation belongs to a type of theorisation and political analysis which is based on the assumption that understanding social reality is not equivalent to understanding what society

is (describing the positive forms our social constructions take) but what prevents it from being. What prevents it from being what it promises to be is the force of dislocation; which is also this is the crucial part for the analysis developed here what generates new ideological attempts to reach this impossible goal.
Before moving to the main body of my argumentation a set of conceptual and theoretical points which constitute its conditions of possibility have to be spelledout. As I have already pointed out, the main focus of this chapter is the emergence of Green ideology. Since, however, this emergence, as well as the development of Green ideological forms, coincides with the emergence of the general field of Green politics of which it forms an integral part (Green ideology can only be the ideology of a Green movement or a Green party), the two terms will be used sometimes interchangeably or side by side. However, in order to avoid confusion the following clarifications are pertinent at this point:

1 In this chapter we discursive practices)

understand 'ideology' in a broad sense as encompassing all meaningful constructions (belief structures, constructions of reality, through which social reality is produced and our action within itespecially our political actionacquires cause and direction. Ideological constructions of reality attempt to provide a final symbolisation of the world around us and thus articulate themselves 'on the basis of closure, of the fixation of meaning', by repressing any recognition of 'the precarious character of any positivity, [and] of the impossibility of any ultimate suture'. The ideological is thus constitutive of our constructions of reality since there is no reality without some sense of closure. It does not exhaust though the whole of human experience. Beyond ideological articulation there is dislocation, beyond positivity there is negativity, beyond reality there is the real, in the Lacanian sense of the word (that which cannot be symbolised, the impossible). In that sense, a rigorous theoretical approach to the analysis of ideology has to take into account the fact that ideological construction emerges in a dialectic with something that exceeds its symbolic and imaginary boundaries. The fantasy the illusion supporting all ideologies is that they can master this excessive element.
2 The way ideologies attempt to master this escaping real to other, now dislocated discourses) around a new nodal point

and suture dislocation is by articulating a chain of signifiers (previously belonging (accepted as) incarnating an ultimate fullness of meaning and thus as suitable to hegemonise a certain discursive field and appeal (as an object of identification) to the respective audiences to which it is addressed (electorate, party membership, public opinion, and so on).
3 We can conclude, on the basis of this schema and of the political experience from the 1960s onwards, that there is a separate ideological form which can be called 'Green ideology' the same way we speak about liberal political ideology, and so on. This ideology has emerged from the 1960s and 1970s onwards as a result of the articulation of a series of socio-political elements (decentralisation, direct democracy, post-patriarchal principles, and so on) around a certain conception of nature. Its novel character is due to the location of this Green signifier which, perhaps for the first time, becomes the nodal point of a whole ideological frame (although the various elements hegemonised by its central position have preexisted their new articulation).

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UTNIF 2007

IMPACT: ECO-CRAZIES
THEIR IDEOLOGY OF ENVIRONMENTAL WHOLENESS PRESENTS A DRIVE TO MASTERY THAT ALLOWS A VIOLENT ORIENTATION TO ALL THOSE WHO REFUSE TO PARTAKE OF THEIR SPECIAL KNOWLEDGE YANNIS STAVRAKAKIS, DEPARTMENT OF GOVT AT UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, 2000 [ON THE EMERGENCE OF GREEN IDEOLOGY: THE DISLOCATION FACTOR IN GREEN POLITICS, DISCOURSE THEORY AND POLITICAL ANALYSIS, EDS: HOWARTH, NORBAL AND STAVRAKAIS]
Sticking to the old paradigm, to the old symbolisation, is not, however, the only response to such a catastrophe or a crisis. In fact, as far as it concerns the general environmental crisis, it could be suggested that one of the dominant responses to this dislocation has been the identification of the public with what we have called a 'New Environmental Paradigm'. This paradigm is built on the dislocation of the previously dominant view of out right to dominate nature, this domination being fantasised as an operation with no hazards and no limits. What is shown by the current environmental crisis, the environmental dislocation, is in fact that there are some limits, limits to growth and economic expansion, limits imposed by the real of nature to which the public is becoming sensitive. This productive/ontological character of dislocation is not something surprising. Milbrath, at the end of his analysis, an analysis very near to our own, asks the following question: 'nature can use its fury to get us to listen, even when we do not wish to. Must we always learn the hard way, by death and destruction?' The answer must be affirmative, although this affirmation is something we easily forget. Dislocation, with all its disruptive power, can be found at the root of all paradigm, discursive, or ideological shifts. Even the romantic idealisation of nature in the late 1800s, which generated the first wave of conservationist environmentalism, can only be understood as a reaction to the social dislocations of the period. The idealised conception of nature provided a source of stability and harmony that attempted to cover the lack produced by these dislocations. It was, again, dislocatory events such as Chernobyl that reinforced the current wave of environmentalism, initially produced by environmental problems such as acid rain, toxic waste, and so on. As Dalton has put it, 'the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 may be the event which finally changed the course of contemporary European politics on environmental issues'. Wiesenthal has also pointed out that events with great dislocatory power, such as Chernobyl, bring forward a that's enough' logic which can facilitate a paradigm shift, an identification with a new discursive ensemble. It is these striking incidents that prompt new innovative interpretations, and suggest new routes of action. People involved in Green politics seem to be aware of the tremendous power of such dislocations in facilitating a change in the direction of 'Greening' public opinion. The introduction of radical environmentalism in Denmark presents a paradigmatic case. In a society which largely neglected environmental issues, Green activists chose to simulate environmental dislocation, anticipating that this violent event would result in an identification with radical environmentalism. They enacted the following happening in a meeting of a respectable natural history society at the University of Copenhagen (NOA) in March 1969. This is how one of the participants describes the events: We locked them all in. We were about twenty people. After we had locked the doors, we cut off the ventilation and started to poison them. It was pretty violent. We got up on the stage and talked about air pollution. We burnt garbage and tobacco in large quantities. We poured waste water from a nearby factory in an aquarium with goldfish who slowly died ... And we had taken along a wild duck which we covered with oil. 'Come and save it', we screamed. 'You talk about pollution. Why don't you do anything about it?' Finally we cut off its head to end its suffering, and we walked down along the first row of chairs so that all who were sitting there got blood on their clothes. After an hour we opened the doors and said that we wanted to start an environmental movement, and that the founding meeting was being held in the next room.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

IMPACT: FEAR
THE

UNSTABLE GREEN IDENTIFICATIONS

EMERGENCE OF GREEN IDEOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION DEPENDS, NOT ONLY ON AN ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS, BUT ALSO ON THE DISLOCATION OF THE OLD WAY OF LOOKING AT THE WORLD AND NATURE. THIS DISLOCATION ARISES OUT OF AN IDEOLOGICAL LACK, IN OTHER WORDS, THE REALIZATION THAT THERE ARE THREATENING ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES THAT MAINSTREAM POLITICAL AGENDAS ARE NOT ABLE TO INCLUDE INTO A COMPREHENSIVE, STABLE POLITICAL SOLUTIONS/ ADVOCACY. THE FEAR PRODUCED BY THIS DISLOCATION SPURS THE CREATION OF NEW, ORIGINAL SOLUTIONS WITH WHICH PEOPLE CAN IDENTIFY WITH AND FIGHT FOR.

YANNIS STAVRAKAKIS, DEPARTMENT OF GOVT AT UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, 2000 [ON THE EMERGENCE OF GREEN IDEOLOGY: THE DISLOCATION FACTOR IN GREEN POLITICS, DISCOURSE THEORY AND POLITICAL ANALYSIS, EDS: HOWARTH, NORBAL AND STAVRAKAIS]
wherever Green identifications occurred, the experience of environmental dislocation was coupled with another fear resulting from social and political dislocations. Dickens's analysis of the Mass Archive leads to such a conclusion:
In fact, it has been argued that for some people,

analogies are being made between on the one hand unpredictable natural disasters and on the other hand the feeling of insecurity deriving from increasingly globalized economic and social conditions. This suggests that some people are, albeit unconsciously, projecting their personal fears in the social world onto the natural . It would be difficult to argue, therefore, that the deterioration of the physical environment is, on its own, the cause of the recent resurgence in environmentalism. Rather, such politics are at least as much a commentary on people's social circumstances, analogies being made between these circumstances and their sense of alienation from other aspects of society. The implication of this is that an increasing number of people look for a solution to problems such as unemployment and economic deterioration in Green ideology. Now, although this is undoubtedly true, this moment in fact follows the emergence of Green ideology, and concerns its hegemonic appeal. What is not mentioned
This view is supported by various personal histories depicted in interviews contained in the archive.

here is another important dislocation. If today people are increasingly looking to Green ideology in order to solve these problems this means that previously hegemonic identifications (from the labour movement up to the limits of the radical tradition, not to mention the right wing of the political spectrum) have been dislocated. Our argument then runs as follows. For

Green ideology to emerge, what was needed, besides environmental dislocation, was the dislocation of a certain political tradition or ideological field (it was the radical tradition which happened to perform this role), a dislocation which was partially resolved by making nature or the NEP the core of a new ideological rearticulation. This process produces an appealing new object of identification as a potential solution to the social problems around which hegemonic struggle currently takes place.

What I am arguing, in other words, is that a dual dislocation is the necessary precondition for the emergence of Green ideology. This is not a metaphysical point. This emergence was not a necessity but a contingent development which, however, had very precise conditions of possibility. Dislocation is the concept we can use in order to facilitate an analysis of the conditions of possibility related to this area of contingency. This is also stressed by Adrian Atkinson if one connects his conception of crisis with that of dislocation. Atkinson speaks of two crises: 'amongst those who do perceive our age as one of crisis there are two almost completely different sets of notions as to what is involved'. The first of these crises is what we have been calling the environmental dislocation, a growing concern and fear that the way in which our society is making use of the biosphere is not sustainable even in the medium term. The second one is a political dislocation. Atkinson especially stresses, in this respect, the collapse of social democracy, socialism and communism. One should not underestimate the effect of these dislocations on the identity of people involved in left-wing politics:

For many these changes have precipitated personal crises that turned to new opportunities or resignation, but the general reaction has not been one of the kind of tension associated with crisis but rather of a quiet falling away of value structures into a life process that seems effortlessly to carry all along with it. In so far as this has generated a sense of crisis, this has been one 'of intellectual concern with the
wisdom of the changes in train and an anxiety with regard to the ultimate social, political and cultural settlement that might evolve out of the current rapid metamorphosis.

the fear produced by these dislocations initiated a quest for new identifications and new ideologies that would fill this ideological lack.
Atkinson has very successfully shown how

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

IMPACT: NATURE FANTASY

SCAPEGOATING INTRUDERS

THE POSITION OF THE TOURIST HAS ITS OTHER. THE VAGABOND IS THE CHARACTER CAST OUT OF THE WILD IN THE AFFS FANTASY. THEIR IMAGE OF A PURE AND ENDANGERED NATURAL SPACE ENCOUNTERS RESISTANCE FROM THOSE WHO ACTUALLY INHABIT AND THEREFORE STAIN THIS SPACE. THESE INTRUDERS
ARE TO BE CAST OUT AS REFUGEES IN ORDER FOR OUR HARMONIOUS IMAGE OF THE BALANCED AND EXOTIC NATURAL WORLD TO SURVIVE.

CONLAN, EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGIST AND ARCHITECTURAL CONSERVATOR AT THE VISUAL MEDIA CENTER, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, 2005. (JAMES, NATURE, HERITAGE, AND SPATIAL TECHNOLOGIES OF FEAR: UNCANNY EXPERIENCES IN KRUGER NATIONAL PARK.
CTHEORY. HTTP://CTHEORY.NET/ARTICLES.ASPX?ID=497)

The emerging global milieu is more and more designed for optimal consumption, peopled by those with direct access to a consumer lifestyle and those left out. Zygmunt Bauman has articulated the situation through two opposing personae. To paraphrase, if the world is increasingly populated by "tourists," the number of "vagabonds," those excluded from fantastic consumer experiences, is growing at an even faster rate. The tourist not only seeks out the most desirable goods -- he is a collector of sensations, accumulating brief, intense experiences only to move on to the next attraction. The vagabond is hard-pressed to pursue any desires at all. Even though mass media regularly presents the touristic pursuit of sensations around the globe, he remains trapped in stifling urban ghettos or weighed down by stark rural poverty. Whether through cheap tour packages or virtual environments, space is becoming less and less an obstacle to the tourist. The vagabond, on the other hand, is tightly bound to his position. He is trapped behind boundaries of class divisions, racial segregation and xenophobic restrictions on the movement of people. The vagabond only "travels" through catastrophic shifts in the social order or by entering a growing underworld of human
trafficking.

In order for the tourist to enjoy the spectacle of the wild, he must assume our protected natural resources have been taken out of the high-stakes game of global exchange and speculation, forevermore out of human context as a simulation of their state in some primordial past. Never mind the fact that human cultures have played an integral role in places like the Kruger for centuries -- there are literally thousands of cultural sites within the boundaries of the Park that are now being reevaluated, while human engineering has altered the face of the nature reserve. It is more the fact that the big business of tourism and a kind of psychological patina of consumerist culture have re-focused our gaze upon the wild. The touristic experience of nature then is more and more a consumer experience. Thoreau's solitude, a mysterious setting for contemplation, is being fast replaced by the slow motion chase scene -- predator versus prey. We hope to re-experience this cinematography through the window of the rental car as we speed from one lodge to another. What is more, you do not have to find yourself at an exclusive resort or faraway locale to come across the tourist. You have likely encountered one locally, for the global affluent are more and more tourists in their own homes and neighborhoods. The tourist's goal is access to experiences, and in turn the possibility of a lifestyle as faithful as possible to the glossy image in the brochure or the thrilling scene on the screen. He is insatiable. In the case of the nature experience, the growing urgency of the global conservancy project only increases the value of cinematic nature, reinforcing its position as a space in need of our protection within the complex web of risk calculation and management that defines contemporary society.
We must flesh out Bauman's oppositional persona to deconstruct the touristic fantasy, and this cannot be performed without positioning the vagabond within the wilderness. In the Kruger, unlike the tourist in the car, the vagabond is alone on foot in the bush, something strictly forbidden by the rules. He is not a native San, like the more iconic Maasai guide of our documentaries and ethnographic museums. The vagabond is not reminiscent of the flute player from Rousseau's "The Dream," nor does he have the official status of park ranger or even the comforting social affluence of another visitor. He is a black African, and as we are working through personae, we may write him as a character similar to Coetzee's Michael K. The vagabond can only be a transgressor in this narrative, at best a refugee, out of place within the tourist's fantastic vista. When encountered out of context in this way, the tourist must frankly weigh this interloper's potential threat to wildlife and visitor alike. In fact, this position is ironically reinforced by Bauman's choice of the term vagabond, implying someone in a permanent position of being out of place.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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AT: PERM (ENVIRONMENT)

THE PERMUTATION SUFFOCATES THE ALTERNATIVE WITHIN THE AFFIRMATIVES MANAGERIAL APPROACH TO GOVERNANCE. THIS POST-POLITICS ABSOLUTELY FORECLOSES UNIVERSALIZATION AND CONFINES POLITICS TO THE TERMS OF THE TECHNOCRATIC, NEO-LIBERAL STATUS QUO. SWYNGEDOUW, DEPT OF GEOGRAPHY, SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT, MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY, 2006. [EIRK, IMPOSSIBLE SUSTAINABILITY AND THE POST-POLITICAL CONDITION, FORTHCOMING IN: DAVID GIBBS AND ROB KRUEGER (EDS.) SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, HTTP://WWW.LIV.AC.UK/GEOGRAPHY/SEMINARS/SUSTAINABILITYPAPER.DOC]
Slavoj iek and Chantal Mouffe, among others, define the post-political as a political formation that actually forecloses the political, that prevents the politicization of particulars (iek 1999a: 35; 2006; Mouffe, 2005). A situation or an event becomes political when a particular demand (cutting greenhouse gases, stopping the exploitation of a particular resource and so on) starts to function as a metaphoric condensation of the global opposition against Them, those in power, so that the protest is no longer just about that demand, but about the universal dimension that resonates in that particular demand. . What post-politics tends to prevent is precisely this metaphoric

universalization of particular demands: post-politics mobilizes the vast apparatus of experts, social workers, and so on, to reduce the overall demand (complaint) of a particular group to just this demand, with its particular content no wonder that this suffocating closure gives birth to irrational outbursts of violence as the only way to give expression to the dimension beyond particularity (iek 1999b: 204). In Europe and the US, in particular, such post-political arrangements are largely in place. Post-politics reject ideological divisions and the explicit universalisation of particular political demands. Instead, the post-political condition is one in which a consensus has been built around the inevitability of neo-liberal capitalism as an economic system, parliamentary democracy as the political ideal, humanitarianism and inclusive cosmopolitanism as a moral foundation. As iek (1999b: 198) puts it: In post-politics, the conflict of global ideological visions embodied in different parties which compete for power is replaced by the collaboration of enlightened technocrats (economists, public opinion specialists, ) and liberal multiculturalists; via the process of negotiation of interests, a compromise is reached in the guise of a more or less universal consensus. Post-politics thus emphasizes the need to leave old ideological visions behind and confront new issues, armed with the necessary expert knowledge and free deliberation that takes peoples concrete needs and demands into account Post-politics is thus about the administration of social or ecological matters, and they remain of course fully within the realm of the possible, of existing socio-ecological relations. The ultimate sign of post-politics in all Western countries, iek (2002: 303) argues, is the growth of a managerial approach to government: government is reconceived as a managerial function, deprived of its proper political dimension. Post-politics refuses politicisation in the classical Greek sense, that is, as the metaphorical universalization of particular demands, which aims at more than negotiation of interests: [T]he political act (intervention) proper is not simply something that works well within the framework of existing relations, but something that changes the very framework that determines how things work . [A]uthentic politics is the art of the impossible it changes the very parameters of what is considered possible in the existing constellation (emphasis in original)
(iek, 1999b: 199)

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

AT: PERM (ENVIRO)

THEIR MODE OF MANAGERIALISM RESULTS IN THE WORST FORM OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS. IT FOCUSES ON THE EFFECT RATHER THAN THE CAUSE AND EXTERNALIZES REAL POLITICAL CONTESTATION OVER THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONDITIONS WHICH AFFECT THE GLOBE. SWYNGEDOUW, DEPT OF GEOGRAPHY, SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT, MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY, 2006. [EIRK, IMPOSSIBLE SUSTAINABILITY AND THE POST-POLITICAL CONDITION, FORTHCOMING IN: DAVID GIBBS AND ROB KRUEGER (EDS.) SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, HTTP://WWW.LIV.AC.UK/GEOGRAPHY/SEMINARS/SUSTAINABILITYPAPER.DOC]
In the domain of the environment, climate change, biodiversity preservation, sustainable socio-technical environmental entanglements and the like exemplify the emergence of this new post-political configuration: they are an unexpected and unplanned by-product of modernization, they affect the way we do things, and, in turn, a new politics emerges to deal with them. This liberal cosmpolitical inclusive politics suggested by Beck and his fellow-travellers as a radical answer to unbridled and unchecked neo-liberal capitalist globalisation, of course, is predicated upon three assumptions: a) The social and ecological problems caused by modernity/capitalism are external side-effects; they are not an inherent and integral part of the de-territorialised and re-territorialised relations of global neo-liberal capitalism. That is why we speak of the excluded or the poor, and not about social power relations that produce wealth and poverty, or empowerment and disempowerment. A strictly populist politics emerges here; one that elevates the interest of the people, nature, or the environment to the level of the universal rather than aspiring to universalise the claims of particular natures, environments, or social groups or classes. b) These side-effects are posited as global, universal, and threatening: they are a total threat, of apocalyptic nightmarish proportions. c) The enemy or the target of concern is thereby of course continuously externalised. The enemy is always vague, ambiguous, and ultimately vacant, empty and unnamed (CO2, gene pools, desertification, etc). They can be managed through a consensual dialogical politics. Demands become depoliticised or rather radical politics is not about demands but about things.

YANNIS STAVRAKAKIS, DEPARTMENT OF GOVT AT UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, 2000 [ON THE EMERGENCE OF GREEN IDEOLOGY: THE DISLOCATION FACTOR IN GREEN POLITICS, DISCOURSE THEORY AND POLITICAL ANALYSIS, EDS: HOWARTH, NORBAL AND STAVRAKAIS]
To recapitulate, our hypothesis concerning the emergence of Green ideology runs as follows. Green ideology is articulated as a result of the temporal and contingent coincidence of two dislocations. These dislocations constitute its conditions of possibility. The first is a dislocation of our previously hegemonic mode of symbolising the real of nature. This dislocation of what has been called the 'Dominant Social Paradigm' led to the articulation of a 'New

Environmental Paradigm' simultaneously investing the signifier 'nature' with major social importance. The second is a dislocation of the Western radical tradition. For a variety of reasons at some point in time radical ideologies can no longer perform the job of every ideology, that is to say, to master the real of society the impossibility of society in other words to provide 'credible', hegemonically appealing answers to social dislocations taking the form of 'social ills' such as unemployment and inequality. This dislocation produced a lack in the ideological level which had to be covered over if the radical side of the political spectrum still wanted to appear as a hegemonic force, an administrator of social dislocations. In order to do that the radical tradition was in need of a rearticulation, a new investment of its potential. This new articulation was performed around 'nature', a highly cathected signifier of public discourse and discussion; a signifier with a radical potential. What emerged was Green Ideology; and this is probably the closest we can get to the caprices of humanity and nature and their relation to Green politics.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

AT: PERM (AFF = BASIS FOR IDENTIFICATION)

THE THE
ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS, OUTLINED IN THE 1AC, ARE DISCURSIVELY CREATED AND MAINTAINED. CONTINUED EXISTENCE OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS INSOFAR AS THEY ARE PERCEIVED AS A PROBLEM DEPENDS UPON THE EXISTENCE OR CREATION OF AGENCIES OR GROUPS THAT DEFINE SOME ISSUE AS A PROBLEM AND ATTEMPT TO RESOLVE IT

YANNIS STAVRAKAKIS, DEPARTMENT OF GOVT AT UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, 2000 [ON THE EMERGENCE OF GREEN IDEOLOGY: THE DISLOCATION FACTOR IN GREEN POLITICS, DISCOURSE THEORY AND POLITICAL ANALYSIS, EDS: HOWARTH, NORBAL AND STAVRAKAIS]
The question, though, remains: What are the conditions that lead to the emergence of a Green ideological concern? There is an increasing consensus that what is needed beyond any 'objective' crisis is the construction of a sense of crisis at the level of discourse as a social problem. As Yearley points out, following Kitsuse and Spector, 'the existence of social problems depends on the continued existence of groups or agencies that define some condition as a problem and attempt to do something about it'. Thus, Yearley stresses the importance of environmentalist groups and the media for constructing and promoting environmental issues and generating the Greening of the public. What is necessary, then, for the development of a certain environmental consciousness is the social availability of the symbolic resources permitting the construction of the environment as a pressing social problem. These resources are missing when a society is hegemonised by a mythic or other ideological structure explaining things in a different way. In any case, as Andrew Dobson has argued, these developments (the discursive production of environmental crisis) may only be viewed as preconditions for the emergence of Green ideology and do not provide any reason for the transformation in question, namely the radicalisation of environmentalist discourse and its investment with political significance, a transformation that takes place in the 1970s.13 In other words, even if we have explained part of the 'how' we still have not located the 'why' vis-a-vis the emergence of Green ideology

NOPE GOTTA REJECT THE NATURAL BALANCE BULLSHIT ENTIRELY. ZIZEK 91 [SLAVOJ, LOOKING AWRY 37-38]
The basic weakness of the usual ecological response is thus its obsessive libidinal economy: we must do all in order that the equilibrium of the natural circuit will be maintained, in order that some horrifying turbulence will not derail the established regularity of nature's ways. To rid ourselves of this predominant obsessive economy, we must take a further step and renounce the very idea of a "natural balance" supposedly upset by the intervention of [hu]man as "nature sick unto death." Homologous to the Lacanian proposition "Woman does not exist," we should perhaps assert that Nature does not exist: it does not exist as a periodic, balanced circuit, thrown off its track by [hu]man's inadvertence. The very notion of [hu]man as an "excess" with respect to nature's balanced circuit has finally to be abandoned. The image of nature as a balanced circuit is nothing but a retroactive projection of [hu]man. Herein lies the lesson of recent theories of chaos: "nature" is already, in itself, turbulent, imbalanced; its "rule" is not a well-balanced oscillation around some constant point of attraction, but a chaotic dispersion within the limits of what the theory of chaos calls the "strange attractor," a regularity directing chaos itself.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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UTNIF 2007

LINK: DEMOCRACY
AFFIRMATIVE IS REPRESENTATIVE OF TRANSFERENCE A PROJECTION OF ONES OWN ANXIETY ONTO THE OTHER. IT IS NOT AFRICA THAT THE AFF LAMENTS BUT THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF REAL DEMOCRACY HERE AT HOME. THIS MAKES THE PLAN AN INEFFECTIVE ATTEMPT AT SELF-REALIZATION IN THE OTHER.

THE

KAPOOR, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES, 2005 [ILAN, PARTICIPATORY DEVELOPMENT, COMPLICITY, AND DESIRE.
THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY VOL. 26 ISS. 8 NOVERMBER]

I would like to track another, related form of complicity by suggesting that pd is, to a degree, the result of psychical transference. Transference is the displacement of unresolved conflicts onto a substitute object, whereby, for example, the lover, analyst or friend is a stand-in for the parent toward whom one feels aggression. pd, I want to suggest accordingly, is the consequence of transference onto Third World communities of the perceived inadequacies of our own liberal democratic political systems.Several analysts (eg Habermas, 1976; Kothari, 1988; Mouffe, 2000) have highlighted the rising 'democratic deficit' within mainstream political institutions in the First and Third Worlds. Public apathy and low voter turn out, they contend, are the product of increasingly distant and exclusionary party politics. The emergence of various fundamentalisms (religious, ethnic, nationalist), as well as grassroots public protests and social movements, are responses to the unaccountability and corruptibility of the state and market. There is thus a wave of political dissatisfaction and a demand for a more participatory democracy that has entered our liberal democratic culture, and in turn, the consciousness of the development intelligentsia.Of course, such frustrations and demands are channelled in various ways (eg through public protest), but some of them may be psychically transferred through our development work. pd then becomes a vehicle for us to try and resolve real or imagined liberal democratic deficiencies. (Such an argument, to my mind, does not appear to be a stretch: after all, a good deal of post-World War II aid and development was aimed at containing the Soviet 'threat' to meet Western foreign policy objectives, and at spreading 'free market' policies to help in the much-needed opening up of Third World markets for multinational capital. Moreover, a sizeable portion of development transfers today continues to be 'tied', and to this extent, helps resolve several economic bottlenecks. Western food aid, for example, is often a subsidy to Western farmers and a way of disposing of their food surpluses (eg of wheat or rice); and the sizable US military aid budget helps prop up the country's military-industrial complex. The transference of which I speak is thus no different in its channelling of, as it were, surplus idealism and disgruntlement, so helping to address political bottlenecks.)A sure sign of this transference is that, when it comes to pd, we ask more of marginalised Third World communities than we do of ourselves. All things considered, how many of our own Western social institutions and programmes (eg employment, gender or poverty-related programmes) are participatory? Very few, if any. The implication is that we hold the 'beneficiaries' of pd to a higher standard or ideal. As a consequence, Third World communities may well be a dumping ground or test site for idealised forms of participation. iek helps tease out a further dimension of such transference via his discussion on 'canned laughter' (ie simulated audience laughter, usually on television comedy programmes). For him, the significance of canned laughter lies not in reminding us when to laugh, but in the fact that the Other - embodied in the television set - is relieving us even of our duty to laugh - is laughing instead of us. So even if, tired from a hard day's stupid work, all evening we did nothing but gaze drowsily into the television screen, we can say afterwards that objectively, through the medium of the other, we had a really good time (1989: 35). Seen in this light, pd is a kind of canned laughter: it helps us work through our political idealism and discontent, relieving us from participating 'over here' and enabling us to partake vicariously through the other's participation 'over there'. We manage the process (and get the glory), they participate (as directed by us), and at the end of the programme, we come away feeling satiated as spectatorparticipants.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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UTNIF 2007

LINK: DEMOCRACY
THE AFFIRMATIVES CLAIMS WE HAVE TO SAVE THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC ORDER JUST REINTRENCHES THEM FURTHER IN THE FANTASY WHILE THEY LEGITIMATE VIOLENCE TO SAVE THE ORDER IEK, INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, 2004 [SLAVOJ, APPENDIX I: CANIS A NON CANENDO, IRAQ THE BORROWED KETTLE PG.67-68 ]
This story perfectly encapsulates the true problem with politicians such as Le Pen in France. A close look at how Le Pen made it into the second round of the French presidential elections in 2002 reveals the true stakes of the widespread emotion of 'fear' and 'shame', even panic, that Le Pen's first-round success generated among many a democratic leftist. The cause of this panic was not Le Pen's percentage as such, but the fact that he finished second among the candidates, instead of Lionel Jospin, the 'logical' candidate for this place. The panic was triggered by the fact that, in the democratic Imaginary of multiparty states in which the political field is bi-polar, with two big parties or blocs exchanging power, second place symbolically indicates the eligibility of a candidate: 'Le Pen finished second' entails that he is considered eligible, a viable candidate for power. This is what disturbed the silent pact of today's liberal democracies that allow political freedom to everyone . . . on condition that a set of implicit rules clearly limits the scope of those who can actually be elected. So, then, was the thing that made Le Pen unfit for election simply the fact that he is heterogeneous to the liberal-democratic order, a foreign body in it? There is more to it: the misfortune (and role) of Le Pen was to introduce certain topics (the foreign threat, the necessity to limit immigration, and so forth) which were then silently taken over not only by the conservative parties, but even by the de facto policies of 'Socialist' governments. I am almost tempted to say that, had there been no Le Pen in France, he would have had to be invented: he is the perfect figure whom one loves to hate, the hatred for whom guarantees the general liberal-democratic 'pact', the pathetic identification with the .....,democratic values of tolerance and respect for diversity - however, after shouting, 'Horrible! How dark and uncivilized! Wholly unacceptable! A threat to our basic democratic values!', outraged-liberals-human face', to do the same thing in a more 'civilized' way, along the lines of Tut the racist populists are manipulating the legitimate concerns of ordinary people, so we do have to take some measures!' . . . Today, the alleged need to 'regulate' the status of immigrants, and so on, is part of the mainstream consensus: as the leading French Socialist Laurent Fabius put it, Le Pen did ask the right questions, it is just that he provided the wrong answers. The `shame' apropos of Le Pen was thus the shame that arises when the hypocritical masks are torn off, and we are directly confronted with our true stance.

FUCK DEMOCRACY. JODI DEAN, PROF. OF POLITICAL THEORY @ HOBART AND WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGE, 2005. ZIZEK AGAINST DEMOCRACY. HTTP://JDEANICITE.TYPEPAD.COM/I_CITE/FILES/ZIZEK_AGAINST_DEMOCRACY_NEW_VERSION.DOC )
If the U.S. remains a liberal democracy, then liberal democracy is the problem. Insofar as Hoffmans sentences include within this remaining liberal democracy imperialism, detention without counsel, support for the rich, and shunning of the poor, then those of us who hoped for better and are now discouraged should not be forgiven. In the name of this liberal democracy, we have endorsed a political form fully accepting of deep and global inequality and inimical to projects toward commonality, toward affiliation and justice. Thus, against this liberal democracy we should no longer emphasize compromise, acceptance, inclusivity, and generosity, and adopt instead the divisive attitude of universal Truth.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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UTNIF 2007

LINK: EQUALITY/ MULTICULTURALISM

EQUALITY - THERE CALLS OF EQUALITY UNDER THE DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM ARE FALSE DEMOCRACY REINFORCES THE BINARIES THAT CAPITALISM CREATED BY ONLY INCLUDING THOSE WHO ARE OF THE SOCIAL CLASS TO PARTICPATE THE EXCLUDE HAVE NOT VOTE IN THE DEMOCRACY AND ARE EXTORTED

IEK, INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, 2004 [SLAVOJ, APPENDIX I: CANIS A NON CANENDO, IRAQ THE BORROWED KETTLE PG.86-87 ]
However, are things really that simple? First, direct democracy is not only still alive in many places, such as the favelas , it is even being 'reinvented' and given a new boost by the rise the 'postindustrial' digital culture (do not the descriptions of the new `tribal' communities of computer-hackers often evoke the logic of conciliarly democracy?). Secondly, the awareness that politics is a complex game in which a certain level of institutional alienation is irreducible should not lead us to ignore the fact that there is still a line of separation which divides those who are 'in' from those who are 'out', excluded from the space of the polis there are citizens, and then there is the spectre of the excluded homo sacer haunting them all. In other words, even 'complex' contemporary societies still rely on the basic divide between included and excluded. The fashionable notion of the 'multitude' is insufficient precisely in so far as it cuts across this divide: there is a multitude within the system and a multitude of those excluded, and simply to encompass them both within the scope of the same notion amounts to the same obscenity as equating starvation with dieting. The excluded do not simply dwell in a psychotic non-structured Outside: they have (and are forced into) their own self-organization (or, rather, they are forced into organizing themselves) and one of the names (and practices) of this self-or organization was precisely 'conciliary democracy) `

MULTICULTURALISM - THEIR

MODE OF MULTICULTURAL TOLERANCE IS INTIMATELY RELATED TO VIOLENCE AGAINST THE INTOLERANT OTHER.

JODI

DEAN,

PROF.

OF

POLITICAL THEORY @ HOBART

AND

WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGE,

2005.

ZIZEK AGAINST DEMOCRACY.

HTTP://JDEANICITE.TYPEPAD.COM/I_CITE/FILES/ZIZEK_AGAINST_DEMOCRACY_NEW_VERSION.DOC )

A second argument Zizek employs against multiculturalism concerns the way that multicultural tolerance is part of the same matrix as racist violence. On the one hand, multicultural respect for the other is way of asserting the superiority of the multiculturalist.i The multiculturalist adopts an emptied out, disembodied perspective toward an embodied, ethnic other. The ethnic other makes the universal position of the multiculturalist possible. Not only does this attitude disavow the particularity of the multiculturalists own position, but it also repeats the key gesture of global corporate capital: the big corporations will eat up, colonize, exploit, and commodify anything. They arent biased. They are empty machines following the logic of Capital. On the other hand, tolerance towards the other passes imperceptibly into a destructive hatred of all (fundamentalist) Others who do not fit into our idea of tolerancein short, against all actual Others.ii The idea is that the liberal democrat, or multiculturalist, is against hatred and harassment. Tolerance, then, is tolerance for another who also doesnt hate or harass, that is, tolerance for an other who is not really so other at all.iii To this extent, the multicultural position blurs into a kind of racism such that respect is premised on agreement and identity. The other with deep fundamental beliefs, who is invested in a set of unquestionable convictions, whose enjoyment is utterly incomprehensible to me, is not the other of multiculturalism. For Zizek, then, todays tolerant liberal multiculturalism is an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality, while practices like wife-beating remain out of sight . . .).iv Just as in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism, so todays reflexive multicultural tolerance has as its opposite, and thus remains caught in the matrix of, a hard kernel of fundamentalism, of irrational, excessive, enjoyment. The concrete realization of rational inclusion and tolerance coincides with contingent, irrational, violence.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

IMPACT: DEMOCRATIC FUNDAMENTALISM

THE PRIVILEGE THEY ACCORD TO DEMOCRATIC CONSENSUS PROHIBITS THOUGHT OUTSIDE THE EXISTING STATE OF THINGS. SLAVOJ ZIZEK, ELVIS OF CULTURAL THEORY. REPEATING LENIN. HTTP://WWW.LACAN.COM/REPLENIN.HTM 2001.
What are we to say to this? Again, the problem resides in the implicit qualifications which can be easily discerned by the "concrete analysis of the concrete situation," as Lenin himself would have put it. "Fidelity to the democratic consensus" means the acceptance of the present liberal-parlamentary consensus, which precludes any serious questioning of how this liberal-democratic order is complicit in the phenomena it officially condemns, and, of course, any serious attempt to imagine a society whose socio-political order would be different. In short, it means: say and write whatever you want - on condition that what you do does not effectively question or disturb the predominant political consensus. So everything is allowed, solicited even, as a critical topic: the prospects of a global ecological catastrophe, violations of human rights, sexism, homophobia, antifeminism, the growing violence not only in the far-away countries, but also in our megalopolises, the gap between the First and the Third World, between the rich and the poor, the shattering impact of the digitalization of our daily lives... there is nothing easier today than to get international, state or corporate funds for a multidisciplinary research into how to fight the new forms of ethnic, religious or sexist violence. The problem is that all this occurs against the background of a fundamental Denkverbot, the prohibition to think. Today's liberal-democratic hegemony is sustained by a kind of unwritten Denkverbot similar to the infamous Berufsverbot in Germany of the late 60s - the moment one shows a minimal sign of engaging in political projects that aim to seriously challenge the existing order, the answer is immediately: "Benevolent as it is, this will necessarily end in a new Gulag!" The ideological function of the constant reference to the holocaust, gulag and the more recent Third World catastrophes is thus to serve as the support of this Denkverbot by constantly reminding us how things may have been much worse: "Just look around and see for yourself what will happen if we follow your radical notions!" And it is exactly the same thing that the demand for "scientific objectivity" means: the moment one seriously questions the existing liberal consensus, one is accused of abandoning scientific objectivity for the outdated ideological positions. This is the point on which one cannot and should not concede: today, the actual freedom of thought means the freedom to question the predominant liberal-democratic "postideological" consensus - or it means nothing.

IMPACT: DEMOCRACY = CAPITALISM

DEMOCRACY IS AN IDEOLOGICAL TRAP MEANT TO ENSURE THE SMOOTH FUNCTIONING OF CAPITAL.
JODI

DEAN,

PROF.

OF

POLITICAL THEORY @ HOBART

AND

WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGE,

2005.

ZIZEK AGAINST DEMOCRACY.

HTTP://JDEANICITE.TYPEPAD.COM/I_CITE/FILES/ZIZEK_AGAINST_DEMOCRACY_NEW_VERSION.DOC )

In this article, I take up Slavoj Zizeks critical interrogation of democracy. I specify and defend Zizeks position as an alternative left politics, indeed, as that position most attuned to the loss of the political today. Whereas liberal and pragmatic approaches to politics and political theory accept the diminishment of political aspirations as realistic accommodation to the complexities of late capitalist societies as well as preferable to the dangers of totalitarianism accompanying Marxist and revolutionary theories, Zizeks psychoanalytic philosophy confronts directly the trap involved in acquiescence to a diminished political field, that is to say, to a political field constituted through the exclusion of the economy: within the ideological matrix of liberal democracy, any move against nationalism, fundamentalist, or ethnic violence ends up reinforcing Capital and guaranteeing democracys failure. Arguing that formal democracy is irrevocably and necessarily stained by a particular content that conditions and limits its universalizability, he challenges his readers to relinquish our attachment to democracy: if we know that the procedures and institutions of constitutional democracies privilege the wealthy and exclude the poor, if we know that efforts toward inclusion remain tied to national boundaries, thereby disenfranchising yet again those impacted by certain national decisions and policies, and if we know that the expansion and intensification of networked communications that was supposed to enhance democratic participation serves primarily to integrate and consolidate communicative capitalism, why do we present our political hopes as aspirations to democracy, rather than something else? Why in the face of democracys obvious inability to represent justice in the social field that has emerged in the incompatibility between the globalized economy and welfare states to displace the political, do critical left political and cultural theorists continue to emphasize a set of arrangements that can be filled in, substantialized, by fundamentalisms, nationalisms, populisms, and conservatisms diametrically opposed to progressive visions of social and economic equality? The answer is that democracy is the form our attachment to Capital takes. Faithful to democracy, we eschew the demanding task of politicizing the economy and envisioning a different political order.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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UTNIF 2007

IMPACT: VIOLENT EXCLUSION (DEMOCRACY LINK)

DEMOCRACY WILL DO ANYTHING TO KEEP ITS FANTASY OF EQUALITY ALIVE THE AFFIRMATIVE ENDORSEMENT OF THESE POLITICS AND ALLOWS FOR THE DEATH OF ANY POPULATION THAT THE LIBERAL DEMOCRACTIC ORDER SEES AS A THREAT TO ITS LIVELYHOOD

IEK, INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, 2004 [SLAVOJ, APPENDIX I: CANIS A NON CANENDO, IRAQ THE BORROWED KETTLE PG.81-83 ]
This brings us to the key dilemma: what the reference to democracy involves is the rejection of radical attempts to 'step outside', to risk a radical break, to pursue the trend of self-organized collectives in zones outside the law. Arguably, the greatest literary monument to such a utopia comes from an unexpected source: Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World (1981), a novel about Canudos, an outlaw community 'deep in the Brazilian heartland which was home to prostitutes, freaks, beggars, bandits and the most wretched of the poor. Canudos, led by an apocalyptic prophet, was a utopian space without money, property, taxes and marriage. In 1897, it was destroyed by the military forces of the Brazilian government. The echoes of Canudos are clearly discernible in today's favelas in. Latin American megalopolises: are they not, in some sense, the first `liberated territories', the cells of future self-organized societies? Are not institutions such as community kitchens models of `socialized' communal local life? The liberated territory of Canudos in Bahia will remain for ever the model of a space of emancipation, of an alternative community which completely negates the existing space of the state. Everything is to be endorsed here, up to and including religious 'fanaticism'. It is as if, in such communities, the Benjaminian other side of historical Progress, that of the vanquished, acquires a space of its own. Utopia existed here for a brief period of time this is the only way to account for the 'irrational', excessive, violence of the destruction of these communities (in the Brazil of 1897, all the inhabitants of Canudos, children and women included, were slaughtered, as if the very memory of the possibility of freedom had to be erased and this by a government which presented itself as 'progressive'liberaldemocratic-republican . . .). Throughout history, suchcommunities have exploded from time to time as passing phenomena, as sites of eternity that interrupted the flow ti progress one should have the courage to recognize. wide span from the Jesuit reduciones in eighteenth-century Paraguay (brutally destroyed by the joint action of Spanish and Portuguese armies) to the settlements controlled by Sendero Luminoso in Peru in the 1990s.

DEMOCRACY IS STRUCTURALLY EXCLUSIVE. IT CANNOT BUT DEMARCATE INSIDE FROM OUTSIDE, THEREBY CREATING A AN OTHER TO BE IGNORED OR DESTROYED. ZIZEK, PROF. OF SOC. @ LJUBLJANA, 2004. (SLAVOJ, FROM POLITICS TO BIOPOLITICSAND BACK, THE SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY, 103: 2/3 SPRING/SUMMER)
Are, however, things really so simple? First, direct democracy is not only still alive in many places like favelas, it is even being reinvented and given a new boost by the rise of the postindustrial digital culture (do the descriptions of the new tribalcommunities of computer hackers not often evoke the logic of councils democracy?). Second, the awareness that politics is a complex game in which a certain level of institutional alienation is irreducible should not lead us to ignore the fact that there is still a line of separation that divides those who are in from those who are out, excluded from the space of the polisthere are citizens, and there is the specter of homo sacer haunting them all. In other words, even the complex contemporary societies still rely on the basic divide between included and excluded. The fashionable notion of multitude is insufficient precisely insofar as it cuts across this divide: there is a multitude within the system and the multitude of those excluded, and to simply encompass them within the scope of the same notion amounts to the same obscenity as equating starvation with dieting. And those excluded do not simply dwell in a psychotic nonstructured Outsidethey have (and are forced into) their own self-organization, one of the names (and practices) of which was precisely the council democracy.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

IMPACT: SCAPEGOATING (DEMOCRACY LINK)

THE WAY THE DEMOCRATIC ORDER SUSTAINS ITSELF IS BY SCAPEGOATING FOREIGN THREATS AS THE ROOT CAUSE OF PROBLEM WITHIN THE SOCIETY SO THAT EVERY HORRENDUS THING THAT IS DONE BY THOSE EMPOWER IS PUSHED ASIDE BECAUSE OF THERE ABLITIY TO DEAL WITH THE SCAPE GOAT PROBLEM THIS PROVES A INHERENT CONTRADICTION IN DEMOCRACY AND WILL INEVITABLY LEAD TO ITS COLLAPSE

IEK, INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, 2004 [SLAVOJ, APPENDIX I: CANIS A NON CANENDO, IRAQ THE BORROWED KETTLE PG.68-69 ]
We have here a kind of perverted Hegelian 'negation of negation': in a first negation, the populist Right disturbs the aseptic liberal consensus by giving voice to passionate dissent, clearly arguing against the 'foreign threat'; in a second negation, the 'decent' democratic Centre, in the very gesture of pathetically rejecting this populist Right, integrates its message in a 'civilized' way - in between, the entire field of background 'unwritten rules' has already changed so much that no one even notices, and everyone is simply relieved that the anti-democratic threat is over. And the true danger is that something similar will happen with the 'war on terror': 'extremists' such as John Ashcroft will be discredited, but their legacy will remain, imperceptibly woven into the invisible ethical fabric of our societies. Their defeat will be their ultimate triumph: they will no longer be needed, since their message will be incorporated into the mainstream. This defeat will simultaneously signal the defeat of democracy itself, its gradual change into a travesty of itself, its impotence in the face of a might-wing populist threat

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY SUSTAINS ITSELF AND ITS HORRORS BY SCAPEGOATING POPULATIONS IT VIEWS AS THREAT AND EXTERMATING THEM

IEK, INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, 2004 [SLAVOJ, APPENDIX I: CANIS A NON CANENDO, IRAQ THE BORROWED KETTLE PG.70 ]
Nowhere is today's resistance to the political act proper more palpable than in the obsession with 'radical Evil', the negative of the act. It is as if the supreme Good today is that nothing should really happen, which is why the only way we can imagine an act is in the guise of a catastrophic disturbance, a traumatic explosion of Evil. Susan Neiman was right to emphasize why September 11 took so many leftist social critics by surprise: Fascism was, for them, the last appearance of a directly transparent Evi1.2 Since 1945 they have been, for decades, perfecting the art of symptomal' reading, a mode of reading which taught us to recognize Evil in the guise of its opposite: liberal democracy itself legitimizes social orders which generate genocide and slaughter; today, massive crimes result from anonymous bureaucratic logic (what Chomsky called the invisible gbackroom boys'). With September 11, however, they suddenly encountered an Evil which fits the most naive Hollywood image: a secret organization of fanatics who fully inter* and plan in detail, a terrorist attack whose aim is to kill thousands of random civilian victims. It is as if Arendt's 'banality of evil' was again inverted: if anything, the al qaeda were not in a sense banal , it effectively 'demonic' . So, it seemed to leftist intellectuals that were they directly condemn these attacks, they would some- how undo the results of their complex analyses, and regress to the Hollywoodfundamentalist level of George W. Bush.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

AT: PERM (DEMOCRACY LINK)

THE PERM OPERATES IN THE DEMOCRATIC FRAME WORK WHICH DOOMS IT FAIL BECAUSE OF THE BINARY CREATED BY DEMOCRACY

IEK, INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, 2004 [SLAVOJ, APPENDIX I: CANIS A NON CANENDO, IRAQ THE BORROWED KETTLE PG.112-113 ]
(This passage is worth quoting in extenso, since it presents, in a clear and concise way, the whole line of reasoning that we should question everything is here, right up to the simplistic parallel b D. etween Nazism and Communism a la Ernst Nolte. The first thing that strikes us is the binary logic on which Stavrakakis relies: on the one hand, in one big arch, premodern millenarian utopias, Communism and Nazism, which all imply the localization of the origin of Evil in a particular social agent (Jews, kulaks . . .) once we have eliminated these 'thieves of (our) enjoyment', social harmony and transparency will be restored; on the other hand, the 'democratic invention', with its notion of the empty place of power, non-transparency and the irreducible contingency of social life, and so on. Furthermore, in so far as the utopia of a harmonious society is a kind of fantasy, which conceals the structural 'lack in the Other' (irreducible social antagonism), and in so far as the aim of psychoanalytic treatment is to traverse the fantasy that is to say, to make the analysis and accept the nonexistence of the big Other is the radical democratic politics whose premises is that 'society doesn't exist' (Laclau) not eo ipso a post-fantasmatic politics? There is a whole series of problems with this line of reasoning. First, in its rapid rejection of utopia, it leaves out of the picture the main utopia of today, which is the utopia of capitalism itself it is Francis Fukuyama who is our true utopian. Second, it fails to distinguish between, on the one hand, the contingency and impenetrability of social life, and, on the other, the democratic logic of the empty place of power, With no agent who is 'naturally' entitled to it. It is easy to see how these two phenomena are independent of each other: if anything, a functioning democracy presupposes a basic stability and reliability of social life. Third, such a simplified binary opposition also ignores the distinction between the traditional functioning of power grounded in a `naturalized' authority (king) and the millenarian radical utopia which strives to accomplish a radical rupture. Is not Stavrakakis's dismissal of millenarian radicalism all too precipitate, overlooking the tremendous emancipatory potential of millenarian radicals, of their explosion of revolutionary negativity? The very least we should do here is to complicate the picture by introducing two couples of opposites: first the opposition full/empty place of power, then the opposition difference/ antagonism as the fundamental structuring principle (to use Laclau's own terms). While the traditional hierarchical power presupposes a 'natural' bearer of power, it asserts difference (hierarchical social order) as the basic structural principle of social life, in contrast to millenarian 'fundamentalism', which asserts antagonism. On the other hand, democracy combines the assertion of contingency (the empty place of power) with difference: while it admits the irreducible character of social antagonisms, its goal is to transpose antagonisms into a regulated agonistic competition. So what about the fourth option: the combination of contingency and antagonism? In other words, what about the prospect of a radical social transformation which would not involve the well-worn scarecrow 'complete fullness and transparency of the social'? Why should every project of a radical social revolution automatically fall into the trap of aiming at the impossible dream of 'total transparency'? )

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

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UTNIF 2007

AT: DEMOCRACY SOLVES TYRANNY/VIOLENCE.

CAPITALISM UNIQUELY DOOMS ANY HOPE IN DEMOCRACY, IT CREATES THE CONDITIONS FOR ETHNIC VIOLENCE AND XENOPHOBIA.
JODI

DEAN,

PROF.

OF

POLITICAL THEORY @ HOBART

AND

WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGE,

NO DATE.

ZIZEK AGAINST DEMOCRACY.

HTTP://JDEANICITE.TYPEPAD.COM/I_CITE/FILES/ZIZEK_AGAINST_DEMOCRACY_NEW_VERSION.DOC )

One might think that once democracy is established it would shed its previous link to violence and capitalism. Yet, this has not been the case. Attachment to a national or ethnic Cause continues violently to subvert democratic pluralism, an attachment that seems only to have intensified as formerly communist states have become subjected to the neo-liberal logics of contemporary global capital. Accordingly, Zizek considers the way the onset of capitalism in Eastern Europe ushered in hideous nationalism rather than a flourishing democracy. And, he extends his analysis to identify the same process in Western countries: fundamentalism necessarily flourishes in the space opened up by formal democracy and in response to the deterritorializing logic of Capital. Zizeks account of East-European nationalism relies on the idea of a national-Thing, of that inexpressible collection of practices and attributes that make us who we are, that constitute our way of life. The Thing isnt the set per se; nor is it that characteristic shared by members of the set. Rather, it shines through the set as a kind of underlying belief in the sets meaningfulness. The Thing cannot be understood simply as a performative effect of peoples belief in it. Rather, the Thing achieves its consistency because of a certain kernel of enjoyment. The national Thing is ultimately nothing but the way subjects in a given ethnic community organize their enjoyment through national myths.v Ethnic tensions and hatreds involve the national Thing. Others are always trying to take our Thing. Or, thats what we think because this is the only way we have a Thing in the first place. Zizek writes, What we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never had what was stolen from us: the lack (castration) is originary, enjoyment constitutes itself as stolen.vi National myths organize a community with reference to external threats. These threats threaten our national Thing. To this extent, we need others: they provide the mechanism through which, via fantasy, we organize our enjoyment. If others dont steal our enjoyment, we wont have it. In this way, the others are actually part of us. As Zizek puts its, the fascinating image of the Other gives a body to our own innermost split, to what is in us more than ourselves and thus prevents us from achieving full identity with ourselves. The hatred of the Other is the hatred of our own excess of enjoyment. vii In short, with the notion of the Thing and the idea of the theft of enjoyment, Zizek gives an account of non-universalizable kernel of fantasy in the organization of community.viii What interests Zizek with regard to the national Thing in post-communist Eastern Europe is how its interaction with capitalism thwarts pluralist democracy. Nationalism is a kind of shock-absorber against the structural imbalance of capitalism, its inevitable excess, expansion, and openness. Eliminating the ethnic other works as the fantasy organization of the desire for a stable, welldefined, social body, for a Gemeinschaft unrent by capitalist upheaval. And since this social body is experienced as that of a nation, Zizek argues, the cause of any imbalance spontaneously assumes the form of a national enemy.ix

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

* LINK: ARMCHAIR ACTIVISM/INTERPASSIVITY *

AFFIRMATIVES CALL TO SOLIDARITY WITH OTHERS IS A SELF-SERVING MODE OF ARMCHAIR ACTIVISMTHEIR DEMAND ALLOWS THEM TO FEEL LIKE AUTHENTIC RADICALS WHILE ALL THE REAL ACTION IS LEFT TO OTHERS, AN INTERPASSIVITY WHERE WE LEARN TO ENJOY THE OTHERS SUFFERING

THE

IEK, INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES FANTASIES,P. 111-113]

Interpassivity

AT THE

UNIVERSITY

OF

LJUBLJANA, 1997 [SLAVOJ, THE PLAGUE

OF

Against this background, one is tempted to supplement the fashionable notion of 'interactivity' with its shadowy and much more uncanny supplement/double, the notion of Interpassivity'.28 That is to say: it is commonplace to emphasize how, with the new electronic media, the passive consumption of a text or a work of art is over: I no longer merely stare at the screen, I increasingly interact with it, entering into a dialogic relationship with it (from choosing the programs, through participating in debates in a Virtual Community, to directly determining the outcome of the plot in so-called 'interactive narratives'). Those who praise the democratic potential of the new media generally focus on precisely these features: on how cyberspace opens up the possibility for the large majority of people to break out of the role of passive observer following the spectacle staged by others, and to participate actively not only in the spectacle itself, but more and more in establishing the very rules of the spectacle.

Is not the other side of this interactivity, however, interpassivity? Is not the necessary obverse of my interacting with the object instead of just passively following the show the situation in which the object itself takes from me, deprives me of, my own passive reaction of satisfaction (or mourning or laughter), so that it is the object itself which enjoys the show instead of me, relieving me of the superego duty to enjoy myself? Do we not witness interpassivity in a great number of todays publicity spots or posters which, as it were, passively enjoy the product instead of us? (Coke cans containing the inscription Ooh! Ooh! What taste! emulate the ideal customers reaction in advance.) Another strange phenomenon brings us closer to the heart of the matter: almost every VCR aficionado who compulsively records hundreds of movies (myself among them) is well aware that the immediate effect of owning a VCR is that one watches fewer films than in the good old days of a simple TV set without a VCR; one never has time for TV, so instead of losing a precious evening, one simply tapes the film and stores it for a future viewing (for which, of course, there is almost never time). So although I do not actually watch films, the very awareness that the films I love are stored in my video library gives me a profound satisfaction and, occasionally, enables me to simply relax and enjoy the exquisite are of farciente as if the VCR is in a way watching them for me, in my place the VCR stands here for the big Other, for the medium of symbolic registration. Is not the Western liberal academics obsession with the suffering in Bosnia the outstanding recent example of interpassive suffering? One can authentically suffer through reports on rapes and mass killings in Bosnia, while calmly pursuing ones academic career . Another standard example of interpassivity is provided by the role of the madman within a pathologically distorted intersubjective link (say, a family whose repressed traumas explode in the mental breakdown of one of its members): when a group produces a madman, do they not shift on to him the obligation passively to endure the suffering which belongs to all of them?
Furthermore, is not the ultimate example of interpassivity the absolute example (Hegel) itself: that of Christ, who took upon himself the (deserved) suffering of humanity? Christ redeemed us all not by acting for us, but by assuming the burden of the ultimate passive experience. (The difference between activity and passivity, of course, is often blurred; weeping as an act of public mourning is not simply passive, it is passivity transformed into an active ritualized symbolic practice.) In the political domain, one of the recent outstanding examples of `interpassivity is the multiculturalist Leftist intellectual's

'apprehension' about how even the Muslims, the great victims of the Yugoslav war, are now renouncing the multi-ethnic pluralist vision of Bosnia and conceding to the fact that if the Serbs and Croats want their clearly defined ethnic units, they too want an ethnic space of their own. This Leftist's 'regret' is multiculturalist racism at its worst: as if the Bosnians were not literally pushed into creating their own ethnic enclave by the way that the 'liberal' West has threatened them in the last five years. What interests us here, however, is how the 'multi-ethnic Bosnia' is only the latest in the series of mythical figures of the Other through which Western Leftist intellectuals have acted out their ideological fantasies: this intellectual is 'multi-ethnic' through Bosnians, breaks out of the Cartesian paradigm by admiring Native American wisdom, and so on just as in past decades, when they were revolutionaries by admiring Cuba, or 'democratic socialists' by endorsing the myth of Yugoslav 'self-management' Socialism as 'something special', a genuine democratic breakthrough .... In all these cases, they have continued to lead their undisturbed upper-middle-class academic existence, while doing their progressive duty through the Other. This paradox of interpassivity, of believing or enjoying through the other, also opens up a new approach to aggressivity: aggressivity is provoked in a subject when the other subject, through which the first subject believed or enjoyed, does something which disturbs the functioning of this transference. Look, for example, at the attitude of some Western Leftist academics towards the disintegration of Yugoslavia: since the fact that the people of ex-Yugoslavia rejected (`betrayed') Socialism disturbed the belief of these academics that is, prevented them from persisting in their belief in 'authentic' self-management Socialism through the Other which realizes it everyone who did not share their Yugo-nostalgic attitude was dismissed as a proto-Fascist nationalist.'

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LINK: SUBJECTS ACTING ON OBJECTS

THE AFFIRMATIVES LOCATION OF THEMSELVES AS THE ACTING SUBJECTS ABLE TO IMPOSE ORDER ON THE WORLD IS AN ATTEMPT TO CONTROL SOCIETY, PRODUCING AN EXCESSIVE ATTEMPT TO FIXATE THE WORLD IEK, INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, 1997 [SLAVOJ, THE PLAGUE OF FANTASIES, 93-96]
In the standard notion of the opposition between subject and object, the subject is conceived as the dynamic pole, as the active agent able to transcend every fixed situation, to 'create' its universe, to adapt itself to every new condition, and so on, in contrast to the fixed, inert domain of objects. Lacan supplements this standard notion with its obverse: the very dimension which defines subjectivity is a certain 'exaggerated', excessive, unbalanced fixation or 'freeze' which disturbs the ever-changing balanced flow of life, and can assume three forms, in accordance with the triad of Imaginary, Symbolic and Real: At the level of the Imaginary, Lacan as is well known locates the emergence of the ego in the gesture of the precipitous identification with the external, alienated mirror image which provides the idealized unity of the Self as opposed to the child's actual helplessness and lack of coordination. The feature to be emphasized here is that we are dealing with a kind of 'freeze of time': the flow of life is suspended, the Real of the dynamic living process is replaced by a 'dead', immobilized image Lacan himself uses the metaphor of cinema projection, and compares the ego to the fixed image which the spectator perceives when the reel gets jammed. So, already at this most elementary level, one has to invert the commonplace according to which an animal is caught in its environs, in the self-enclosed organic whole of Innenzvelt and Aussenwelt, while man can transcend this closure, dialectically subvert the confines of his environs, build new, artificial environs, and so on yes, but what makes this transcendence possible is precisely an excessive fixation on the mirror-image. The answer to this deadlock may seem to reside in the opposition between imaginary fixity and the dialectic fluidity and mediating power of the symbolic process: an animal remains stuck at the imaginary level, it is caught in the mirror-relationship to its environs, while man is able to transcend this closure by being engaged in the process of symbolization. It is the realm of 'symbolic fictions' which enables us to adapt ourselves to ever new situations, radically to change our self-perception, and so on. Is not the ultimate feature of the symbolic order found in its utter contingency? We can never derive the 'story we tell about ourselves' from our 'real situation', there is always a minimal gap between the real and the mode (s) of its symbolization .... Here however, again, the very plasticity of the process of symbolization is strictly correlative to even grounded in the excessive fixation on an empty signifier: to put it in a somewhat simplified way, I can change my symbolic identity precisely and only in so far as my symbolic universe includes 'empty signifiers' which can be filled in by a new particular content. For example, the democratic process consists of the elaboration of ever new freedoms and equalities (of women, of workers, of minorities .. .); but throughout this process, the reference to the signifier 'democracy' is a constant, and the ideological struggle is precisely the struggle to impose an ever new meaning on this term (say, to claim that democracy which is not inclusive of democracy for women, which does not also preclude workers' enslavement, which does not also include respect for religious, ethnic, sexual, etc., minorities, is not true democracy .. .). The very plasticity of the signified content (the struggle for what democracy 'really means') relies on the fixity of the empty signifier 'democracy'. What characterizes human existence is thus the 'irrational' fixation on some symbolic Cause, materialized in a Master-Signifier to whom we stick regardless of the consequences, disregarding our most elementary interest, survival itself: _it is the very 'stubborn attachment' to some Master-Signifier (ultimately a `signifier without signified') which enables man to maintain free flexibility towards every signified content (the fact that I fear God absolutely enables me to overcome my fear of any worldly threat, etc.). According to this second commonplace, the self-transcending plasticity and freedom of man is grounded in the distance between 'things' and `words', in the fact that the way we relate to reality is always mediated by a contingent symbolic process. Here again, however, a certain excessive fixity intervenes: according to psychoanalytic theory, a human subject can acquire and maintain a distance towards (symbolically mediated) reality only through the process of 'primordial repression': what we experience as 'reality' constitutes itself through the foreclosure of some traumatic X which remains the impossiblereal kernel around which symbolization turns. What distinguishes man from animals is thus again the excessive fixation on the trauma (of the lost object, of the scene of some shattering jouissance, etc.); what sets the dynamism that pertains to the human condition in motion is the very fact that some traumatic X eludes every symbolization. 'Trauma' is that kernel of the Same which returns again and again, disrupting any symbolic identity. So, at each of the three levels, the very dynamic, adaptive, self-transcending capacity which defines subjectivity is grounded in an excessive fixation.

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AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

LINK: ENJOYMENT OF DISTANCEDIVORCED HUSBAND

AFFIRMATIVES PASSIONATE CRITICISM OF DEBATE GLOSSES OVER ONE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM THEY HAVE TO BE A DEBATER TO MAKE THIS CRITICISM. THE AFFIRMATIVE IS LIKE A HUSBAND WHO DIVORCES HIS WIFE, BUT THEN ACTS LIKE NORMAL, ENJOYING THEIR DISTANCE BUT SHIRKING ALL RESPONSIBILITY. THEY USE THE ACTIVITY TO MEDIATE THEIR ENJOYMENT OF DEBATE SO THEY CAN ENJOY IT WITHOUT THE ANXIETY THAT COULD DRIVE THEM TO MAKE IT TRULY BETTER, OR EVEN LEAVE THE ACTIVITY

THE

IEK, DIRECTOR OF HUMANITIES AT THE BIRKBECK INSTITUTE, 1997 [SLAVOJ, THE PLAGUE OF FANTASIES, P. 113-116]
At the level of elementary psychological observation, one can answer this by recalling the deep satisfaction a subject (a parent, for example) can derive from the awareness that his or her beloved daughter or son is really enjoying something; a loving parent can literally enjoy through the Other's enjoyment. However,

there is a much more uncanny phenomenon at work here: the only way really to account for the satisfaction and liberating potential of being able to enjoy through the Other of being relieved of one's enjoyment and displacing it on to the Other is to accept that enjoyment itself is not an immediate spontaneous state, but is sustained by a superego imperative: as Lacan emphasized again and again, the ultimate content of the superego injunction is 'Enjoy!'.
In order to grasp this paradox properly, one should first elucidate the opposition between the (public symbolic) Law and the superego. The public Law 'between the lines' silently tolerates incites, even what its explicit text prohibits (say, adultery), while the superego injunction which ordains jouissance, through the very directness of its order, hinders the subject's access to it much more efficiently than any prohibition. Let us recall the figure of the father who advises his son on sexual exploits: if the father warns him against it, formally prohibits him from dating girls, and so on, he of course, between the lines, only propels the son to do it to find satisfaction in violating the paternal prohibition; if, on the contrary, the father, in an obscene way, directly pushes him to 'behave like a man' and seduce girls, the actual effect of this will probably be the opposite (the son's withdrawal, shame of the obscene father, even impotence ...). Perhaps the briefest way to render the superego paradox is the injunction 'Like it or not, enjoy yourself!'.

An attempt to resolve this same deadlock is the typical hysterical strategy of changing (suspending) the symbolic link while pretending that nothing has changed in reality: a husband, say, who divorces his wife and then continues to visit her house and the kids regularly as if nothing had happened, feeling not only as at home as before, but even more relaxed; since the symbolic obligation to the family is broken, he can now really take it easy and enjoy it. Against this background, it is easy to discern the liberating potential of being relieved of enjoyment: in this
way, one is relieved of the monstrous duty to enjoy. On closer analysis, one would thus have to distinguish between two types of 'the Other doing (or, rather, enduring) it for me' :31 In the case of commodity fetishism, our belief is laid upon the Other: I think I do not believe, but I believe through the Other. The gesture of criticism here consists in the assertion of identity: no, it is you who believe through the Other (in the theological whimsies of commodities, in Santa Claus ...). In the case of a video recorder viewing and enjoying a film for me (or of the canned laughter, or of the weepers who cry and mourn for you, or of the Tibetan prayer wheel) it is the other way round: you think you enjoyed the show, but the Other did it for you. The gesture of criticism here is that, no, it was not you who laughed, it was the Other (the TV set) who did it. Is not the key to this distinction that we are dealing here with the opposition between belief and jouissance, between the Symbolic and the Real? In the case of (symbolic) belief, you disavow the identity (you do not recognize yourself in the belief which is yours); in the case of (real) jouissance, you misrecognize the decentrement in what you (mis)perceive as 'your own' jouissance. Perhaps the fundamental attitude which defines the subject is neither that of passivity nor that of autonomous activity, but precisely that of interpassivity. This interpassivity is to be opposed to the Hegelian List der Vernunft ('cunning of Reason'): in the case of the 'cunning of Reason', I am active through the other that is, I can remain passive while the Other does it for me (like the Hegelian Idea which remains outside the conflict, letting human passions do the work for it); in the case of interpassivity, I am passive through the other that is, I accede to the other the passive aspect (of enjoying), while I can remain actively engaged (I can continue to work in the evening, while the VCR passively enjoys for me; I can make financial arrangements for the deceased's fortune while the weepers mourn for me). This allows us to propose the notion of false activity: you think you are active, while your true position, as embodied in the fetish, is passive .... Do we not encounter something akin to this false activity in the paradox of Predestination (the very fact that things are decided in advance that our attitude to Fate is that of a passive victim urges us to engage ourselves in incessant frenetic activity) and in the typical strategy of the obsessional neurotic, which also involves a 'false activity': he is frantically active in order to prevent the real thing from happening (in a group situation in which some tension threatens to explode, the obsessional talks all the time, tells jokes, etc., in order to prevent the awkward moment of silence which would make the participants aware of the underlying tension).32 The object which gives body to the surplus-enjoyment fascinates the subject, it reduces him to a passive gaze impotently gaping at the object; this relationship, of course, is experienced by the subject as something shameful, unworthy. Being directly transfixed by the object, passively submitting to its power of fascination, is ultimately unbearable: the open display of the passive attitude of 'enjoying it' somehow deprives the subject of his dignity.

Interpassivity is therefore to be conceived as the primordial form of the subject's defence against jouissance: I defer jouissance to the Other who passively endures it (laughs, suffers, enjoys ...) on my behalf. In this precise sense, the effect of the subject supposed to enjoy the gesture of transposing one's
jouissance to the Other is perhaps even more primordial than that of the 'subject supposed to know', or the 'subject supposed to believe'. Therein lies the libidinal strategy of a pervert who assumes the position of the pure instrument of the Other's jouissance: for the (male) pervert, the sexual act (coitus) involves a clear division of labour in which he reduces himself to a pure tool of woman's enjoyment; he is doing the hard work, accomplishing the active gestures, while she, in transports of ecstasy, endures it passively and stares into space .... In the course of the psychoanalytic treatment, the subject has to learn to accept directly his relationship to the object which gives body to his jouissance, bypassing the proxy who enjoys in his place, instead of him.

The disavowed fundamental passivity of my being is structured in the fundamental fantasy which, although it is a priori inaccessible to me, regulates the way I relate to jouissance. For that precise reason, it is impossible for the

subject to assume his fundamental fantasy without undergoing the radical experience of 'subjective destitution': in assuming my fundamental fantasy, I take upon myself the passive kernel of my being the kernel the distance towards which sustains my subjective activity. The substitution of the object for the subject is thus in a way even more primordial than the substitution of the signifier for the subject: if the signifier is the form of 'being active through another', the object is the form of 'being passive through another' that is to say, the object is primordially that which suffers, endures it, for me, in my place: in short, that which enjoys for me. So what is unbearable in my encounter with the object is that in it, I see myself in the guise of a suffering object: what reduces me to a fascinated passive observer is the scene of myself passively enduring it. Far from being an excessive phenomenon which occurs only in extreme 'pathological' situations, interpassivity, in its opposition to interactivity (not in the standard sense of interacting with the' medium, but in the sense of another doing it for me, in my place), is thus the feature which defines the most elementary level, the necessary minimum, of subjectivity: in order to be an active subject, I have to get rid of and transpose on to the other the inert passivity which contains the density of my substantial being. In this precise sense, the opposition signifier/ object overlaps with the opposition interactivity/interpassivity: the signifier is interactive, it is active on my behalf, in my place, while the object is interpassive, it suffers for me. Transposing my very passive experience on to another is a much more uncanny phenomenon than that of being active through another: in interpassivity I am decentred in a much more radical way than I am in interactivity, since interpassivity deprives me of the very kernel of my substantial identity. Consequently, the basic matrix of interpassivity follows from the very notion of subject as the pure activity of (self-)positing, as the fluidity of pure Becoming, devoid of any positive, firm Being: if I am to function as pure activity, I have to externalize my (passive) Being in short: I have to be passive through another. This inert object which 'is' my Being, in which my inert Being is externalized, is the Lacanian objet petit a. In so far as the elementary, constitutive structure of subjectivity is hysterical in so far, that is, as hysteria is defined by the question 'What for an object am I (in the eyes of the Other, for the Other's desire)?', it confronts us with interpassivity at its purest: what the hysterical subject is unable to accept, what gives rise to an unbearable anxiety in him, is the presentiment that the Other(s) perceive him in the passivity of his Being, as an object to be exchanged, enjoyed or otherwise 'manipulated'.

Therein lies the 'ontological axiom' of Lacanian subjectivity: the more I am active, the more I must be passive in another's place that is to say, the more there must be another object which is passive in my place, on my behalf. (This axiom is realized in its utmost simplicity in the proverbial senior manager who, from time to time, feels compelled to visit prostitutes to be exposed to masochistic rituals and 'treated as a mere object'.) What psychoanalysis is looking for in an active subject is precisely the fundamental fantasy which sustains his disavowed passivity.

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And its at this point that he recognizes that the world doesnt appear to have changed all that much Jacques Lacan, Seminar III

AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

LINK: ENJOYMENT MEDIATIONSTRAWBERRY CAKE

THE STRUGGLE FOR RECOGNITION WITHIN THE DEBATE COMMUNITY MAINTAINS THE OBJECT OVER WHICH THEY STRUGGLE AS A FANTASMATIC ENTITY RATHER THAN A SUBJECTIVE ACTOR. THIS REINSCRIBES THEIR POLITICAL GOALS INTO THE REALM OF PASSIVITY, NECESSITATING THEIR CONTINUED DOMINATION BECAUSE IT MAINTAINS THEIR ENJOYMENT IEK, DIRECTOR OF HUMANITIES AT THE BIRKBECK INSTITUTE, 1997 [SLAVOJ, THE PLAGUE OF FANTASIES, P. 8-10]
2: Intersubjectivity The critical depreciation and abandonment of the term 'intersubjectivity' in late Lacan (in clear contrast to his earlier insistence that the proper domain of psychoanalytic experience is neither subjective nor objective, but that of intersubjectivity) does not in any way involve an abandonment of the notion that the subject's relation to his/her Other and the latter's desire is crucial to the subject's very identity - paradoxi-cally one should claim that Lacan's abandonment of `intersubjectivity' is ' strictly correlative to the focusing, of attention on the enigma of the impenetrable Other's desire ('Che vuoi?'). What the late Lacan does with intersubjectivity should be opposed to early Lacan's Hegelo-Kojvian motifs of the struggle for recognition, of the dialectical connection between recognition of desire and desire for recognition, as well as to middle Lacan's 'structuralist' motif of the big Other as the anonymous symbolic structure. Perhaps the easiest way to discern these shifts is by focusing on theme changed status of the object. In earl Lacan, the object is depreciated as to its inherenet qualities; it counts only as a stake in the intersubjective struggles for recognition and love (the milk demanded by a child from the mother is reduced to a 'sign of love', that is, the demand for milk effectively aims at prompting the mother to display her love for the child; a jealous subject demands from his parents a certain toy; this toy becomes the object of his demand, because he is aware that it is also coveted by his brother, etc.). In late Lacan, on the contrary, the focus shifts to the object that the subject itself 'is', to the agalma, secret treasure, which guarantees a minimum of phantasmic consistency to the subject's being. That is to say: objet petit a, as the object of fantasy is that 'something in me more than myself' on account of which I perceive myself as 'worthy of the Other's desire'. One should always bear in mind that the desire 'realized' (staged) in fantasy is not the subject's own, but the other's desire: fantasy, phantasmic formation, is an answer to the enigma of 'Che vuoi?' - 'You're saying this, but what do you really mean by saying it?' - which established the subject's primordial, constitutive position. The original question of desire is not directly 'What do I want?' but 'What do others want from me? What do they see

The second feature concerns the radically intersubjective character of fantasy.

in me? What am I to others? A small child is embedded in a complex network of relations; he serves as a kind of catalyst and battlefield for the desires of those around him: his father, mother, brothers and sisters, and so on, fight their battles around him, the mother sending a message to the father through her care for the son. While he is well aware of this role, the child cannot fathom what object, precisely, he is to others, what the exact nature of the games they are playing with him is, and fantasy provides an answer to this enigma: at its most fundamental, fantasy tells me what I am to my others. It is again anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitic paranoia, which reveals this radically intersubjective character of fantasy in an exemplary way: fantasy (the social fantasy of the Jewish plot) is an attempt to provide an answer to 'What does society want from me?', to unearth the meaning of the murky events in which I am forced to participate. For that reason, the standard theory of 'projection',
accord-ing to which the anti-Semite projects on to the figure of the Jew the disavowed part of himself, is not sufficient: the figure of the 'conceptual Jew' cannot be reduced to externalization of my (anti-Semite's) 'inner conflict'; on the contrary, it bears witness to (and tries to cope with) the fact that I am originally decentered, part of an opaque network whose meaning and logic elude my control. This radical intersubjectivity of fantasy is discernible even in the most elementary cases, like that (reported by Freud) of his little daughter fantasizing about eating a strawberry cake - what we have here is by no means a simple case of the direct hallucinatory satisfaction of a desire (she wanted cake, she didn't get it, so she fantasized about it ...). That is to say: what one should introduce here is precisely the dimension of intersubjectivity: the

crucial feature is that while she was voraciously eating a strawberry cake, the little girl noticed how her parents were deeply satisfied by this spectacle, by seeing her fully enjoying it - so what the fantasy of eating a strawberry cake is really about is her attempt to form an identity (of the one who fully enjoys eating a cake given by the parents) that would satisfy her parents, would make her the object of their desire ....
One can clearly perceive the difference here from early Lacan, for whom the object is reduced to a token which is totally insignificant in itself since it matters only as the point in which my own and the Other's desires intersect: for Late Lacan, the object, is precisely that which is 'in the subject more than the subject itself,' that which I fantasize that the Other (fascinated by me) sees in me. So it is no longer the object which serves as the mediator between my desire and the Other's desire; rather, it is the Other's desire itself which serves as the mediator between the 'barred' subject ($) and the lost object that the subject 'is', that provides the minimum of phantasmic identity to the subject. And one can also see in what la traversee du fantasme consists: in an acceptance of the fact that there is no secret treasure in me, that the support of me (the subject) is purely phantasmic. We can now see clearly, also, the opposition between Lacan and Habermas. Habermas insists on the difference between the subjectobject relationship and intersubjectivity proper: in the latter, the other subject is precisely not one of the objects in my field of experience, but the partner in a dialogue, the interaction with whom, within a concrete life-world, forms the irreducible background of my experience of reality. What he represses thereby, however, is simply and precisely the intersection of these two relations the level at which another subject is not yet the partner in intersubjective symbolic communication and/or interaction, but remains an object, a Thing, that which makes a 'neighbour' into a sleazy repulsive presence this other qua the object which gives body to an unbearable excess of jouissance is the proper 'object of psychoanalysis'. Lacan's point is thus that symbolic intersubjectivity is not the ultimate horizon behind which one cannot reach: what precedes it is not a 'monadic' subjectivity, but a pre-symbolic 'impossible' relation to an Other which is the real Other, the Other as Thing, and not yet the Other located within the field of intersubjectivity.

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AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

LINK: DEVELOPMENT
THE AFF PARTICIPATES IN A FANTASY OF HARMONY WHEREIN UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA IS BROUGHT UP TO SPEED WITH THE WESTERN SELF. THIS FANTASY ENCOUNTERS PERPETUAL RESISTANCE IN THE FORM OF NEW AFRICAN OBSTACLES FOR THE US TO SOLVE. WHAT RESULTS IS AN ENDLESS RELATIONSHIP OF DOMINATION AND DEPENDENCE WHEREIN AFRICA IS PRESENTED AS SYMBOLICALLY DEFICIENT, SUBORDINATE TO THE WEST. SATO, SCHOOL OF EDUCATIONS CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION, 2006 [CHIZU, SUBJECTIVITY, ENJOYMENT, AND DEVELOPMENT:
PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON A NEW APPROACH TO POSTDEVELOPMENT RETHINKING MARXISM, VOLUME 18, ISSUE 2 APRIL ]

Within Lacanian psychoanalysis, Development (with a capital D) can be thought of as one of a sequence of social fantasies born after World War II whose effect has been to guarantee social harmony in the sociosymbolic field These fantasies have naturalized longstanding though continually shifting imperialist class struggles. In modern society, Development is promoted through the creation of a certain symbolic authority (ego ideal) with which both 'the Developed' and 'the Underdeveloped' can identify. While changes in context have shaped the manifestation of this fantasmatic scenario, the Developed have always had the mandate to identify and develop all the Underdeveloped through Western capitalist development. The Underdeveloped, for their part, are forced by the Law of Development to accept their subordinate symbolic position For the Developed, the relationship between the Developed and the Underdeveloped appears to be noncontradictory. Let us look at a well-known example from a psychoanalytic perspective. In 1949, U.S. President Harry Truman said that the Underdeveloped were, among other things, "victims of disease" (quoted in Escobar 1995, 3). In this speech he articulated fully the identity of the Underdeveloped and made the excessive demand that they should develop themselves by engaging in "greater [Capitalist] commodity production" (3). He further stated that, ultimately, it was the gift of "modern scientific and technical knowledge that would bring development to the Underdeveloped" (3). This speech exposes the self-identified Developed as constituted within and dependent on the Law of Development. The Developed exist only in relation to the Underdeveloped, and both can be found only within the fantasy of Development. Looking at this self-congratulatory picture from the other side, two short statements made by India's first postindependence prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, are telling.
The very thing that India lacked, the modern West possessed and possessed to excess. It had a dynamic outlook Because it was dynamic, it was progressive and full of life India, as well as China, must learn from the West for

2004, 16)We are trying to catch up, as far as we can, with the Industrial Revolution that occurred long ago in 2003, 2)This bondage was to be resolved by pursuing 'greater production' through the West-directed 'Industrial Revolution'. In other words, he accepted his (or India's) place in the symbolic order as the non-Modern, the non-Industrialized, thus 'the Underdeveloped' in need of 'capitalist development' facilitated by the West/the Developed. In this scenario, the Underdeveloped is also, albeit differently, bound to the Law and the self-identified Developed appears fully to govern the Underdeveloped. A psychoanalytic reading tells us that this seemingly noncontradictory social bond between the Developed and the Underdeveloped is a semblance. That is, the perception the Developed has of this social bond is made possible by the repression of an absolutely necessary unconscious fantasy. Speaking from an already historically power-laden position, the self-identified Developed (i.e., Truman) fantasized that his demands would be fulfilled by the Underdeveloped. In this scenario, the Developed can be read as experiencing the absolute enjoyment that derives from solidifying his identity as a master by turning the Underdeveloped into a passive object. Yet, the truth is that this master is marked by the lack (the unconscious).9 Within psychoanalytic theory, the lack is instituted at the moment an individual enters the sociosymbolic field. At that time the individual undergoes symbolic castration that forever denies the possibility of absolute enjoyment. Once within the symbolic order, his speech acts appear wholly to be determined by the conscious; however, at the level of the unconscious, he is neurotically and desperately trying to cover over this necessary internal lack in order to maintain his place as the master in the symbolic order. This unconscious attempt to cover over the lack provides the template for the consistent failure of the Developed's enunciation. That is, his demand always produces at least one excess or surplus that the Underdeveloped fail to embody in responding to his demand. This is why it is the self-identified Developed who continually produces new theories and technologies to compensate for, or to paper over, the gap created by the surplus in this social bond. Or, to put it differently, his consistent failure can be read as the unconscious resistance of the seemingly self-identified Developed to fully conform to the Law of Development. In either case, despite the conscious appearances to the contrary, the Developed is a passive object that provides enjoyment to the Other, the symbolic order of development. The constant attempts of the Developed to cover over the antagonisms within his fantasy provide its conditions of existence. Thus, both the excessive demands of and the constant creation
the modern West has much to teach, and the spirit of the age is represented by the West. (quoted in Bergeron Western countries. (quoted in Chakrabarti and Cullenberg of new theories and technologies by the Developed should be read as symptoms of this social bond.

the Underdeveloped is also turned into a passive object of the Other's enjoyment. The Underdeveloped, in the same scenario is repressed in relation to the self-identified Developed who speaks from an already historically power-laden position. The knowledge and desires external to those specified by Development are irrelevant to the self-identified Developed and are inadmissible in the consciousness of the self-identified Developed. This repression of the Underdeveloped is the price they have to pay in order to enter the symbolic order of development. The Underdeveloped represses her own knowledge and desire - in other words, gives up the enjoyment experienced before entering the symbolic order of development in order to derive the enjoyment available within the fantasy of Development. The fantasy might, for example, be that if the Underdeveloped fully responds to the demands of the Developed, she will gain the freedom identified as hers by the Law of
It is perhaps more obvious that as discussed above, Development. Or reading differently, the surplus produced through the social bond can be read as the Underdeveloped, albeit unconsciously, enjoying the freedom found in resisting fully conformity with the Law of Development.

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AFRICAN FANTASIES

UTNIF 2007

LINK: DEVELOPMENT
THE AFF PROMISES A SHINY NEW ERA OF DEVELOPMENT POLICY BUT IS REALLY JUST MORE OF THE SAME. AFRICA IS NOT EMPOWERED BY THE PLAN BUT FURTHER SUBJUGATED TO THE IMPERIAL DESIRES OF THE WEST. THE 1AC FASCINATION WITH THE AFRICAN OTHER IS REALLY ONLY A PROJECTION OF THE ANXIETIES THAT ATTEND OUR OWN IDENTITIES. FAILURE TO CONFRONT THIS LIBIDINAL ATTACHMENT TO SEEING OURSELVES IN THE OTHER GUARANTEES THAT THE AFFIRMATIVE ONLY REPEATS THE TERMS OF IMPERIALISM AND DOMINATION.

KAPOOR, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES, 2005 [ILAN, PARTICIPATORY DEVELOPMENT, COMPLICITY, AND DESIRE. THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY VOL. 26 ISS. 8 NOVERMBER]
At a time when imperialism looks naked and pervasive, when 'freedom' and 'democracy' are all but forced on people (eg in Iraq), any North-to-South exchange appears particularly suspicious. Thus, thanks at least in part to the growing influence of the Western-dominated Bretton Woods institutions, the field of international development struggles harder and harder to escape its reputation as a Trojan horse. And now, so does one of its newest offspring - participatory development (pd) - and this in spite of the latter's 'noble' goals. pd ostensibly implies discarding mainstream development's neocolonial tendencies, Western-centric values and centralised decision-making processes. It stands instead for a more inclusive and 'bottom-up' politics, which takes two dominant institutional forms: 1) Participatory Rural Appraisal (pra), which aims at promoting local community 'empowerment'; and 2) country 'ownership' of development programmes, where the state and/or international development agency seeks civil society involvement for policy development and agenda setting. 1 In one form or the other, pd has become development's new orthodoxy, so much so that you would be hard-pressed to find any ngo, donor agency or development institution that has not integrated it into programming. But of late PD has faced notable scrutiny and criticism. Critics point out that, far from being inclusive and bottom-up, it reconfigures power and value systems which may end up being exclusionary, if not tyrannical (Mosse, 1994; Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Kapoor, 2002a). It is shown to be gender-biased, frequently ignoring and reinforcing patriarchal structures (Parpart, 2000). And it seen as a 'liberal populist' approach to development that fails to address either class inequalities or the negative impacts of macro-socioeconomic structures (Mohan & Stokke, 2000). I would like, in this article, to include and extend the above criticisms by carrying out a postcolonial and psychoanalytic reading of pd. Postcolonialism helps point out that our discursive constructions of the Third World say more about us than the Third World; while psychoanalysis helps uncover the desires we invest in the Other. Thus, to the question, 'why do neo-imperial and inegalitarian relationships pervade pd?', I want to answer, 'because even as it promotes the Other's empowerment, it hinges crucially on our complicity and desire'; and 'because disavowing such complicity and desire is a technology of power'. In other words, I want to argue that complicity and desire are written into pd, making it prone to an exclusionary, Western-centric and inegalitarian politics. I write 'our' in an effort at self-implication: it seems to me that, whether we are critics or advocates of pd, we are implicated in it. As development workers and researchers, as intellectuals and academics, we may make (at least a part of) our careers off it. As Westerners, some of our sociocultural values and practices may inform pd (as we shall see below). As members of Western(ised) elites participating in the global capitalist economy, we may be direct or indirect contributors (as taxpayers, consumers, voters) to those national or transnational institutions that 'invest' in pd. True, there are different degrees of contamination here; but my point is that not owning up to the range of these complicities ensures the reproduction of inequality and empire.

THE AFFIRMATIVE IS HARDLY A STORY ABOUT AFRICA. INSTEAD, THEIR FETISHIZATION OF AFRICA AND ATTEMPT TO MOLD IT IN OUR IMAGE IS A STORY ABOUT THE WESTERN SELF. THIS STRANGE ECONOMY OF DESIRE RESULTS IN HOMOGENIZING DEVELOPMENT POLICIES, I.E. THE PLAN, AND DEMANDS VIOLENT OUTBURST AGAINST THREATENING OTHERS TO SUSTAIN ITSELF.
DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY, VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE AND STATE UNIVERSITY, 2004. [GEAROID, CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS AND DEVELOPMENT THEORY: INTENSIFYING THE DIALOGUE. TRANSACTIONS OF THE INSTITUTE OF BRITISH GEOGRAPHERS, NEW SERIES, VOL. 19, NO. 2] Slater's argument can be read as primitively Lacanian. A more explicit consideration of Lacan's themes sharpens Slater's points. First, the 'geopolitical Imagination' can be read in terms of the Lacanian Imaginary, the identificatory process by which a subiect locates itself in the world and separates inside from outside, subject from object, and self from other (Grosz 1990. 35). But this locating and affixing of identity is truly imaginary, for the subject (in this case 'the West') is never unified and stable but fragmented and schizoid. Lacan stresses the alienated nature of subjectivity, the gap between self-comprehension and the real. Secondly, Lacan's mirror stage highlights the significance of the specular image in the process of identity. The imaginary ego-image is the organizing site of perspective on the world. Western discourses on development and the Third World, therefore, can be understood not as discourse about the 'reality' of the Third World, but as another means by which the West represents its own ideal of itself to itself. The West supposedly has civilization (which is 'protected' by periodic barbaric wars against its designated Others), democracy (built on cash, media manipulation and the gerrymander) and market capitalism (which is organized gangsterism in Japan, Brazil, Italy and other places) whereas the Third World does not. Western speculations on development, in Lacanian terms, are specularizations, discourses which positively image rather than describe the world. For Lacan, the language of visualization ('we envisage', 'Western vision of development', 'IMF monitoring', etc.) and panoptic survey is never neutral but a motivated projection of demand and desire. Thirdly, Lacan's account of desire as a fundamental lack which impels subjects to search out a series of substitute objects may account for the persistent felt need to wage wars against defiant male leaders (Castro, Qaddafi, Noriega, Hussein) in the Third World. Desire, for Lacan, is insatiable and not reducible to any symbolic logic. This point would seem extremely relevant to explanations (insofar as 'we' can ever have any) of the persistent economic war against Cuba, the airstrikes against Libya, the Panama invasion and the Gulf War.

TUATHAIL,

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THE AFFS DEFERRAL TO SEEMINGLY OBJECTIVE MEASURES OF ADVANCEMENT ONLY EVIDENCES THE EXTENT TO WHICH THEY HAVE BEEN THOROUGHLY ENTRENCHED IN THE SYMBOLIC UNIVERSE OF DEVELOPMENT. THIS DEFERRAL STEMS FROM A LIBIDINAL ENJOYMENT OF THE FREEDOMS ASSOCIATED WITH PARTICIPATION IN THE SOCIAL CONSENSUS. UNFORTUNATELY, THIS SAME ENJOYMENT TIRELESSLY FRUSTRATES ITSELF, THE LETTER ALWAYS FAILS TO ARRIVE AT ITS DESTINATION. CONSEQUENTLY, THE IRRATIONAL ATTACHMENT THAT THE AFF MAINTAINS TO FIXING AFRICA ENDLESSLY CIRCULATES, JUSTIFYING EVER NEW AND EVER MORE INVASIVE DEVELOPMENT POLICIES. SATO, SCHOOL OF EDUCATIONS CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION, 2006 [CHIZU, SUBJECTIVITY, ENJOYMENT, AND DEVELOPMENT:
PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON A NEW APPROACH TO POSTDEVELOPMENT RETHINKING MARXISM, VOLUME 18, ISSUE 2 APRIL ]

Lacanian psychoanalysis directs us to recognize 'scientific' or 'objective' knowledge as produced and consumed at many levels within a historically maintained hierarchy of social bonds. Examples are found in the professor/student dyad at a university and the developer/beneficiary relationship which is an update of that of the colonizer and the colonized. These bonds, in turn, form part of the sociosymbolic webs within which individuals are interpellated as subjects of development. The actions that these subjects of development undertake both instantiate Development and disguise the semblance that binds the self-identified Developed and the Underdeveloped. Development, in a manner similar to the functioning of Louis Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) (2001), deploys Western 'modern scientific and technical knowledge' in combination with repressive methods, such as examinations and tenure or performance reviews, to discipline both its shepherds (professors) and its flocks (students, experts, nongovernmental organization (NGO) officers, 'beneficiaries'). But why does an individual, who winds up serving as an instrument for Development, come to obey the Law of Development? What does psychoanalysis tell us about this? Psychoanalysis tells us that the role of enjoyment, which is undertheorized by both Althusser in his discussion of ISAs (iek 1989) and postdevelopment critics, is crucial. Both the Developed and the Underdeveloped abide by the Law in the hope of gaining symbolic respect, recognition, and approval from the Other to which each is differently enchained. Again, let's use
a familiar example, gross national product (GNP), which can be considered to function as a master signifier in modern society. The 'detached' professor, possessing 'objective' knowledge derived from authoritative texts, teaches the undisciplined student, who is not yet enchained within the Law, to be a subject of development.10 The professor teaches that capitalism is the only way to realize development and that GNP is the best indicator of development. He teaches specific knowledges and skills that his student will later be required to deploy as a development expert: how to plan, implement, and evaluate development activities, how to write proposals and reports, how to give orders - in short, all those skills necessary for a development expert to perform those tasks that the authoritative texts say will increase GNP. By positioning himself as the neutral instrument, the professor does nothing but legitimize and

rationalize the Law. On the other hand, to the extent she wishes to pass, the undisciplined student comes to embody the Law: capitalism is the only way forward, and GNP is the prime indicator of development. In attempting to embody the 'correct knowledge' of development, she creates symbolic role models for herself valued by the Other (ego ideals) (i.e., an A student and/or good daughter). In order to gain symbolic esteem and respect (in other words, in order not to fail exams), she must confront her superego's dictate to experience the egoistic enjoyment available prior to entering the symbolic order of development.11 She incrementally gives up
these egoistic enjoyments by, for example, substituting the enjoyments of sitting up late studying for those of drinking late and sleeping. What makes her keep striving is the enjoyment she comes to experience as a result of her attempts to cover over her lack with particular objects, such as getting an A on an exam. In this example,

interpellation is successful to the extent that the student conceives of herself as autonomous, as free of the Law, and as deciding on the basis of her own judgments. By deferring to the local embodiment of the Law (e.g., the professor) - in other words, by obeying the Law, the subject experiences 'freedom', which is the enjoyment that stems from gaining the symbolically mediated rewards (e.g., esteem, respect, symbolic position, etc.) that the Other desired for her to desire.Successfully realizing symbolically mediated rewards is not the only source of enjoyment for the subject. Lacanian psychoanalysis tells us that desire always fails because the subject is split (into the conscious and the unconscious) and the internal negativity, that which was excluded as the price of taking up her place within the sociosymbolic field, necessarily eludes symbolization. This internal negativity constantly interferes with the stable identification of the subject within its fantasmatic scenario. It precipitates subjects' hysterical questioning of the Law. This unconscious yet hysterical questioning, for example, may in part contribute to the endless elaboration of new theories and technologies whose pursuit stabilizes for a while the Development that necessarily represses her unconscious wishes and images. The subject, paradoxically, comes to fear the resolution of her questions insofar as this would precipitate an end to her enjoyment. As such, she finds special enjoyment in her inability to resolve the questions precipitated by the internal negativity, and this repetitive failure itself becomes a source of libidinal enjoyment. This libidinal enjoyment derives, for example, from 'less developed' counterparts who allow the 'more developed' not to worry about the efficacy of their speech by concocting practices that support the continued integrity of his identity. Despite the impossibility of resolving her
own lack, the impossible pursuit of the Other's desire produces for the subject both symbolically mediated and covert libidinal enjoyment.

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THE IMPACT IS THAT THE AFF ONLY FURTHER ENTRENCHES THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC POWER CONFIGURATIONS THAT PERVADE STATUS QUO NORTH-SOUTH RELATIONS. AFRICA IS NOT BENEFITED BY THE PLAN BUT FURTHER SUBJUGATED TO EVEN MORE BENEVOLENT UNITED STATES HEGEMONY. AFRICA BECOMES A PAWN IS THE AFFIRMATIVES SELF-AGGRANDIZING GESTURE WHICH ULTIMATELY ONLY ADDS SUPPORT TO A GLOBAL IMPERIALISM, TURNING AND OUTWEIGHING THE CASE. KAPOOR, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES, 2005 [ILAN, PARTICIPATORY DEVELOPMENT, COMPLICITY, AND DESIRE.
THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY VOL. 26 ISS. 8 NOVERMBER]
My point in tracking the above complicities and desires in pd is not to argue that they show up all of the time and in every aspect of programming; it is to suggest instead that they are liable to (and do) show up somewhere and at least part of the time because they are integral to pd. The propagation of pd depends

fundamentally on a propagator or convenor, who in the current geopolitical conjuncture tends to be us as members of elites and institutions in both the North and South. It is because of such inescapable complicity that personal and institutional benevolence in pd, while outwardly other-regarding, is deeply invested in self-interest (geopolitical, cultural, organisational, economic) and desire (narcissism, pleasurability, self-aggrandisement, purity, voyeurism, manageability, control).But pd's propagation is premised on overlooking these contaminations (ie the Real), and to this extent it is an ideology, in the iekian meaning of the term discussed earlier. pd as ideology is attractive and pleasurably desirable (in indulging our self-centredness). It is marketed and branded as wholesome and unblemished. But, even as it papers over its 'dirty secrets', what is notable about its ideological and misrecognising force is the ability to appear open, inclusive and transparent: 'The central paradoxis that the very process of production, the laying bare of its mechanism, functions as a fetish which conceals the crucial dimension of [its] form' (iek, 1997: 102). 4Three implications follow. First, the disavowal of complicity and desire (ie the construction of pd as ideology) is a technology of power, as a result of which participation can easily turn into its opposite - coercion, exclusion, panopticism, disciplinarity. Here, 'participation as empowerment' morphs into 'participation as power'. pd may appear pure and unmediated but, for this very reason, as we have seen, it is often deployed to wield authority, helping to maintain and further elite or institutional hegemony. Flashing pd as a badge, or romanticising our involvement in it, will tend to be similarly dangerous: innocently or benevolently claiming that one is helping a Third World community become participatory is not just self-aggrandising, but also risks perpetuating elite, panoptic or institutional power, all at the expense of the Third Word community. (This of course conjures up the triumphalist Bush/Blair claim of bringing 'freedom and democracy' to Iraq.)A second implication is that pd is a vehicle for various types of empire building - institutional, geopolitical, socioeconomic, cultural, personal. One such instance,
as underlined earlier, is the branding of pd to help widen institutional spheres of influence, while another is the World Bank/imf construction of pd as conditionality, through which participation becomes a 'euphemism for [global] neo-liberal capitalism' (Roy, 2004: 56).6 In either case, it is no wonder

that pd is a vehicle for empire: in this era of mediatisation, when image and spin matter so much, the construction of pd (or indeed of 'freedom' and 'democracy') as 'benevolent' and 'good' is an ideal cover.Note that to make such an argument is not to maintain that power is conspiratorial (pd = empire building = Western conspiracy). On the contrary, it is to agree with Foucault in suggesting that power circulates, so that institutional and social complicities and desires adjust, and are reconfigured, to pd's new power/knowledge regime. Thus, as mentioned earlier, consensus building can align with elite/institutional interests, and community gatherings can end up helping state monitoring of local communities. Now it is true that, in the current global context, many of these complicities and desires are Western/Westernised, reflecting
Western economic, geopolitical and cultural hegemonies. But they are not exclusively so (as I have tried to underline); they also reflect local hegemonies (class, patriarchal, institutional).Moreover, it is because power circulates that we, Western(ised) elites and intellectuals, are implicated in empire.

For example, as the earlier discussion on 'transference' emphasised, our development work is psychically and politically conditioned, so that we, too, develop, amend and transfer our interests and desires in accordance with pd's knowledge/power regime. This is why it is
too easy and convenient to blame contemporary empire building on transnational corporations or the Bush/Blair administrations alone; the latter may well be more powerfully complicitous, but this is no reason for us to claim innocence or neutrality. Empire building, in this sense, may well be a broadly cultural sign of the times, implicating the 'noble' as much as the 'ignoble', 'participation' as much as 'trade', 'citizens' as much as 'leaders'. And this is also why dismantling empire, if it is to happen, must take place at so many levels simultaneously (personal-structural, local-global, social-institutional, North-South, etc), a point I shall take up further below.A final implication is that pd perpetuates the treatment of the Third World as object and resource. If empowerment centres not on

the Other but on our own desire to be seen as benevolent, then Third World communities are in effect regarded as pawns. If participation is a conduit for transference of our politico-cultural ideals and frustrations, then the Third World becomes a disposal site, in the way that it already acts as a dumping ground for toxic waste or hazardous multinational corporate products (eg milk substitutes, contraceptive implants). And if pd enables the collection of information or 'field data' for our research and disciplinary/managerial needs, then the Third World is made into both resource and laboratory. Spivak argues, in this regard, that the Third World produces 'the wealth and the possibility of the cultural self-representation of the "First World" ' (1990: 96)

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THE PERMUTATION CONTINUES TO PARTICIPATE IN A FANTASY OF EMPOWERING THE OTHER VIA THE PLAN. THIS DAMNS THE ALTERNATIVE. A CRITICISM OF THE IDEOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT CANNOT TAKE PLACE FROM WITHIN THAT IDEOLOGY ITSELF, WHICH ALREADY SITUATES THE AFF VIS--VIS THE AFRICAN OTHER IN A WAY THAT SUSTAINS STATUS QUO POWER CONFIGURATIONS. KAPOOR, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES, 2005 [ILAN, PARTICIPATORY DEVELOPMENT, COMPLICITY, AND DESIRE.
THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY VOL. 26 ISS. 8 NOVERMBER]

While fantasy is an individualised or internalised psychic phenomenon, ideology interpellates us at the level of the social, from the outside. Like fantasy, it is a framework that forecloses the Real in order to make reality smooth and consistent. But iek is adamant that ideology is not a mask or veil covering the 'real' situation, a reality behind reality: it is 'not simply a "false consciousness", an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as "ideological" ' (1989: 21). In this sense, for iek, ideology is externalised and materialised: it is built into our sociopolitical practices and institutions. But if it surrounds us and interpellates us, how do we go about distancing ourselves from it, critiquing it? do something (but nevertheless go ahead and do it):
for iek, far Not through the development of some super-consciousness, since, as just pointed out, there is no 'higher' ground from which to distinguish 'true' from 'false' reality. And not through some sort of postmodern ironic distance, in which we admit we know better than to the TV viewer, for example, may mock and rail against TV advertisements, aware that they are commercial manipulations; but the point is that s/he still watches them, and does so with some delight.

Irony or cynicism from being critical, are built into ideology, underlining both how insidiously pervasive ideology is and how psychically enjoyable it can be (1989: 28, 33). No, ideology critique, according to him, can only be undertaken from within ideology itself, by being intimately alert to its machinations. And this means tracking and identifying ideology's Real its slips, disavowals, contradictions, ambiguities.

What iek helps reveal, then, are the psychoanalytic dimensions of our complicities. He points up the psychical-ideological work that goes into desiring reality and disavowing the Real or, in our case, desiring to empower the Other and overlooking our complicity. And so, drawing on these insights, I want to show pd to be ideological. As we shall see, it is promoted as benevolent, but forecloses various complicities and desires. It is championed and propagated by development institutions, which nonetheless seek to obscure their own participation in participation. It supposedly puts local Third World communities at the centre of development, but actually centres on First World and/or elite institutional and geopolitical interests. The task ahead, then, is to track these complicities and desires, and to scrutinise their accompanying slips, disavowals, contradictions, ambiguities.

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THE INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN REGIME NEEDS A FEW GOOD WOMEN MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE HELPLESS VICTIM OR INDUSTRIOUS HEROINE, WOMEN BECOME THE EVER MALLEABLE JUSTIFICATION OF EVERY NEW INTERVENTION OF THE MACHINERY OF INTERNATIONAL CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT. AS ALTRUISTIC, CRITICAL PARTICIPANTS IN THIS DEVELOPMENT PROJECT, WE NEED THIRD WORLD WOMEN TO DESIRE OUR HELP TO ASSUAGE THE DOUBT WE FEEL ABOUT THE WHOLE ENDEAVOR

WOOD, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES AT APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY, 2001 [CYNTHIA, AUTHORIZING GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT: THIRD WORLD WOMEN, NATIVE INFORMANTS, AND SPEAKING NEARBY, NEPANTLA: VIEWS FROM SOUTH 2.3, PROJECT MUSE]
5. Why Women?

It is possible to discuss demands to give voice to the voiceless in development discourse without attention to gender. I would argue, for example, that the World Bank's new interest in the participatory evaluation of poverty stems, at least in part, from the discursive need for development to be authorized by its "beneficiaries" (see Robb 1999; Narayan et al. 2000).9 Some of the emerging postdevelopment
literature may also inadvertently reproduce this subtle problematic by requiring authentic native informants' testimony to authorize itself (see Rahnema and Bawtree 1997). Even in these instances, however, I would also argue that whether or not women are obviously present, gender is fundamental to the functioning of development (and postdevelopment) as a discourse. It is not coincidental, even if it is overdetermined, that it is the figure of the third world woman which is so frequently called into the service of development (Spivak 1999, 274); Gayatri Spivak (1999, 200) suggests

that this figure is a "particularly privileged signifier, as object and mediator." Why is it especially necessary now, in the era of globalization and transnational capitalism, not only for the subaltern to speak, but also for her to be in so many cases a "third world woman?"10 Spivak (1999, 223) suggests that there is ideological significance to the "revision of women-in-development (modernization) to gender-and-development (New World Economic Order)." That this transition is tied to a new need to listen to previously silenced voices is equally significant, not least because it "apparently grants the woman free choice as subject" (291). The hostility expressed in development circles to the suggestion that the subaltern cannot speak (and also to the revelations of Mench's "deception"), I take as symptomatic of the importance of this speech to the discourse of development (see Marchand
and Parpart 1995). What follows is a series of partial and speculative glances at the questions "Why women?" combined with Spivak's (1999, 309) "What is at stake when we insist that the subaltern speaks?" One possible answer is that authorizing development through the figure of the third world woman, whether as victim or as authentic

heroine, posits "third world man" as appropriately absent or irredeemable. Strategies to control recalcitrant men and the women who fail to see their own interests and continue to support such men (women always circle the perimeter of male influence, so they can only be their own agents with help from "outside") are therefore justified in the name of development. [End Page 439] Another answer could be that third world women are available to be represented, either because they are not interested in representing themselves or because they are not allowed to. So they must be represented, la Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire. At least initially, it functioned best for development that this representation be that of victim, because defense of the vulnerable is a tried and true justification for all sorts of behavior, heinous and otherwise. But in that case, why were children not the chosen mediators? Granted that there has been attention to children in
the development literature, and granted also that part of the reason for attention to gender has always been women's reproductive and protective role vis- -vis children; nevertheless it seems necessary to explain why "children and development" is not the hot topic in development circles that gender and development is. More

recently, as "development" has become coincidental with neoliberal economics at so many international financial institutions, the importance of individual agency to this ideology requires women's voices to constitute them as rational economic actors. According to Arturo Escobar (1995, 184), an international climate "fostering the new visibility of women," which was institutionalized in the U.N. Decade on Women, coincided in the early 1980s with "a worsening of the food situation in many countries and declining availability of funding for social services under the impact of the debt crisis. It was thus that the state discovered' rural women" only when such a discovery was also functional for development. Escobar argues that development reduces women "to the prosaic status of human resources for boosting food production" and quotes Lourdes Arizpe's insightful comment: "Everybody seems to be nowadays preoccupied about the campesinas, but very few people are interested in them" (19091). A new preoccupation with women's education and success in microenterprise again serves the needs of development in its emphasis on the market (see Summers 1994).
Spivak's (1999, 28384) commentary on Freud and the hysteric points to another set of answers that lie in the complex and ambiguous need we feel as development agents to be desired by the third world woman: Sarah Kofman has suggested that the deep ambiguity of Freud's use of women as a scapegoat may be read as a reaction-formation to an initial and continuing desire to give the hysteric a voice, to transform her into the subject of hysteria. The masculine-imperialist ideological formation that shaped that desire into "the daughter's seduction" is part of the same formation [End Page 440] that constructs the monolithic "third-world woman." No contemporary metropolitan investigator is not influenced by this formation. Part of our "unlearning" project is to articulate our participation in this formationby measuring silences, if necessaryinto the object of investigation. Thus, when confronted with the questions, Can the subaltern speak? and Can the subaltern (as woman) speak? our efforts to give the subaltern a voice in history will be doubly open to the dangers run by Freud's discourse. It is in acknowledgment of these dangers rather than as a solution to a problem that I put together

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the sentence "White men are saving brown women from brown men" a sentence that runs like a red thread through today's "gender and development." My impulse is not unlike the one to be encountered in Freud's investigation of the sentence "A child is being beaten." Spivak's analysis suggests that third world women only achieve subjectivity in the context of development by actualizing the development academic and practitioner's desire to be desired. We need brown women (mediating agents we define in homogeneous terms that best satisfy our desires) to need us. This compulsion simultaneously serves development, which needs the third world woman to want to be developed. Ambiguity arises: who is victimizer, who victim, and who mediator in the sentence "White men are saving brown women from brown men"? Escobar (1995, 5354) argues that development "reproduces endlessly the separation between the reformer and those to be reformed," and

therefore relies on a "perpetual recognition and disavowal of difference." It thus also serves to reproduce the needs of its agents to reenact (perpetually) the satisfaction of their desires through the practice of development. Spivak (1999, 290) points to Derrida's assertion that every copula is a supplement: third world women become subjects only (and forever) when supplemented by development, which recodes imperialism's "civilizing mission" as the genteel gender "and" development.
Donna Haraway looks at another system of codes that suggests the function of gender in development discourse. Analyzing National Geographic specials on primates, Haraway decodes the meaning of Jane Goodall and other female anthropologists' communication with the great apes in the context of decolonization and the bomb. Far from being innocent of history, the image of a chimp's hand reaching out to touch Goodall's is [End Page 441] replete with it. The white woman, closer to nature and therefore capable of creating conditions receptive to the redeeming touch of the animal, stands as the surrogate for white men, thrown out of the garden by their complicity in colonization and the nuclear age. Apes stand in this story as "(colored) surrogates for all who have been colonized in the name of nature and whose judgment can no longer be repressed" (Haraway 1989, 152). The ape reaches out in a gesture of redemption that necessarily brings white folk back into the garden: "In all of these stories humans from scientific cultures are placed in nature' in gestures that absolve the reader and viewer of unspoken transgressions, that relieve anxieties of separation and solitary isolation on a threatened planet and for a culture threatened by the consequences of its own history. But the films and articles rigorously exclude the contextualizing politics of decolonization and exploitation of the emergent Third World" (156). Haraway bases her analysis on documentaries from the mid-1970s. Just as the transgressions and stresses related to first world production and consumption of "the third world" have changed since then, so necessarily must the gendered, racially marked and postcolonial codes of redemption. Now, brown women mediate entrance to the garden of modernity, but only when supplemented by development. This vision does much to soothe the privileged. If we allow voices previously silenced to have a voice, and they speak

to us, and they ask us to continue to "develop" them, and these voices are either innocent and victimized women or heroic women, both protectors of children and defenders of the hearth against, not us, but brown men (drunkards, abusers, and slackers all), must we not be satisfied? Are not our anxieties about the function of development and our presence in exotic, alien, and transformable terrain put to rest? That women of color can now stand and "speak" in the place of the mute apes is certainly no great advance, when the contextualizing politics of postcolonial globalization, development, and exploitation of the third world are equally disguised.
6. Conclusion in a Postcolonial Vein

I am not, of course, suggesting that we should not speak with poor women of the South. The challenge is to understand the many limitations of this speech.11 Postcolonial structures of power prevent subaltern women from setting the terms of engagement with development or from declining engagement altogether, and combat other forms of resistance directly, sometimes with force, sometimes with considerable subtlety. Unless these structures are actively resisted, we will continue to enact our part in the [End Page 442] development drama, demanding and receiving authority from authentic native informants. Nor am I suggesting that pragmatic concerns with policy and material conditions are misplaced. My critique of development as a discourse is strongly motivated by its failures in these areas. However, these failures cannot be understood apart from issues of representation, and development continues to thrive largely because it has succeeded in asserting its character as a neutral and technical science impervious to culture or ideology. At the same time, one implication of poststructuralist approaches to development is that projects to improve access to drinking water, for instance, are not the same everywhere, and that sometimes the costs of bringing water may be too high. Several
recent critics have taken up the challenge of evaluating policy and the empirical effects of development in terms that emphasize the local and situated responses of people struggling at "making a living and making it meaningful" (Bebbington 2000, 498; see also Fagan 1999). Ideologies of gender and representations of women are also situated and, I believe, as constitutive of local responses to development as they are of other aspects of development discourse. A number of postcolonial feminist critics have suggested the importance of being comfortable (or tolerating discomfort) with difference and its ambiguities in attempting to develop new strategies that actively resist privilege from both sides. "I do not intend to speak about," says Trinh (1992, 96) of Reassemblage, her film on Senegal, "just speak near by." Tsing (1993, xi) describes a similar approach to feminist ethnography in terms of "an alertness." Ong (1988, 87) points to the "need to keep a respectful distance." Since we are all enmeshed in ideologies demanding the control or erasure of difference, this is no easy task, as Spivak (1996, 293) argues: "It seems to me that finding the subaltern is not so hard, but actually entering into a responsibility structure with the subaltern, with responses flowing both ways: learning to learn without this quick-fix frenzy of doing good with an implicit assumption of cultural supremacy which is legitimized by unexamined romanticization, that's the hard part." This approach is almost certainly impossible in the context of development, which by definition is not bound simply to understand,

but to "help." Going away is not an option allowed by or for the academics and practitioners dependent on the institutions and ideologies of development. Even a good conversation is not sufficient to make third world women "equal participants in development" (Chowdhry 1995, 39). However, conversation that encourages difference is part of the process of [End Page 443] transforming development into
something better or dispensing with it altogether.

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THE VOYUERISTIC WAYS IN WHICH WE EXPERIENCE WAR IN DEBATE ARE THE EXEMPLIFICATION OF OUR DESIRE TO FIND THE SINGLE BIGGEST IMPACT CARD. THIS INDIVIDUAL DESRIE IS IN A DIRECT RELATIONSHIP WITH WHAT OUR LEADERS DECIDE IS BEST FOR THE NATION STATE. THIS NATIONAL DESIRE IS MANIFESTED IN OUR NEED TO BE DOMINAT OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS. THEIR IMPACT STORY IS NOT EXTERNAL TO JOURNEY TO ACHIEVE PERFECTION JUST LIKE HYPING UP AND WARRANTING DOWN THE BIGGEST IMPACT CARD IS NOT EXTERNAL TO OUR MULITPLE INVASIONS OF IRAQ AND THEIR FAILURES ON A LIBIDNAL LEVEL. SHAPIRO, CRITICAL INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORIST AND A PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII. 1993. [MICHAEL J. THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF VIOLENCE: LOGISTIC AND DESIRE IN THE GULF WAR THE POLITICAL SUBJECT OF VIOLENCE P.126-130]
the objects of desire are substitutable signs related to the subject's self-constitution and coherence. They are thus never destined to provide the self with satisfaction. Accordingly, during the recent Gulf War, discursively engendered understandings and desires found distant objects of attention, not only for those involved in combat however technologically mediated that involvement was but also for the viewing public, who watched the war on television and experienced the destruction of people and things at another technological level of remove. The highly mediated relationship, in which linguistic, and weapons technologies intervened, rendered the relationship between viewing and fighting subjects
Within a Lacanian frame, complex, for the targets of violence were rarely available to anyone's direct vision and were hardly ever available for direct contact. There was very little actual touching. It was indeed telling when one airforce pilot praised his sighting devices and weapons by remarking of his recently vanquished enemy, 'we could reach out and touch him, but he could not touch us' (a bit of discursive flotsam left over from AT&T's advertisement) one service remote touching of 'someone' was involved. In most senses, then, the objects of violence in the Gulf War were obscure and remote, both in that they were removed from sight and other human senses and that they emerged as appropriate targets through a tortuous signifying chain. More generally, they were remote in terms of the

meanings they had for their attackers and the attackers' legitimating and logistical supporters.
To place the implications for how hostile actions can be understood in such a peculiar, modern condition, it is appropriate to turn to Luis Bunuel's film Cet Obscur Objet du Desir (This/That Obscure Object of Desire), which contains not only a structure and dynamic that fits the array of subjects acting, in as well as following, the story of the Gulf War but also is implicitly structured within a Lacanian frame that fits the approach to interpreting the Gulf War to follow.

This/that obscure object of desire

At the level of its primary narration, Bunuel's film is the story of a failed seduction, told in flashbacks by the middle-aged Mathieu Fabert to his (accidental?) travelling companions, sharing a compartment in a train to Paris. At a more abstract level, the film is governed by a Lacanian view of the opacity or deeply encoded non-comportment between desire and its objects.

Ambiguities abound from the outset, not the least of which is the absence of a designation in the title that a woman is the object in question, which adds to the this/that (close or remote) ambiguity of the Cet in the French title.
Moreover, as is shown (but necessarily evident to all viewers of the film) Conchita, whom Fabert names as the object of his amorous quest, is two different women (she is represented by two different actresses), and this is seemingly never apparent to Fabert or his listeners in the train compartment. Apart from the various mediations between the various desiring subjects and objects in the film, however (Fabert's audience in his train compartment are straining with attention to the narrative), as viewers, we also have desires, and they remain unconsummated as the narrative and images frustrate our attempt to attain completion, to grasp a coherent episode unless we work to help make it coherent. Despite the seeming confidence with which Fabert delivers his story, what one sees, especially the dualistic Conchita and other enigmatic images and events, deprive us of confidence that we have a story we can understand. Ultimately, the imposition of meaning (by the viewers among others) on the ambiguous and arbitrary aspects of Fabert's story are organised within the frame of a Lacanian view of the functioning of desire. Bunuel leaves many hints that Lacan hovers in the background, and most significant for thepurposes at hand, the lessons of the film transfer to the US actions in the Gulf for it developed narrative of the derealisation of the targets of violence developed above.

Lacanian desire operates through a series of substitutions, there is a compatibility between the functioning of desire and logistical abstraction as they work together to locate targets of violence in modern warfare, despite how recalcitrant those targets may actually be to the meaning frames that direct the enemy-perceiving gaze. The operation of desire in a war works on the basis of a different process from that of an individual's search for erotic completion. It is connected to a national-level rather than individual-level work on the production of a coherent self. As has already been suggested in the analysis of Clausewitz's duplicitous discourse, what is represented as a quest for accomplishing political and military objectives obfuscates a more fundamental, ontological quest, the attempt for the national subject at completion through the display of courage and the lack of inhibition against using force in a violent confrontation with an enemy.
Because For a deeper appreciation of how desire complements the historically emerging, logistical narrative in which the enemy/object has been derealised, it is necessary to recognise that within the Lacanian view, desire is formed at the time when the subject first enters the realm of the symbolic. Residing as an infant in the domain of the imaginary, where there is no recognition of oneself as separate from others, the subject's entry into the symbolic is a dual alienation. First, it is a separation from the maternal source of satisfaction and, second, through becoming a named beings withal language, it is a loss of control over

meaning and the bonds of affect; it amounts to a subjugation to the law of the signifier.

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The compensation for this alienation is of course the ability to participate in the domain of the symbolic, but it is also the birth of desire, which, given the unlawfulness of achieving the satisfactions longed for but lost, takes the form of a series of substitutions. It is the alwaysobscuring acts, based on the ways in which the subject is divided from itself, that impose significance on the objects of desire, and within the Lacanian model, these impositions follow the twists and turns of linguistic, figural mechanisms. More specifically, Lacan notes in one place, 'desire is metonymy, however funny people may find the idea'.'
The metonymical structure of desire is displayed unambiguously in Bunuel's film when Conchita gets in bed with Fabert in a chastity-protecting undergarment tied tightly with little knots that he cannot undo. As he weeps in frustration, she names the various parts of her that he already possesses and expresses puzzlement that he is so resolute in his quest for the one part denied him. During the Gulf War, President Bush and many television commentators seemed caught in a similar signifying structure. What eluded final consummation in their case was not someone's maidenhead. It was Saddam Hussein's destruction. All the parts associated with him were possessed. Kuwait was freed, his army was routed, his 'weapons of mass destruction' largely eliminated. But as long as Saddam remained the ruling leader of Iraq, the 'victory in the desert' seemed empty. The narrative was left uncompleted.

perhaps 'Saddam Hussein' (the 'Hitler', the 'Arab fanatic', the 'ruthless dictator') needs to survive. Without him, there would remain no archenemy. Without Saddam Hussein, perhaps the US would not be .able to justify remaining so armed and alert. Indeed, this is precisely what Fabert says in response to his cousin, the arbiter/judge who asks why he doesn't just marry Conchita. Fabert says, Si je'epousais, je serais desarme.' (If Saddam had been destroyed or removed, no sense of fulfilment would have lasted because the conditions of possibility for producing desire would re-emerge. For example, of late in the United States there is a national debate over towards whom the reduced nuclear weapons arsenal ought to be aimed. National desire is searching for new dangerous objects).
But At this moment, at least, Fabert seems to understand much of what is driving his narrative, but there is also much evidence that the more fundamental part, remains obscure, for his story continually turns the incredible - e.g. encountering Conchita almost everywhere - into the credible. This is because the object of desire for Fabert (Mathieu for one Conchita and Mateo for another), like the enemy/object of violence for the United States, is in part a product of a

damaged subjectivity in search of reestablishing a coherence as an effective and virile male entity. In the case of the United States, the damaged collective subjectivity (often called the 'Vietnam syndrome') is a result of a lost and muddled war in the recent past. In the case of Fabert his manly subjectivity is similarly uncertain. First, his wife of many years is recently deceased and he
has had no substitute prior to his pursuit of Conchita. Second, he is a law-abiding, obviously well-established and well-off citizen and, in his pursuit of Conchita uses his spending power rather than his male strength (until the very end when driven to the limit with frustration). Meanwhile, all around him, he witnesses a series of acts of violence, car bombings, political assassinations, etc., apparently carried out by terrorist groups. At one point we overhear a radio report claiming that the bombings, which are randomly dispersed in his narrative, are attributed to coalitions of political groups that form the acronyms, PRIQUE and RUT. The virile young terrorists, with which one version of Conchita seems to be associated, serve as an affront to Fabert, who cannnot show his potence (cannot use his prick). Similarly, the collective subjectivity of the US prior to the Gulf War (the Vietnam syndrome) and its leader's potence (the 'wimp

factor') had been affronted by the violence of others not restricted by law-abiding inhibitions. Hence the increasingly frenzied complaints from the White House against terrorists (similar complaints issue from Fabert about the terrorist acts around him). Thus the comparison two levels of incomplete and increasingly provoked subjectivity in need of an episode of completion.
But perhaps, major similarity that suggests the Gulf War is the similarity in the dynamics governing the meanings of the objects of attention. In Fabert's narrative, Conchita appears as both lack (as an elusive object ofdesire) and excess (she appears everywhere Fabert goes). At one point, Fabert's servant likens women to a sac d'excrement. Rather than simply a sexist disparagement, this can be read as reference to the object of desire's excess, of all that is imposed on it by a restless, driven subjectivity. Conchita flees Fabert's employ as a servant after his initial advances, and then he encounters her as a restaurant coatcheck person, as part of a youthful gang in Switzerland, as a flamenco dancer in Seville. She is excessive, inexplicably appearing everywhere. With each encounter, she seems to promise herself to Fabert and then does something extraordinary to frustrate him. Similarly, as the Gulf War progressed, Saddam's resistance capability was easily overcome, but the superiority in the air and the decisive land battle left Saddam where he was, a defiant leader of an Iraqi nation that was badly bruised but had never been completely possessed, never made to totally capitulate. What substitutes for a final and telling violence in the Gulf War, is a fitful and ambiguous attempt to force the object, Saddam, to comply with the law (the United Nations resolution). Within a Lacanian frame and, accordingly, in Bunuel's film, the relationship between the law and desire is complex. The law cannot still the operation of desire in the direction of seeking consummation may -even provoke it. In a telling episode, Fabert attempts to use the law, his cousin the judge, to send the object of desire away. His cousin uses his influence to have the police exile Conchita and her mother, sending them back to Spain. As the decree is read, we learn that Conchita is a name related to her official/legal name which is Concepcion, and that her mother's name is Encarnacion, deepening our suspicion that their existence and significance is largely a function of the work of the subject, Fabert, and his desire-driven imagination. Fabert decides to take an arbitrary trip to forget his frustration, but after he chooses Singapore by pointing to a map while blindfolded, he ends up travelling to Seville, where Conchita is. The arbitrary is always controlled at some level by desire. It is not wholly clear what the signifying elements are that turn Singapore (etymologically, 'Lion city') into Seville (etymologically, merely 'city'). Perhaps it is that the lion represents virility and reminds Fabert of his quest to consummate it. What energes most significantly is the need for a woman to complete the self for Fabert (in the way that the US needed an enemy and Bush needed to get tough for self-completion), and here again the law does not quiet desire; it seems only to inflame it. Moreover, the love or violent object is arbitrary inasmuch as it does not summon on the basis of what is intrinsic to it. It acquires its force from the signifying practices that erupt out of a subjectivity pursuing it, a subjectivity that lacks a reflective rapport with itself.

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ARGUMENTS FOR UNIPOLARITY ARE ABOUT COBLING TOGETHER A COHERENT IDENTITY FOR A DIRECTIONLESS UNITED STATES AND PROVIDING A NEW SET OF JUSTIFICATIONS FOR IMPERIALIST AMERICAN POWER; ASSOCIATED DOOMSDAY PREDICTIONS ARE THE CONSEQUENCE OFNOT THE REASON FORTHAT POSITION. SHAPIRO, CRITICAL INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORIST AND A PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII. 1993. [MICHAEL J. THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF VIOLENCE: LOGISTIC AND DESIRE IN THE GULF WAR THE POLITICAL SUBJECT OF VIOLENCE P.135]
The Gulf War leaves us with a similar suspicion. Saddam Hussein, our archenemy, remains in place, occupying a position that national desire would nevertheless reproduce were he to be removed. Despite the trumpeting about our 'victory in the Gulf, the discourse on the danger from such enemies reasserts itself. Even now, the media dwarfs are busy helping the militarised national consciousness fix on an antagonism. The problematic at the moment is how to justify armed preparedness in a world of dissolving powerblocs that have, until recently, reliably supplied antagonists. Unable to use the old ideological discourse that required the existence of implacable communist regimes, one inventive commentator has provided a geopolitical category that is aimed at saving our antagonistic identity. There exists the dangerous entity he, calls 'the weapons state', which possesses 'weapons of mass destruction' and includes such feisty little places as Libya, North Korea and Iraq. He argues that the antagonistic structure of response to such enemies must be unipolar', i.e. that the US must be the sole geopolitical unit taking the responsibility for managing the dangers. It turnsout that national-level hostility still needs its objects, but the rationale remains duplicitous. As in the case of Clausewitz's discourse, the objects only appear to be the result of an epistemologically oriented kind of thinking, a thinking that locates dangers as external objects to be met by the endangered subject. As in Clausewitz's case, the more significant frame is ontological. The commentator is fixing on objects, but their meaning derives from the concern with maintaining selfhood. This is made even more evident when an adjacent dwarf (one writing in the same issue of Foreign Affairs [note the pun]) writes of the need for a new self-justification' now that the US lacks the one it had for nearly a half century because the Eastern Bloc has dissolved. Lest there be any doubt that it is the maintenance of a coherent subjectivity, not rationality in the old external means-ends sense that is at stake, the commentator is explicit, and here I can rest my case for the operation of a desire whose restless quest is aimed - through its objects of attention - at its own constitutive identity: 'The great lesson of how the cold war ended may be stated in these words: being is superior to doing. What a nation is, is essential. What it does can only express what it is.'

IMPACT - THEIR

REPRESENTATIONS IMPOSE A PURE WAY PSYCHOLOGY WHEREIN LIFE BECOMES ONLY A PERPETUAL PREPARATION FOR EXTINCTION.

BORG,

PRACTICING PSYCHOANALYST AND COMMUNITY/ORGANIZATIONAL CONSULTANT WORKING IN WITH THE

PSYCHOANALYTIC PURE WAR: INTERACTIONS AND SOCIETY 8.1 (2003) 57-67

POST-APOCALYPTIC UNCONSCIOUS, JOURNAL

FOR THE

NEW YORK CITY., 2003. [MARK, PSYCHOANALYSIS OF CULTURE

Virilio and Lotringer gave the name "pure war"to the psychological condition that results when people know that they live in a world where the possibility for absolute destruction (e.g., nuclear holocaust) exists. As Virilio and Lotringer see it, it is not the technological capacity for destruction (that is, for example, the existence of nuclear armaments) that imposes the dread characteristic of a pure war psychology but the belief systems that this capacity sets up. Psychological survival requires that a way be found (at least unconsciously) to escape inevitable destructionit requires a way outbut this enforces an irresolvable paradox, because the definition of pure war culture is that there is no escape. Once people believe in the external possibilityat least those people whose defenses cannot handle the weight of the dread that pure war imposespure war becomes an internal condition, a perpetual state of preparation for absolute destruction and for personal,

social, and cultural death.

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THE AFFS PRESUMPTION OF A FREE WILLING, FIATING INDIVIDUAL IS A FANTASY WHICH COVERS OVER THE OPERATIONS OF THE DRIVES WHICH HOLD THE SUBJECT TOGETHER. ENJOYMENT IS THE FUEL THAT POWERS THE SELF. JODI DEAN. ENJOYMENT AS A CATEGORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT.ANNUAL MEETING OF AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION, SEPTEMBER, JDEANICITE.TYPEPAD.COM/I_CITE/FILES/ASPA_05_ENJOYMENT.DOC 2005. DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION
Thinking enjoyment in terms of fixity enables us to distinguish Zizeks account of subjectivity from other versions prominent in political theory. First, his subject is clearly not the same as the liberal subject in so far as there is no notion of consciously free and rational will. Rather, the Zizekian subject is an emptiness held in place by enjoyment. Second, for Zizek the subject is not properly understood in terms of the concept of subject-position or the individual as it is constructed within the terms of a given hegemonic formation (as a woman/mother, black/minority, etc). And, third, the subject is not the illusory container of a potentially infinite plasticity or capacity for creative self-fashioning. Instead, of either a subject position or an opportunity for re-creation, the subject is lack (in the structure, the other) marked by the limit point or nugget of an impossible enjoyment. Although this idea of the subject of lack might appear at first glance rather bizarre and unhelpful, it nonetheless affiliates well with notions congenial to thinkers convinced by critiques of a specific reading of the enlightenment subject such as those offered by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud and extended in Foucauldian, feminist, and post-Nietzschean thought. Zizeks account of the subject shares with these views the rejection of a primary will, rationality, wholeness, and transparency. Similarly, it acknowledges the role of the unconscious, the body, and language, bringing these three elements together in its account of enjoyment as it limits and ruptures language and provides the object that is the very condition of the subject. As it emphases the object conditioning the subject, moreover, Zizeks discussion of enjoyment as a political factor draws our attention to a certain fixity on the part of the subject. Far from the malleable self-creating subject championed by consumer capital, the Zizekian subject finds itself in a place not of its choosing, attached to fantasies of which it remains unaware that nevertheless structure its relation to enjoyment thereby fastening it to the existing framework of domination.

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STATE SOVEREIGNTY SERVES AS A UNIVERSAL LENS THROUGH WHICH TO VIEW THE WORLD AND CONDUCT POLITICAL LIFE IT CONSTITUTES A FANTASY ATTEMPTING TO AVOID CONFRONTING UNCERTAINTY, EVEN TO THE POINT OF VIOLENT IMPOSITION. EDKINS, PROFESSOR AT ABERYSTWYTH 2002 [JENNY THE SUBJECT OF THE POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY AND SUBJECTIVITY]
We have shown that the subject is of necessity incomplete, or impossible. It is always in process; it never fully comes to presence but is structured around a lack. This lack arises, first, from the gap between the real and the imaginary in the mirror phase and then from the gap between the imaginary and the symbolic, or social, during interpellation. Like the subject, the symbolic, or social, order is similarly constituted around a lack, one that in this case appears as a constitutive antagonism.11 This antagonism appears in a variety of guises in different social orders, but it is always there and cannot be removed. A society without antagonism cannot exist: social reality can never be complete or whole. However, for life to go on the lack must be concealed and the concealment hidden. This is accomplished by the production of social reality. In order for what we call social reality to be constituted, meaning has to be imposed. This is achieved through the "master signifier," a signifier that stands in the place of the constitutive lack or antagonism at the heart of the social order. Without such a signifier, the social order cannot constitute itself; the sliding of meaning cannot be arrested. This signifier is the embodiment of lack; it enables us to account for the gap between result and intention. The act of imposing meaning, halting the movement of free-floating signifiers, is an authoritative act, "a non-founded founding act of violence" that recalls the violence of the founding decision in the work of Jacques Derrida.12 At this moment, the symbolic order comes into being, the decision is taken, and the law is founded. The violence that is implicated in this process then disappears: in the history of what happened, what was brought into being with this foundational act is narrated as always already inevitable. Once the decision has been taken, the moment of decision disappears, though not entirely without trace. We are now in a position to suggest how sovereignty and subjectivity implicate each other. As we have seen, subjectivity can only exist, or rather, be constituted, in relation to a particular social or symbolic order. The social order itself is brought into existence, supposed or posited, in relation to a particular signifier, which covers the hole or lack in the-social or symbolic order and provides a nodal point around which meaning is articulated. In modernity, one of the signifiers that performs this function is sovereignty. The concept of sovereignty is central to discourse and the International. It informs conventional notions of what power might be: the relationship between sovereign and subject within the absolutist kingdom, or the sovereignty of a government over the lives of its citizens in the modern nation state. Sovereignty also plays a foundational role in discussions of international autonomy: the sovereign state is a bounded unit in the international system. This centrality testifies to its place as the master signifier around which a particular symbolic order is constituted "Sovereignty" as a master signifier is not free and autonomous here but stands implicated and embroiled in questions of "subjectivity." The authority of the master signifier derives only from its position in the social orderwhich itself derives only from the subjection of the subjects that evoke it. It is an impostor, in a sense: any signifier that found itself at the place of constitutive lack in the structure would dodivine providence, the invisible hand of the market, the objective logic of history, or the Jewish conspiracy, for example.i3 Sovereignty performs this task for the social reality that is taken to be modern politics. It conceals antagonism in a particular way and implicates particular subjectivities. For example, it produces politics as subjection and sovereignty as absolute. Within the legal authority it establishes, violence is concealed. That same violence is banished to the nonsoviereign realm of the international. The subjectivities it invokes (or rather, that invoke it) are the irresponsible camp followers of power insofar as they naturalize a particular social order. Their actions respond to what they suppose are the desires of authority.

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MEANINGFUL ETHICAL OR POLITICAL ACTION IS IMPOSSIBLE AS LONG AS THE MASTER-SIGNIFIER OF SOVEREIGNTY REMAINS UNCHALLENGED. EDKINS, PROFESSOR AT ABERYSTWYTH 2002 [JENNY THE SUBJECT OF THE POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY AND SUBJECTIVITY]
\A symbolic order centered on sovereignty is not the only (im)possible solution; we could imagine other social realities. However, once sovereignty is in place, an ethical-political challenge in the name of an alternative becomes illegitimate. This difficulty arises because sovereignty as a master signifier conceals its status as will have been, constituting the social order as always already. As such, sovereign as a political referent persists and endures almost as if it were an inevitable and unavoidable _part of politics. Indeed, it functions to define politics in a particular way such that sovereignty is the oily referent by which one can understand the political. We will question this by asking whether another politics is possible, one that does not invoke sovereignty or an alternative master signifier. Arguably, without a master signifier either the social order nor the subject are possible. If this is accepted, emancipation as such becomes impossible. Liberation is always to come. Revolution is a joyous but impossible moment, a singularity outside time, where repressive authority has been overthrown and a new order has yet to be reimposed. There was such a moment during the revolutions at the end of the cold war in Europe, with "rebels waving the national flag with the red star, the communist symbol, cut out, so that instead of the symbol standing for the organizing principle of national life, there was nothing but a hole in its centre." Zizek raises the prospect of "tarrying with the negative," although the logic of his Lacanian position would repudiate that possibility. Derrida, in a parallel attempt to find a way of being outside the dichotomized violence of logocentrism, suggests an endless process of decisioning.I54" Both of these would be a way of engaging with the political and returning to an ethicsin Derrida's case an ethics of responsibility, and for Zizek an ethics of the real. Examining how an ethics of the real might operate leads to some interesting conclusions about the role of sovereignty in preempting such a move. As a master signifier, sovereignty has precisely the task of preventing the emergence of an ethics of the real. The imposition of meaning, which is what the master signifier accomplishes, forecloses ethical possibility,)

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MODERN CLAIMS OF REASON ARE THE FEEBLE ATTEMPTS TO CONTROL LANGUAGE, ACTION AND THOUGHT, TO CREATE THEM AS UNIVERSELY MANAGEABLE, GROUNDED AND UNDERSTANDABLE. BUT WITHIN THIS QUEST THE PICTURE OF THE RATIONAL, CONSCIOUS, AUTONOMOUS INDIVIDUAL HAS VANISHED. IN ITS PLACE, IS A FORM OF SUBJECTIVITY THAT IS BOUND UP WITH THE SOCIAL OR SYMBOLIC ORDER.

EDKINS, PROFESSOR AT ABERYSTWYTH 2002 [JENNY THE SUBJECT OF THE POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY AND SUBJECTIVITY]
Toward the end of this part of Chapter 1, before we outline the contribution subsequent chapters will make, we pursue the entanglement of sovereignty and subjectivity further and pose the question of whether there is an alternative to sovereignty. Does the political as such necessarily involve sovereignty as a nodal point, or can other signifiers take its place, leading to alternative structures of authority? More radically, perhaps, is it possible to talk of politics without the fixity such an authorizing concept imposes? We conclude by arguing that it is only without a "sovereign" that a rethinking of the political is possible. The Cartesian subject was produced in response to a sense of loss and a search for certainty amid the confusion of a newly decentered post-Copernican world. The resolution of doubt for Rene Descartes was to be found in rational, conscious thought. Since then, as Richard Ashley reminds us, "modem discourse has invoked the heroic figure of reasoning man who is himself the origin of language, the maker of history, and the source of meaning in the world. . . . Reasoning man . . . is the modern sovereign."3 The challenge to this notion of sovereign subjectivity has occurred through a series of decenterings that have successively loosened its anchorages in language, action, and thought. The first decentering contested the concept of language as no more than a medium for the expression of thought. Ferdinand de Saussure contended that rather than linguistic signs being produced by the allocation of names to preexisting objects, the association of signifier and signified that they embodied produced objects at the same time as naming them.4 Language constituted the world in particular ways. More significantly for the present discussion, since signifier and signified were arbitrary, meaning arose only from the linguistic system as a whole, and words acquired their value through associations. Language as system, however, preexists, and hence is beyond the control of, the speaker. In addition, words spoken are not determined in their meaning, since meaning arises from associations that vary with the context and the listener.5 In an important sense, then, we do not speak language; language speaks us. The sense that language was out of control, and that thoughts could not be "expressed" as such, was only the first challenge. The next was to thought itself, with the notion of the unconscious.6 If it was necessary to posit the existence of a realm of thinking that was not only unconscious (and hence inaccessible) but that operated in an entirely different manner from that of consciousness, then the picture of reason as central to subjectivity was shattered. The status of thought as originary was also contested by the view that social being precedes and to an extent at least determines consciousness.? The whole edifice of philosophy and political thought was argued to be no more than a superstructure resting on the foundations of an economic base defined by its mode of production. Political ideas and aspirations were seen as reflecting and constrained by, rather than leading to, economic and social change. The subject was not in charge of history but subjected to (and by) historical processes. After these several decenterings, what is left? The picture of the rational, conscious, autonomous individual has vanished. In its place, what we have is a subjectivity that is bound up with the social or symbolic order. The constitution of the subject and the social order seem to implicate each other. This leads to the picture of the poststructuralist subject as not only a decentered subject but an incomplete, impossible subject that only ever will have been.8 How does this relate to our contention that subjectivity and sovereignty depend upon and contain each other and that this is a fiercely political relationship? Before we can address this question, we need to elaborate how the impossible, split subjectivities we describe are constituted, thus giving an account of how the social order is posited and how sovereignty as a nodal point is crucial in this process.

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THE AFFIRMATIVES VIEWS OF A PERFECT WORLD ARE UNREACHABLE AND WILL ONLY LEAD TO MORE CONSERVATIVE REGRESSIVE POLITICS IEK, INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, 2004 [SLAVOJ, APPENDIX I: CANIS A NON CANENDO, IRAQ THE BORROWED KETTLE PG.124-125 ]
The first thing to do here is to specify what we mean by utopia: in its essence, utopia has nothing to do with imagining an impossible ideal society; what characterizes utopia is literally the construction of a u-topic space, a social space outside the existing parameters, the parameters of what appears to be 'possible' in the existing social universe. The 'utopian' gesture is the gesture which changes the co-ordinates of the possible. That was the kernel of the Leninist 'utopia' which rose from the ashes of the catastrophe of 1914, in his settling of accounts with Second International orthodoxy: the radical imperative to smash the bourgeois state, which meant the state as such, and to invent a new communal social form without a standing army, police or bureaucracy, in which all could take part in the administration of social affairs. For Lenin, this was no theoretical project for some stant future in October 1917, he claimed: 'we can at once set in motion a state apparatus constituted of ten if not twenty million people'.34 This urge of the moment is the true utopia. What one should stick with is the madness (in the strict Kierkegaardian sense) of this Lenininst utopia and, if anything, Stalinism stands for a return to realistic 'common sense'. It is impossible to overestimate the explosive potential of The State and Revolution in this book, 'the vocabulary and grammar of the Western tradition of politics was abruptly dispensed with'.35 What this means is, again, that utopia has nothing to do with idle dreaming about ideal society in total abstraction from real life: 'utopia! is a matter-of-innermost urgency something we are pushed into as a matter of survival, when it is no longer possible to go on within the parameters of the 'possible'. This utopia has to be opposed both to the standard notion of political utopias, books containing projects which were basically not even intended to be realized (from its first supreme, case, Plato's Republic, up to Thomas More's Utopia and - not to be forgotten - De Sade's Philosophy in the Boudoir) and to what is usually referred to as the utopian practice of capitalism itself: commodities evoking utopian pleasures, the libidinal economy that relies on the dynamic of continuously generating new transgressive desires and practices, right up to necrophilia (think of the- recent proposals to make corpses available to those who need them for their satisfaction).

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THEIR ANTI-CAPITALISM IS DOOMED TO FAIL AS IT REMAINS COMPLICIT IN LIBERAL-DEMOCRACY SLAVOJ ZIZEK, MAIN MAN, 2001 THE RHETORICS OF POWER. DIACRITICS 31.1 (2001) 91-104
Today, when everyone is "anticapitalist"even Hollywood "sociocritical" conspiracy movies (from The Pelican Brief to The Insider) in which the enemies are big corporations with their ruthless pursuit of profitthe signifier "anticapitalism" has lost its subversive sting. What one should problematize is rather the self-evident opposite of this "anticapitalism": trust that the democratic substance of honest Americans is able to break up the conspiracy. This is the hard kernel of today's global capitalist universe, its true Master-Signifier: democracy. The limit of democracy is the State: in the democratic electoral process, the social body is symbolically dissolved, reduced to a pure numerical multitude. The electoral body is precisely not a body, a structured whole, but a formless abstract multitude, a multitude without a State (in both Badiouian senses of this term: the state as the re-presented unity of the multitude, and the State with its apparatuses). The point is thus not that democracy is inherent to the State, sustained by its apparatuses, but that it structurally ignores this dependency. When Alain Badiou says that the State is always in excess with regard to the multitude it represents, this means that it is precisely this excess which is structurally overlooked by democracy: the illusion is that the democratic process can control this excess of the State [Badiou 37]. Which is why the antiglobalization movement is not enough: at some point, one will have to problematize the self-evident reference to "freedom and democracy." Therein resides the ultimate "Leninist" lesson for today: paradoxically, it is only in this way, by problematizing democracyby making it clear how liberal democracy a priori, in its [End Page 96] very notion (as Hegel would have put it), cannot survive without capitalist private propertythat we can become effectively anticapitalist. Did the disintegration of Communism in 1990 not provide ultimate confirmation of the most "vulgar" Marxist thesis that the actual economic base of political democracy is the private ownership of the means of production, that is, capitalism with its class distinctions? The big urge after the introduction of political democracy was "privatization," the frantic effort to findat any price, in whatever waynew owners, who can be the descendants of the old owners whose property was nationalized when the Communists took power, ex-Communist apparatchiks, mafiosi . . . whoever, simply in order to establish a "base" of democracy. The ultimate tragic irony is that this is all taking place too lateat exactly the moment when, in First World "postindustrial" societies, private ownership has begun to lose its central regulating role. The battle to be fought is thus twofold: first, yes, anticapitalism. However, anticapitalism without problematizing capitalism's political form (liberal parliamentary democracy) is not sufficient, no matter how "radical" it is. Perhaps the lure today is the belief that one can undermine capitalism without effectively problematizing the liberal-democratic legacy whichas some Leftists claimalthough engendered by capitalism, has acquired autonomy and can serve to criticize capitalism. This lure is strictly correlative to its apparent opposite, to the pseudo-Deleuzian love-hate fascinating/fascinated poetic depiction of Capital as a rhizomatic monster/vampire that deterritorializes and swallows all, indomitable, dynamic, ever-rising from the dead, each crisis making it stronger, Dionysos-Phoenix reborn. . . . It is in this poetic (anti)capitalist reference to Marx that Marx is really dead: appropriated when deprived of his political sting.

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THE MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS ARE NOTHING MORE THAN UTOPIAN RHETORIC GLOSSING THE GEOPOLITICAL INTERESTS OF WEALTHY INDUSTRIAL NATIONS, PROMISING MUCH BUT DELIVERING LITTLE. THIS SYSTEM OF UTOPIAN PROMISE FOLLOWED BY THE ASSIGNMENT OF BLAME WHEN POVERTY AND DISEASE ARE NOT SOLVED IN A MERE 20 YEARS IS THE VERY SYSTEM THAT ALLOWS US TO KEEP AFRICA ENSLAVED TO THE GLOBAL ECONOMY WHILE FEELING GOOD ABOUT HELPING THEM EASTERLY, PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS AT NYU, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2005 [WILLIAM, THE UTOPIAN NIGHTMARE, FOREIGN POLICY, ONLINE, P. 58-62]
the most powerful and influential people seem to believe that utopia is military to spread democracy throughout the Middle East, G-8 leaders strive to end poverty and disease sometime soon, the World Bank promis- es development as the path to world peace, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is trying to save the environment. In a world where billions of people still suffer, these are certainly appealing dreams. But is this surprising new fondness for utopia just harmless, inspirational rhetoric? Are utopian ambitions the best way to help the poor-world majority? Unfortunately, no. In reality, they hurt efforts to help the worlds poor. What is utopianism? It is promising more than you can deliver. It is seeing an easy and sudden answer to long-standing, complex problems. It is trying to solve everything at once through an administrative apparatus headed by world leaders. It places too much faith in altruistic cooperation and underestimates self-seeking behavior and conflict. It is expecting great things from schemes designed at the top, but doing nothing to solve the bigger problems at the bottom. THE YEAR OF LIVING UTOPIANLY At the dawn of the new millennium, the United Nations realized Robert Owens dream of bringing together the Potentates of the Earth in what the global organization called a Millennium Assembly. These potentates set Millennium Development Goals for 2015, calling for, among other things, dramatic reductions in poverty, child mortality, illiteracy, environmental degradation, AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, unsafe drinking water, and discrimination against women. But it is in 2005 that utopia seems to have made its big breakthrough into mainstream discourse. In March, Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, celebrity economist and intellectual leader of the utopians, published a book called The End of Poverty, in which he called for a big push of increased foreign aid to meet the Millennium Development Goals and end the miseries of the poor. Sachs proposes everything from
nitrogen-fixing leguminous trees to replenish soil fertility to antiretroviral AIDS therapy, cell phones that provide up-to-date market information to health planners, rainwater harvesting, and battery-charging stations. His U.N. Millennium Project pro- posed a total of 449 interventions. British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gor- don Brown likewise called in January for a major increase in aid, a Marshall Plan for Africa. Brown was so confident he knew how to save the worlds poor that he even called for borrow- ing against future aid commitments to finance massive increases in aid today. At the World Economic Forum in January, British Prime Minister Tony Blair called for a big, big push to meet the goals for 2015, and his administration issued a fat report on saving Africa in March. The World Bank and the IMF issued their own weighty document in April about meeting these goals and endorsing the call for a big push, and utopians of the world will reconvene at the U.N. World Summit in September to evaluate progress on the Millennium Development Goals. The G-8 lead- ers agreed on a plan in June to cancel $40 billion worth of poor-country debt to help facilitate the push. The IMF might even tap its gold reserves to bolster the effort. How comforted Owen would be if he were alive in 2005, when some of back. American President George W. Bush has dispatched the U.S.

The least likely utopian is George W. Bush, who has shown less interest in vanquishing poverty, but has sought to portray the Iraq misadventure as a step toward universal democracy and world peace. As he modestly put it in his Second Inaugural Address in January 2005, America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. These leaders frequently talk about how easy it is to help the poor. According to Brown, medicine that would prevent half of all malaria deaths costs only 12 cents per person. A bed net to prevent a child from contracting malaria costs only $4. Preventing 5 million child deaths over the next 10 years would cost just an extra $3 for each new mother, says Brown.

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The emphasis on these easy solutions emerged as worry about terrorist havens in poor states intersected with the campaigning on the part of Sachs, Bono, rocker Bob Geldof, and the British Labourites. All these factions didnt seem to realize aid workers had been trying for years to end poverty. ALL TALK, NO TRACTION We have already seen the failure of comprehensive utopian packages in the last two decades: the failure of shock therapy to convert the former Soviet Union from communism to capitalism and the failure of IMF/World Bank structural adjustment to transform nations in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America into free-market paragons. All of these regions have suffered from poor economic growth since utopian efforts began. In the new millennium, apparently unchastened, the IMF and World Bank are trying something even more ambitious social, political, economic, and environmental transformation of the poorest nations through Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. These reports, which the IMF and World Bank require that governments design in consultation with the poor, are comprehensive plans to make poverty vanish in each nation. It is a little unclear how a bureaucratic document can make often undemocratic governments yield some of their power to the poor, or how it will be more successful than previous comprehensive plans that seem modest by comparison. Indeed, we have seen the failure of what was already a big push of foreign aid to Africa. After 43 years and $568 billion (in 2003 dollars) in foreign aid to the continent, Africa remains trapped in economic stagnation. Moreover, after $568 billion, donor officials apparently still have not gotten around to furnishing those 12-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. With all the political and popular support for such ambitious programs, why then do comprehensive packages almost always fail to accomplish much good, much less attain Utopia? They get the political and economic incentives all wrong. The biggest problem is that the rich people paying the bills do not share the same goals as the poor people they are trying to help. The wealthy have weak incentives to get the right amount of the right thing to those who need it; the poor are in no position to complain if they dont. A more subtle problem is that if
all of us are collectively responsible for a big world goal, then no single agency or politician is held accountable if the goal is not met. Collective responsibility for world goals works about as well as collective farms in agriculture, and for the same reason.

To make things worse, utopian-driven aid packages have so many different goals that it weakens the accountability and probability of meeting any one goal. The conditional aid loans of the IMF and World Bank (structural adjustment loans) were notorious for their onerous policy and outcome targets, which often numbered in the hundreds. The eight Millennium Development Goals actually have 18 target indicators. The U.N. Millennium Project released a 3,751-page report in January 2005 listing the 449 intermediate steps necessary to meet those 18 final targets. Working for multiple bosses (or goals) doesnt usually work out so well; the bosses each try to get you to work on their goal and not the other bosss goal. Such employees get overworked, overwhelmed, and demoralizednot a bad description of todays working-level staff at the World Bank
and other aid agencies.

Top-down strategies such as those envisioned by President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, and Bono also suffer from complex information problems, even when the incentive problems are solved. Planners at the global top simply dont know what, when, and where to give to poor people at the global bottom.

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THE AFFS BENEVOLENCE TOWARD AFRICA IS A NARCISSISTIC SAMARITANISM. THE UNITED STATES ASSUAGES ITS GUILT FOR PREVIOUS DEVELOPMENT POLICIES BY PROMISING A NEW ERA OF PARTICIPATORY ASSISTANCE. BUT THIS OSTENSIBLY STEP DOWN ONLY BECOMES A NEW MEANS OF SELF-GRATIFICATION FOR THE US AND THE AFF ALIKE. IT FUNDAMENTALLY MAINTAINES STATUS QUO POWER RELATIONS WHILE MAKING THEM LESS VISIBLE AND MORE INSIDIOUS.

KAPOOR, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES, 2005 [ILAN, PARTICIPATORY DEVELOPMENT, COMPLICITY, AND DESIRE. THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY VOL. 26 ISS. 8 NOVERMBER] As to the first of these, there is an unmistakable self-righteousness that pervades pd. Partly, this is the inheritance of the field of development, in which the mentality of the 'burden of the fittest' prevails: not only is pride taken in the philanthropic idea of 'us' helping 'them', but also in the assumption that we (elites and professionals) know better than they (impoverished Third World communities). Perhaps some of this self-congratulatory benevolence has faded lately, in the wake of harsh condemnation, notably of the socio-environmental costs of imf/World Bank-led structural adjustment programmes. But the emergence of pd appears to have neutralised some of these criticisms and saved the day. Armed with its message of enabling local community participation, pd has become a kind of development with a clear conscience. Its 'empowerment' dimension, in fact, gives it an almost sublime character, so that it
has come to be associated with a series of seemingly incontestable maxims: pd is naturally progressive, community participation is inherently good, championing pd is blameless and honourable. Added to this is a certain religious dimension, particularly noticeable in pra. It is evident, first, in the figure of the pra 'facilitator', who plays the crucial role of the change catalyst. Robert Chambers, charismatic enthusiast and promoter of pra, stands as model here. Affable and earnest, he cuts a preacher-like personage (Henkel & Stirrat, 2001: 175). His
writings are strewn with moral exhortations, encouraging the pra facilitator to shed hierarchical thinking and Westernised ways (1994: 1256). Like the ascetic or monk who has overcome worldly attachments, the facilitator is expected to develop astringent powers (more on this below) and, as Paul Francis puts it, enact 'an exorcism, of sorts, of phantoms of "conventional" development practice' (Francis, : 80). But pra's religiosity is also evident in the way it envisions social change. pra-led community discussions can become ecstatic experiences, causing socioeconomic elites (or 'uppers'), in particular, to re-think their privileges and undergo tremendous personal transformation: 'it means that

2001

those who are uppers and powerful step down, disempower themselves, and empower othersIt implies that uppers have to give up 1997: 234). Seen in this light, then, the pra exercise becomes a (Christian evangelical) religious ceremony, in which the facilitator-as-priest presides, privilege and power are purged, and the community is reborn.
something and make themselves vulnerable' (Chambers,

Running counter (or so it appears) to the construction of a benevolent and quasi-religious aura around pra, however, is an attempt at self-effacement. The logic here is that outside interference and imposition must be minimised in order to facilitate civil society 'ownership' of programmes or enable community empowerment. The onus, once again, is on the convenor or facilitator to be neutral and objective so as to allow the community agenda to emerge authentically. Thus, pra repeatedly underlines the need for 'handing over the stick', urging in its facilitators the cultivation of such personal behaviour traits as transparency, honesty, humility, respect and patience (Chambers, 1994: 1253, 1256).
But how is one to reconcile this self-effacement with the earlier self-regarding benevolence? The answer, it seems to me, lies in the power relationships set up in pd's community workshops or forums. The convenor or facilitator may well portray him/herself as a neutral and fair arbiter, but the fact is that s/he manages the proceedings almost every step of the way: deciding on the need for, and purpose of, the meeting; selecting whom to include/exclude on the invitation list; making up the agenda; choosing which participants speak, on what topic and for how long; and/or shaping the form and use of the meeting outputs. There are no 'objective', or indeed inter-subjective, rules or procedures governing meeting goals, logistics or discussions. Power is tilted decidedly in favour of the convenor, and, while it may well be used accountably and democratically (as Chambers hopes for), it can just as easily be abused.

Either way though, given the convenor's substantial discretionary powers,

any attempt at self-effacement, far from running counter to self-aggrandisement, is rather another strategy for it. Pretending to step down from power and privilege, even as one exercises them as master of ceremony, is a reinforcement, not a diminishment, of such power and privilege. Humility, patience, respect, etc, may be the public expression of pd's guilty conscience ('I'm a bit ashamed of being in charge of your "empowerment" and isn't it nice of me to acknowledge it?'); but these may also be acts of self-glorification and -gratification ('it doesn't really matter whether or not people are "empowered", as long as I come off looking good!'). The result in both cases is that pd centres, not on the Other, but on the I. pd fits well, then, the iekian definition of ideology as a 'lie which pretends to be taken seriously' (1989: 30). It appears immaculate, founded as it is on enabling unadulterated participation; upon such purity does its reputation as noble and progressive rest. Yet it hinges on a fundamental underside - the enabler's complicity. Its ingeniousness rests on successfully negotiating this slipperiness. It creates a 'feel good' community experience, but elides the behind-the-scenes stage management. It promotes the sharing of power, but manages to centralise power by personalising and mythologising the role of the facilitator. The latter feature is perhaps what makes pd so desirable to the development establishment - its narcissistic pleasurability: not only does one get to stage the empowerment process, but one also gets to be the centre of attention, deriving enjoyment and praise for it.

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THE AFFIRMATIVES CULTURAL POLITICS HAS ALREADY BEEN COOPTED. DIFFERENCE AND TRANSGRESSION ARE BOUGHT AND SOLD IN CAPITALIST SOCIETIES, THE AFF IS NOT SUBVERSION THEYRE THE LATEST NEW AGE FAD. JODI DEAN. ENJOYMENT AS A CATEGORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT.ANNUAL MEETING OF AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION, SEPTEMBER, JDEANICITE.TYPEPAD.COM/I_CITE/FILES/ASPA_05_ENJOYMENT.DOC 2005. DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION
Zizek argues that the crucial feature of late capitalist societies is the way that transgression has been normalized.57 Now, rather than conforming to stereotypes of responsible men in the public sphere and caring women in the private, contemporary subjects are encouraged to challenge gender norms and boundaries. Men and women alike are enjoined to succeed in the work force and in their family lives, to find fulfilling careers and spend quality time with their children. Networked communication technologies (high speed internet, cell phones) enable parents to work harder even as attend to familial relationships. Similarly, emphases on the value of diverse cultural and ethnic traditions have replaced earlier injunctions to assimilate. These emphases find material support in consumer goods from specifically targeted clothing and accessories, to film, television, and print media, to, more recently, specific drugs and medical plans. What is now quite clear is a shift in the understanding of social membership away from the worker/citizen toward the consumer.58 Thus, what disciplinary society prohibited, contemporary consumerism encourages, indeed, demands.

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DELEUZES ALTERNATIVE TO CAPITALISM WILL FAIL BECAUSE IT FAILS TO SEE THAT CAPITALISM IS ALREADY DETERRIOLIZED TO THE FULLEST AND IT IS STILL REPRODUCING THE HARMS OF THE SYSTEM.

IEK, INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, 2004 [SLAVOJ, APPENDIX I: CANIS A NON CANENDO, IRAQ THE BORROWED KETTLE PG.72-4 ]
Todays anti-globalization movement seems to be caught in the antinomy of de- and reterritorialization: on the one hand there are those who want to reterritorialize capitalism (conservatives, ecologists, partisans of the nation-state and champions of local roots or traditions); on the other, there are those who want an even more radical deterritorialization, liberated from the constraints of capital. But is this opposition not too simple? Is it not ultimately a false alternative? Is not the capitalist territory (everything must pass through the grid of market exhange) the very form and vextor of radical deterritorialization its operator, as it were? (and does the same not go for the nation-state, this operator of the erasure of local traditions) positivity and naegativity are inextricably interwined here, which is why the true aim should be a new balance , a new form of de- and re territorialiation. This brings us back to the central sociopolitical antinomy of late capitalism: the way its pluralist dynamic of permanent deterritorializatino coexists with its opposite, the paranoid logic of the one , thereby confirming that, perhaps, in the deleuzian opposition between schizophrenia and paranoia, between the multitude and the One, we are dealing with two sides of the same coin.

[ZIZEK CONTINUES]
Were the Left to choose the 'principled' attitude of fidelity to its old programme, it would simply marginalize itself. The task is a much harder one: thoroughly to rethink the leftist project, beyond the alternative of 'accommodation to new circumstances' and sticking with the old slogans. Apropos of the disintegration of `state socialism' two decades ago, we should not forget that, at approximately the same time, Western social-democratic welfare ideology was also dealt a crucial blow, that it also ceased to function as the Imaginary able to arouse a collective passionate following . The 'notion that 'the time of the welfare state has past' is a piece of commonly accepted wisdom today. What these two defeated ideologies shared was the notion that humanity as a collective subject has the capacity somehow to limit impersonal and anonymous sociohistoric development, to steer it in a desired direction. Today, such a notion is quickly dismissed as 'ideological' and/or 'totalitarian': the social process is perceived as dominated by an anonymous Fate which eludes social control. The rise of global capitalism is presented to us as such a Fate, against which we cannot fight either we adapt to it or we fall out of step with history, and are crushed. The only thing we can do is to make global capitalism as human as possible, to fight for global capitalism with a human face' (this, ultimately, is what the Third Way is or, rather, was about)

THE MODE OF SUBJECTIVITY PRESUMED BY THE ALTERNATIVE IS JUST WHAT CAPITALISM ORDERED. SINTHOME.
MYSTERIOUS THEORY BLOGGER. CLAIMS TO HAVE WORKED WITH DELEUZE.

LARVAL SUBJECTS: ZIZEKS POLITICS!

HTTP://LARVAL-SUBJECTS.BLOGSPOT.COM/2006/09/ZIZEKS-POLITICS.HTML

2006

I have quoted this passage at length as it so nicely encapsulates the organization of late capitalism and the challenges (and theoretical seductions) that attend it. On the one hand, the collapse of symbolic efficiency under late capitalism is accompanied by the collapse of symbolic identities, which entails that identity subsequently unfolds in the unstable domain of the imaginary, with its attendent dualities, paranoia, and aggressions. In this regard, it is not off the mark to suggest that we are living in an age characterized by a generalized psychosis, as psychosis results from the foreclosure of the name-of-the-father and is accompanied by the predominance of imaginary relations. The tendency towards paranoia and comprehending the world in terms of conspiracies could be seen as the return of what is foreclosed in the symbolic returning in the real. Indeed, could not paranoia about terrorists (who are generally conceived in terms of religion), be thought as the return of the foreclosed symbolic dimension of religion? The question, of course, would be whether the symbolic intrinsically requires a religious supplement, or whether we can be done with the religious once and for all. At any rate, it is clear that ethics such as those we find in Deleuze and Guattari where we are enjoined to develop ourselves as anarchic desiring machines and lines of flight are part and parcel of this ideological structure, and thus expressions of the superego of capital.

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DERRIDAS
UNDECIDABILITY DEGENERATES INTO EMPTY FORMALISM AND GUILT. OUR PSYCHOANALYTIC EMPHASIS IS NECESSARY TO INVESTIGATE HOW AFFECTS ARE STRUCTURED THROUGH LANGUAGE IN THE FIRST PLACE AND ARE THEREFOR INSUFFICIENT TO GROUND ETHICAL ACTION WHICH REQUIRES SUBJECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY.
DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT, UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX. THINKING THE ETHICS OF THE POLITICAL IN THE CONTEXT OF A

JASON GLYNOS,

POSTFOUNDATIONAL WORLD:FROM AN ETHICS OF DESIRE TO AN ETHICS OF THE DRIVE.THEORY & EVENT VOLUME 4, ISSUE 4, 2000

The question I want to ask here is whether this line of inquiry opened up by Derrida can pushed yet further. And I want to suggest that Lacanian psychoanalysis furnishes us with one way to conceive such a possibility. One can start with the question,
Why?

Why should one take guilt or lack of good conscience as the index of having adopted an ethical stance? Why not ride the worm of doubt a while longer -- at least long enough to doubt doubt itself? That is to say, to put into question the doubt that finds itself in thrall of guilt or lack of good conscience. Might there be another way to view lack of good conscience other than as the upstanding sibling of a truly ethical stance in the face of undecidability? If we held a different theory of guilt, might we not, just possibly, come to a different conclusion? Namely, that guilt is the accomplice to something other than ethical authenticity? At the very least, it is possible to question whether guilt or lack of good conscience should function as an index of an ethical stance to the lack in the big Guilt, in other words, can also be seen to be in need of an explanation, or subjected to a more thorough investigation -one that does not restrict it to the certainty of a decision's exclusionary effects, of, as Derrida puts it, knowing or at least suspecting that a properly ethical stance toward the moment of the political is always going to be "to the detriment of an other; of

Other.

one nation to the detriment of another nation, of one family to the detriment of another family, of my friends to the detriment of other friends or nonfriends, etc."[18] Of course, the way I have outlined this ethic of deconstruction resonates with Kant's discussion of the feeling of 'respect' for the moral law. This feeling of 'respect' coincides with the irreducible doubt, anxiety even, that riddles such a political decision: is it 'really' moral (in other words, have I actually acted only from the moral law rather than simply in accordance with it?), is it 'really' just (in other words, is not my decision always contaminated with a residue of injustice?), etc.? But what if the true enigma is not why a 'pure'

ethical act appears impossible but why the drive to make such an impossible act does not cease to persist, especially if we are
inclined to accept the Freudian view, that superegoic guilt has a tendency to feed on itself. Of course, I do not want to imply that Derrida himself attaches even remotely the same level of significance to guilt in its relation to ethics that I do. It is a reading. At the very least it can be taken as a hint or intuition he expresses in this regard. Either way, it allows me a convenient entry point to introduce a Lacanian perspective on what I am calling the ethics of the political. Why turn to Lacanian psychoanalysis in investigating this question of ethics? One reason for bothering might simply be to point to Lacan's repeated insistence that the status of the subject as such is ethical. This, at least, might arouse curiosity. It is perhaps the most fundamental and

central concern of Lacanian psychoanalysis to deal with the question of ethics -- and this on a practical, even daily basis. And it should be obvious by now that the kind of ethics that Lacanian psychoanalysis is concerned to elucidate is not the positive ethics familiar to us in the form of an externalised positive code of professional ethics. It is not about what rules the profession should subscribe to, or about how to motivate compliance with them. No doubt, this serves an important social function, but this is definitely not what the ethics of psychoanalysis aims at. Rather, the ethics of psychoanalysis is concerned with the question of how to orient the sessions themselves, of how to orient

interventions given the dynamic nature of an analysand's discourse. In short, how can one think the end of psychoanalysis if we exclude orientations based on the positively defined Good of the patient or the Good of society? Another reason for looking to Lacanian psychoanalysis in search for insights on the question of ethics concerns the high importance placed upon language and the unconscious as structured like a language. This emphasis on the importance of language has consequences regarding guilt, and regarding affects generally. One insight this generates is the idea that affects deceive. Many take Lacan to privilege language at the expense of
affects. This view, however, is based on a misunderstanding. Think, for example, of affects such as anger, jealousy, sympathy, depression, etc. Lacan's point is essentially the Freudian point that affects are structured and shaped by the symbolic order, by the language and meanings that language conveys. Change the meaning, and the affect changes, transforms itself, sometimes into its very opposite. This is the work of the unconscious: metaphor and metonymy; or condensation and displacement. In short, language affects affects. Which means that affects -- and

this includes guilt -- are as fluid as the signifying elements that structure them. One important consequence of this is that they cannot serve as reliable reference points when considering the ethical authenticity of an act or decision -- at least from a
particular psychoanalytic point of view. But again: How more precisely can a Lacanian intervention here be better understood? In the remaining part of the paper I will begin exploring what one such possibility might look like. And for this I rely on the work of Slavoj Zizek, who opposes what he calls an ethics of the drive to an ethics of desire. Lacan's motto 'Don't give way to your desire' is meant to capture the type of ethics I have described thus far. That is to say, the kind of ethics that bows before the awesome emptiness of the formal law, that accepts the simultaneous absence of guarantees and the call to make a decision nevertheless. The Law of desire for Lacan is governed by the fact that

desire is always the desire of the symbolic Other. And the big Other's desire is founded on the big Other's lack, the symbolic order's structural openness. 'Don't give way to your desire' means: stay true to the senselessness of the master signifier, thereby keeping alive, by way of a reminder, the responsibility with which you should assume your each and every concrete identity and action. This conception of
ethics is an ethics of keeping the infinite metonymy of desire alive.

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THIS CARD SAYS THAT DESPITE DERRIDAS ATTEMPT TO EMBED LEVINAS-STYLE ETHICS WITHIN THE EMPIRICAL WORLD OF POLITICS, IT RETAINS ALL THE TRAPPINGS OF ABRAHAMIC RELIGIOSITY THE OTHER IN WHOSE NAME PROCLAMATIONS ARE MADE AND ACTIONS TAKEN REMAINS THE DEIFIEDAND THUS ULTIMATELY FABRICATEDINEFFABLE INFINITE. BLAH BLAB BLAH (INTERNAL LINK TO SMASHING THE OTHERS FACE, POTENTIALLY) JACKSON,
DEPT.
OF

ENGLISH, WAYNE ST. UNIV,

2007. [KEN, THE GREAT TEMPTATION OF RELIGION: WHY BADIOU HAS BEEN SO

IMPORTANT TO IEK IJZS VOL. 1 NO. 2]

Derridas very different (from Badiou) fascination with Levinasian religious gestures was particularly visible in his later years, a matter evidenced institutionally by the attention he garnered from the countrys theology and religious studies departments. The efforts of Levinas suggested to Derrida a certain messianism, a way to stay open to the other yet to come, the infinite, the other of Being that haunts philosophy, without conceding philosophy to the traditional, religious messianisms and without conceding the Levinasian desire to stay open to the other strictly to the ream of the religious at least as we traditionally understand the term. It is ultimately Derridas efforts to explicate how this was possible that led Badiou to St. Paul and, as suggested, it was St. Paul that led iek to Badiou. In 1992, in between the publication of Badious Being and Event and his 1997 St. Paul book, Derrida published Donner la mort in Lethique du don, Jacques Derrida et la pensee du don. The work was translated in 1995 as The Gift of Death and is largely an extended reading of Soren Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling, itself, of course, the most famous and influential modern interpretation of Genesis 22 an increasingly important text in our times in that it ultimately unites Judaism, Christianity, and Islam around the common figure of Abram/Abraham/Ibrahim. As Derrida hinted as long ago as 1967, Fear and Trembling can be read as an attempt on Kierkegaards part to stay open to the other, the absolute other, in the figure of certain Abraham. Kierkegaard locates in the Genesis 22 description of Abraham a figure who eludes the ethical, which is to say the universal of Hegelian thought. For Hegel, identity and difference, self and other, pass into one another, and thus ultimately there is no difference, there is no other no justified incommensurability -- in his dialectical logic. In Abraham, Kierkegaard identifies a figure who responds to the absolutely other in a way that suspends the Hegelian ethical or universal (for Kierkegaard the two are the same thing) if only for an instant. In other words, he locates in Genesis 22 a rupture or cut in Hegels ontological framework, a teleological suspension of the ethical.

Derrida, in turn, identifies a messianic structure in Kierkegaards philosophical gesture, a messianic structure that may determine, but is not equivalent to, the traditional messianisms. For Abraham to respond to Gods demand to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham must kill Isaac without believing he
will get anything in return salvation, for example. Abraham must move towards the absolute other, God, without any sense of a deal having been struck. The exchange relationship implied in any reading that emphasizes obedience for salvation also implies some level of equality and thus negates

To distinguish Abrahams aneconomic movement from the economy of sacrifice or exchange, Derrida identifies in Kierkegaard the figure of the gift. The gift is the impossible, the instant when the economic circle of exchange is interrupted and Abraham gives death (or almost gives death) without expecting anything from God in return. The gift identifies that which is not an exchange, that which stands outside even a sacrificial economy that which is absolutely other. The Abrahamic gift thus suggests a way to think the religious without the religions, pointing simultaneously to a founding messianic gesture for all three monotheisms that is not specific to one tradition and a potential obliteration of differences something other yet to come. The to come is critical here, particularly as it works its way into Derridas more explicitly political writings like Spectres de Marx (1993) where he begins talking about a democracy to come, a concept and phrase that still draws the comic ire of iek.
the otherness of the absolute other, the distinction of divine from human. Like Kierkegaard,

Derrida is above all else interested in keeping the possibility of the

impossible open. However, Derrida does not simply dispense with a general obligation toward others to fulfill the obligation toward the absolute Other (God), the tout autre. Instead he seeks to "weaken the distinction" between the other individual and the absolutely Other. Derrida admires Kierkegaard's reading of the Abraham story in its insistence
on the difficult sacrificing of general ethics, but he is more truly tracing and refining the work of Levinas who, again, insists on the ethical, the call of the other as manifested in (other) individuals. The call Abraham hears to sacrifice Isaac is not from some extraordinary other, but something we all confront everyday when we protect our own children at the expense of others, an infinite number of others whom we, in some sense, sacrifice. To put this another way,

in this impossible contradictory instant Derrida seeks to find a relationship between religious obligation and everyday ethical obligation, an absolute obligation and a calculated, rational one. Quite simply, like Badiou, Derrida seeks to confront the problem of divine when Derrida begins talking about a democracy to come he is trying to maintain the very same Abrahamic relation between the absolute and the everyday, the impossibly an-economic and the calculated or rational, the idealist and the materialist. Rather than simply expose or demystify the gap between an ideal democracy and neo-liberal democracies as they actually exist, Derrida wants to concentrate on the failure of the actual to achieve the ideal; not unlike
Indeed,

alterity in Levinass other and, quite provocatively, he does this by juxtaposing Levinas to Kierkegaard. The Derridean hope, I would suggest, is that if one positions Levinas next to Kierkegaard the transdescendence or materialist aspects of the Levinasian position becomes more distinct to critics who would dismiss him as simply religious.

iek, he wants to concentrate on the gap between the ideal and the factual because this failure and this gap characterizes A priori and by definition, all democracies, including the oldest and the most stable of so-called Western democracies.

At stake here is the very concept of democracy as concept of a promise that can only arise in such a diastema (failure, inadequation, disjunction, disadjustment, being out of joint [here Derrida employs Hamlet]). That is why we always propose to speak of a democracy to come, not of a future democracy in the future present, not even of a regulating idea, in the Kantian
sense, or of utopia at least to the extent that their inaccessibility would still retain the temporal form of a future present, of a future modality of the living present. [Even beyond the regulating idea in its classic form, the idea, if that is still what it is, of democracy to come, its idea as event of a pledged injunction that orders one to summon the very thing that will never present itself in the form of full presence, is the opening of this gap between an infinite promise (always untenable at least for the reason that it calls for the infinite respect of the singularity and infinite alterity of the other as much as for

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the respect of the countable, calculable, subjectal equality between anonymous singularities) and the determined, necessary, but also necessarily inadequate forms of what has to be measured against this promise. (1994: 64-65) Derrida suggests that his
democracy to come, then, involves a spirit of Marxism, a desire for justice. To this extent, the effectivity or actuality of the democratic promise, like that of the communist promise, will always keep within it, and it must do so, this absolutely undetermined messianic hope at its heart, this eschatological relation to the to come of an event and of singularity, of an alterity that cannot be anticipated. (1994: 65) In some sense, for those who know Derrida, this is a reworking of differance in a specifically political context. But like differance, Derridas democracy to come was destined to be interpreted, despite his continual rebuttals, as deferral, lateness, delay, postponement and thus politically it suggested, at best, quietism, at worst, complicity.5 There has been some rapprochement between and Derrida and Marxism in the making, a rapprochement that became more explicit with his death (as such things tend to go) in 2005. Badiou, for example, in a recent talk titled as Homage to Derrida, talks of Derrida not as the messianic, waiting for something other, at odds with materialist thought figure that many know, but as someone captivated by the problem of inexistence as the extreme of existence. Similarly, in the opening pages of TheParallax View, iek is even willing to concede some relationship between his notion of addressing the gap as such and Derridean differance. Since I have written many pages in which I struggle with the work of Jacques Derrida, now when the Derridean fashion is fading away is perhaps the moment to honor his memory by pointing out the proximity of this minimal difference to what he called differance, this neologism whose very notoriety obfuscates its unprecedented materialist potential. (2006: 11) But like any rapprochement, this one is complicated, partial at best. In discussing his rapprochement with Derridean thought iek ultimately offers this line of distinction:

This reappraisal [of difference] is intended to draw an even stronger line of demarcation from the usual gang of democracy-to-come deconstructionist-postsecular- Levinasian-respect-for-Otherness suspects. So . . .as usual, I would like to point out that, as usual (and, as usual, several sensitive people I like will look huffy), the democracy-to-come delegation has not been invited. If, however, a resolute democrat-to-come manages to slip in, he or she, should be warned that a number of cruel traps have been set here and there
throughout the book. (2006: 11) One is never quite sure what to do with this brand of iekian humor.

The problem, again, is that even Derridas materialist refinements of Levinas were not sufficient for Badiou (or later iek). In the figure of Abraham and the messianic openness of democracy to-come there lingered a hint of the absolute Other, the deified rather than thoroughly laicized infinite. Even more, in the figure of Abraham the common patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam there was the hint of the universalism of the one, a totality of Being to come, a totality of Being that had once been accessible somehow and would be again. In presenting St. Paul in the context of Being and Event, then, Badiou made a decisive cut between the Abrahamic Levinasian crowd and himself. In the figure of Paul Badiou quite simply identifies the most striking contrast possible to Derridas Abraham, a distinctive gesture of immanence to counter Derridas messianic openness. The historical Paul argues Abrahams covenant with God has been supplanted by the resurrection of Christ. In so arguing,
he helps invent the tradition of Christian typology, the practice of reading the Hebrew Bible as only a foregrounding for what happens in the Christian New Testament. That is, Paul marks not a relation to Abraham, but a point of non-relation, absolute difference. Paul is an apostle, not a prophet, announcing that the event has already come not that it is perennially to- come. Indeed, for Paul, a certain notion of Judaism never was at all. Badiou knows this biblical scholarship well. On can detects notes of the forthcoming Paul book in Being and Event. There Badiou suggests that not only is Levinass path of thought religious, it is somewhat ironically a religious path of thought that always ultimately follows a certain Christian route: From the point of view of experience, this path consecrates itself to mystical annihilation; an annihilation in which, on the basis of the interruption of all presentative situations, and at the end of a negative spiritual exercise, a Presence is gained, presence which is exactly that of the being of the One as non-being, thus the annulment of all functions of the count of One (2005: 26). Badiou begins to suggest here that the Levinasian Jewish openness to the other will always lead to some Christian presence or immanence. The Other (God) never stays sufficiently Other; he always becomes some version of the same or self (man). Here we need to tread carefully because we risk occluding the larger discussion with the ancient divide between Jew and Christian. Badiou is not criticizing Judaism or the role Judaism played in Levinass intellectual life. He is, again, illustrating the Great Temptation of philosophical ontologies and, in particular, the fundamental flaw of beginning thought with a deified notion of the infinite. Badious materialist point, again, is that there is no one, there is no God, and certainly no other (again, only a masquerade for God); there is only a multiple without one, an infinite multiplicity with which we somehow need to come to terms -- mathematical terms. Consequently, the sooner we give up altogether on The Great Temptation of religion to stay open to the other and the suggestion of non or otherwise than Being the better off we will be. Thus he begins to foreground in Being and Event the way in which the other always moves from the transcendent beyond of Being to the imminent. Infinite multiplicity is what there and is there is nothing else (other) and there never has been anything else (other).

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THE NEGATIVES IDEA OF RESISTANCE IS PRODUCED BY THE POWER RELATIONS THEY SUPPOSE TO OPPOSE. ONLY OVERIDENTIFYING WITH THE LAW, HOLDING IT TO ITS PUBLIC PROMISE, CAN RADICALLY TRANSFORM THE SOCIAL ORDER. SLAVOJ ZIZEK, MAIN MAN. THE RHETORICS OF POWER. DIACRITICS 31.1 (2001) 91-104
In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler makes the same point apropos of Lacan himself: The [Lacanian] imaginary [resistance] thwarts the efficacy of the symbolic law but cannot turn back upon the law, demanding or effecting its reformulation. In this sense, psychic resistance thwarts the law in its effects, but cannot redirect the law or its effects. Resistance is thus located in a domain that is virtually powerless to alter the law that it opposes. Hence, psychic resistance presumes the continuation of the law in its anterior, symbolic form and, in that sense, contributes to its status quo. In such a view, resistance appears doomed to perpetual defeat.

In contrast, Foucault formulates resistance as an effect of the very power that it is said to oppose. [. . .] For Foucault, the symbolic produces the possibility of its own subversions, and these subversions are unanticipated effects of symbolic interpellations. [98-99]
My response to this is triple. First, on the level of exegesis, Foucault is much more ambivalent on this point: his thesis on the immanence of resistance to power can also be read as asserting that every resistance is caught in advance in the game of the power it opposes. Second, my notion of "inherent transgression," far from playing another variation on this theme (resistance reproduces that to which it resists), makes the power edifice even more vulnerable: insofar as power relies on its "inherent transgression," then sometimes, at leastoveridentifying with the explicit power discourseignoring this inherent obscene underside and simply taking the power discourse at its (public) word, acting as if it really means what it explicitly says (and promises)can be the most effective way of disturbing its smooth functioning. Third, and most important: far from constraining the subject to a resistance doomed to perpetual defeat, Lacan allows for a much more radical subjective intervention than Butler: what the Lacanian notion of "act" aims at is not a mere displacement/ [End Page 94] resignification of the symbolic coordinates that confer on the subject his or her identity, but the radical transformation of the very universal structuring "principle" of the existing symbolic order. Orto put it in more psychoanalytic termsthe Lacanian act, in its dimension of "traversing the fundamental fantasy" aims radically to disturb the very "passionate attachment" that forms, for Butler, the ultimately ineluctable background of the process of resignification.

THE ALTS CONCEPTION OF FLUID SUBJECTIVITY AND RESISTANCE ARE PRECISELY WHAT CAPITALISM NEEDS. THE ALT IS DOOMED. SLAVOJ ZIZEK. HYSTERIA AND CYBERSPACE. (INTERVIEW) WWW.HEISE.DE/TP/R4/ARTIKEL/2/2492/1/HTML 2000
SZ: Of course there is also a political axis to this: My answer to some popularised version of Foucault or Deleuze which praises this multiple perverse post-modern subject with its no longer fixed paternal authority, which shifts between different self-images and reshapes itself all the time, is: Why is this supposed to be subversive? I claim, and this got me into a lot of trouble with some feminists, I claim that, to put it into old fashioned Marxist terms, the predominant structure of today's subjectivity in "Spaetkapitalismus" (Advanced Capitalism) or whatever we want to call it, is perverse: The typical form of psychic economy of subjectivity which is more and more predominant today, the so called narcissist personality, is a perverse structure. The paternal authority is no longer the enemy today. So this idea of an explosion of multiple perversions just describes what fits perfectly today's late-capitalist order... ... the flexible economy. SZ: Yes, you can put it that way. No firm identity, shifting and multiple identities. This is how subjectivity functions today. To cut a long story short, in this sense perversion is not subversive, and the first step towards subversion is precisely to reintroduce this hysterical doubt. I think the present social relations can fully acknowledge multiple identities. I think that today the ideal subject is bisexual: I play with men, I play with women, anything goes and it's not subversive. And the strategy of imagining the nastiest perversion will not create a situation which the system will not be able to sustain. I think it's politically wrong and I think it doesn't work. When you have a look at the art system for example: Perverse transgressions are directly organized by the establishment to keep the market functioning and alive

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THEIR UNDERSTANDING OF THE SUBJECT AS CONSTITUTED BY DISCOURSE PRIVILEGES THE SYMBOLIC AND EFFACES THE REAL. SATO, SCHOOL OF EDUCATIONS CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION, 2006 [CHIZU, SUBJECTIVITY, ENJOYMENT, AND DEVELOPMENT:
PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON A NEW APPROACH TO POSTDEVELOPMENT RETHINKING MARXISM, VOLUME 18, ISSUE 2 APRIL ] The framework provided by Lacanian psychoanalysis makes it possible to see that the Foucauldian understanding of the regime of power forces its critics to recognize subjects as 'multiple' rather than 'divided' and as articulated by discourse (see Copjec 1994; Salecl 1998; iek 1999). For example, in work that examines the connections between political rationality within a particular development apparatus and microcredit as a governmental strategy, Rankin, drawing on Foucault's notion of governmentality, claims that these connections reveal "markets themselves as a mechanism of governance that carefully regulates individual behavior" (2001, 33). While a politically potent intervention, what concerns me is that she and other postdevelopment authors see individual behavior as regulated by discourse. A Lacanian psychoanalytic approach

would affirm this claim but would go on to argue that this approach is limited insofar as it can only examine those phenomena that appear in the symbolic order of development. That is, the Foucauldian subject is theorized as independent of what Lacan calls the real. Within Lacan it is impossible to represent the real in the sociosymbolic field (1981). Laclau and Mouffe (1985) bring the real into socioideological analysis as antagonism (iek 1989, 1990).4 The inability of postdevelopment critics to recognize the real/antagonism compels them to see the subjectivities of development (for example, those of Third World women) as committed to those actions that sustain the discourse of development and as unable to act in ways that expose the impossibility of that social order.

ONLY PSYCHOANALYSIS ADDRESSES THE GAZE OF THE OTHER WHICH MAKES POSSIBLE POLITICAL ACTION. DEAN. ENJOYMENT AS A CATEGORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT.ANNUAL MEETING OF AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION, SEPTEMBER, JDEANICITE.TYPEPAD.COM/I_CITE/FILES/ASPA_05_ENJOYMENT.DOC 2005. DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION
JODI

Zizek also differs from Foucault with respect to the status or place of the subjectivized practices. Whereas Foucault accounts for the unity of disciplinary practices by referring to the dispersion of specific logics of power (logics around confession and speaking, observation and surveillance, examination and judgment as they take material form in architectures, urban planning, and designs for education and punishment, for example), Zizek addresses a peculiar fact about the subjects performance of its practices: the gaze before which it imagines itself performing. This gaze constitutes the Other who registers my acts in the symbolic network.19 Following Lacan, Zizek understands this gaze as the ego ideal, as a point of symbolic identification. The gaze is more than the product of a particular architecture intended to install normalizing judgment and discipline the behavior of the observed (for example, the panopticon as introduced by Jeremy Bentham and elaborated by Foucault). Instead, for Zizek, the gaze is a crucial supposition for the very capacity to act at all. Identifying with the gaze enables the subject to be active. The gaze is the point from which one sees ones actions as valuable and worthwhile, as making sense. Absent that gaze, one may feel trapped, passive, unsure as to the point of doing anything at all. This gaze, then, structures our relation to our practices. Instead of experiencing the state as myriad forms and organizations, branches, and edicts, presences and regulations, say, in our daily activities we posit the state as a kind of entity, an other, aware of what we are doing (a positing that, unfortunately, makes ever more sense as it is materialized in surveillance technologies). Similarly, we may posit an enemy assessing our every action. The point, then, is that through symbolic identification the subject posits the very entity it understands itself as responding to. And how it imagines this other will be crucial to the kinds of activities the subject can undertake.

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THE ALTERNATIVE CANNOT BE UNIVERSALIZED AND RISKS EASILY EMPOWERING EMPIRE.
JODI

DEAN,

PROF.

OF

POLITICAL THEORY @ HOBART

AND

WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGE,

2005.

ZIZEK AGAINST DEMOCRACY.

HTTP://JDEANICITE.TYPEPAD.COM/I_CITE/FILES/ZIZEK_AGAINST_DEMOCRACY_NEW_VERSION.DOC )

I can now specify what is at stake politically in Zizeks emphasis on universality by contrasting it with the approach taken by Hardt and Negri. Hardts and Negris political ontology accepts the reduction of politics to policing. For example, their characterization of the relation between Empire and Multitude turns on the notion of crisis; the struggles of the multitude induce the crises into which authority is called to intervene, put down, police.x And, all these singular events, resistances that strike at the heart of Empire, are what Hardt and Negri understand as politics. To be sure, their description of Empire and Zizeks account of the post-political totality of global capital are not far apart: both views take the position that the political space is threatened or dissipated, diffused because of globalization. But, whereas Hardt and Negri treat this loss of the autonomy of the political as an opportunity insofar as now conflict can be anywhere, anytime, Zizek looks at it as precisely that depoliticization that forecloses any real, political challenge to globalization. He writes, Globalization is precisely the name of the emerging post-political logic which progressively precludes the dimension of universality that appears in politicization proper.xi From the perspective provided by Zizeks emphasis on universality, we can locate a fundamental problem with Hardts and Negris political ontology: the impossibility of discerning whether an action or event supports the Empire or empowers the multitude. This is impossible because in their order, things simply are, given, immanent. But politics requiresdemandsrepresentation.xii Politically, it isnt enough to say that something could be both, or that something is simply undecideable. Rather, one needs to say from what perspective or what standpoint an action or event has a certain meaning. And, to say this is to accept the political necessity of division, of the division that orients and anchors struggle.xiii

THEIR FOCUS ON MOBILITY IGNORES THE FIXITY OF DESIRE WHICH HOLDS THE SUBJECT TOGETHER. ONLY
THE AFF ADDRESSES THIS KERNEL OF BEING WHICH EXCEEDS ANY SYMBOLIZATION AND SIMULTANEOUSLY CONDITIONS REAL POLITICS

JODI DEAN. ENJOYMENT AS A CATEGORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT.ANNUAL MEETING OF AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION, SEPTEMBER, JDEANICITE.TYPEPAD.COM/I_CITE/FILES/ASPA_05_ENJOYMENT.DOC 2005. DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION
A number of compelling theories of the circulation and migration of people, information, capital, and opportunity characteristic of contemporary communicative capitalism emphasize notions of speed, flow, and mobility. For some, such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri and William Connolly, the key challenge of contemporary life arises from institutions or formations that endeavor to stop, contain, or territorialize these flows. Zizeks approach differs from these insofar as where they see movement, he finds fixity. And, as I explain in this section, he understands this fixity in terms of enjoyment. Enjoyment is what fixes the subject in its place. According to the story of the infants primary attachment to the mother, enjoyment is not a rich positive interiority, but the remainder of impossible fullness the desire for which animates the subjects fundamental fantasy and persists in the incommunicable excess of drive. The little remainder/reminder of enjoyment is the nugget, the object (objet petit a), that guarantees the consistency of the subjects being.28 This nugget of enjoyment is thus strictly correlative to the subject.29 In Zizeks words, enjoyment is the place of the subject, his impossible Being-there.30 Its why the symbolic order isnt whole or complete, why the subject is split, not-self-identical. We might think of this place of the subject, then, as a limit point, a point of impossibility (insofar as it marks the lack in the other that the subject tries to make into its own). And, we might think of it as what sticks to the subject, of what it can never shake or escape. In both respects, enjoyment is a kind of fixity, something that holds the subject together, that provides it with a place. And, this place is not the same as a subject position or place in the symbolic order of language. Rather, it is the incommunicable nugget of excess which prevents the subject from ever fully occupying the place provided for it, which provides it, we might say, with another place.

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******IMPACT: SCAPEGOATING/NAZISM*****
CONSTRUCTION OF UTOPIAN FANTASIES INEVITABLY PRODUCES OUTGROUPING AND VIOLENCETHE WORST ATTROCITIES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTRUTY HAVE BEEN THE PRODUCT OF ATTEMPTS TO ACHIEVE A VISION OF SOCIAL HARMONY AND ELIMINATE THE NEGATIVE IN HUMAN LIFE, JUST LIKE THE FANTASMAL PROJECT THE AFFIRMATIVE CALLS YOU TO PARTICIPATE IN.

THE

STAVRAKAKIS, DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, DIRECTOR OF IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS PROGRAM 1999 [YANNIS, LACAN AND THE POLITICAL, P.99-105]
need for utopian meaning arises in periods of increased uncertainty, social instability and conflict, when the element of the political subverts the fantasmatic stability of our political reality. Utopias are generated by the surfacing of grave antagonisms and dislocations in the social field. As Tillich has put it all utopias strive to negate the negative, in human existence; it is the negative in that existence which makes the idea of utopia necessary. (Tillich in Levitas, 1990:103). Utopia then is one of the possible responses to the ever present negativity, to the real antagonism which is constitutive of human experience. Furthermore, from the time of More.s Utopia (1516) it is conceived as an answer to the negativity inherent in concrete political antagonism. What is, however, the exact nature of this response? Utopias are images of future human communities in which these antagonisms and the dislocations fuelling them (the element of the political) will be forever resolved, leading to a reconciled and harmonious world. It is not a coincidence that, among others, Fourier names his utopian community Harmony and that the name of the Owenite utopian community in the New World was New Harmony. As Marin has put it, utopia sets in view an imaginary resolution to social contradiction; it is a simulacrum of synthesis which dissimulates social antagonism by projecting it onto a screen representing a harmonious and immobile equilibrium (Marin, 1984:61). This final resolution is the essence of the utopian promise. What I will try to do in this chapter is, first of all, to demonstrate the deeply problematic nature of utopian politics. Simply put, my argument will be that every utopian fantasy construction needs a scapegoat in order to constitute itselfthe Nazi utopian fantasy and the production of the Jew is a good example, especially as pointed out in .Zizeks analysis. Every utopian fantasy produces its reverse and calls for its elimination. Put another way, the beatific side of fantasy is coupled in utopian constructions with a horrific side, a paranoid need for a stigmatised scapegoat. The naivetyand also the dangerof utopian structures is revealed when the realisation of this fantasy is attempted. It is then that we are brought close to the frightening kernel of the real: stigmatisation is followed by extermination. This is not an accident. It is inscribed in the structure of utopian constructions; it seems to be the way all fantasy constructions work. If in almost all utopian visions, violence and antagonism are eliminated, if utopia is based on the expulsion and repression of violence (this is its beatific side) this is only because it owes its own creation to violence; it is sustained and fed by violence (this is its horrific side). This repressed moment of violence resurfaces, as Marin points out, in the difference inscribed in the name utopia itself (Marin, 1984:110). What we shall argue is that it also resurfaces in the production of the figure of an enemy. To use a phrase enunciated by the utopianist Fourier, what is driven out through the door comes back through the window (is not this a precursor of Lacans dictum that what is foreclosed in the symbolic reappears in the real?.VII:131). The work of Norman Cohn and other historians
permits the articulation of a genealogy of this manichean, equivalential way of understanding the world, from the great witch-hunt up to modern anti-Semitism, and Lacanian theory can provide valuable insights into any attempt to understand the logic behind this utopian operation.here the approach to fantasy developed in Chapter 2 will further demonstrate its potential in analysing our political experience. In fact, from the time of his unpublished seminar on The Formations of the Unconscious, Lacan identified the utopian dream of a perfectly functioning society as a highly problematic area
(seminar of 18 June 1958). In order to realise the problematic character of the utopian operation it is necessary to articulate a genealogy of this way of representing and making sense of the world. The work of Norman Cohn seems especially designed to serve this purpose. What is most important is that in Cohn.s schema we can encounter the three basic characteristics of utopian fantasies that we have already singled out: first,

In order to answer these questions it is crucial to enumerate the conditions of possibility and the basic characteristics of utopian thinking. First of all it seems that the

Since human experience is a continuous battle with the unexpected there is always a need to represent and master this unexpected, to transform disorder to order. Second, this representation is usually articulated as a total and universal representation, a promise of absolute mastery of the totality of the real, a vision of the end of history. A future utopian state is envisaged in which disorder will be totally eliminated. Third, this symbolisation produces its own remainder; there is always a certain particularity remaining outside the universal schema. It is to the existence of this evil agent, which can be easily localised, that all persisting disorder is attributed. The elimination of disorder depends then on the elimination of this group. The result is always horrible: persecution, massacres, holocausts. Needless to say, no utopian fantasy is ever realised as a result of all these crimesas mentioned in Chapter 2, the purpose of fantasy is not to satisfy an (impossible) desire but to constitute it as such. What is of great interest for our approach
their link to instances of disorder, to the element of negativity. is the way in which Cohn himself articulates a genealogy of the pair utopia/demonisation in his books The Pursuit of the Millennium and Europe.s Inner Demons (Cohn, 1993b, 1993c). The same applies to his book Warrant for Genocide (Cohn, 1996) which will also be implicated at a certain stage in our analysis. These books are concerned with the same social phenomenon, the idea of purifying humanity through the extermination of some category of human beings which are conceived as agents of corruption, disorder and evil. The contexts are, of course, different, but the urge remains the
same (Cohn, 1993b:xi). All these works then, at least according to my reading, are concerned with the production of an archenemy which goes together with the utopian mentality. It could be argued that the roots of both demonisation and utopian thinking can be traced back to the shift from a cyclical to a unilinear representation of history (Cohn, 1993a:227). 6 However, we will start our reading of Cohns work by going back to Roman civilisation. As Cohn claims, a profound demonising tendency is discernible in Ancient Rome: within the imperium, the Romans accused the Christians of cannibalism and the Jews were accused by Greeks of ritual murder and cannibalism. Yet in the ancient Roman world, although Judaism was regarded as a bizarre religion, it was nevertheless a religio licita, a religion that was officially recognised. Things were different with the newly formed Christian sect. In fact the Christian Eucharist could easily be interpreted as cannibalistic (Cohn, 1993b:8). In almost all their ways Christians ignored or even negated the fundamental convictions by which the pagan Graeco-Roman world lived. It is not at all surprising then that to the Romans they looked like a bunch of conspirators plotting to destroy society. Towards the end of the second century, according to Tertullian, it was taken as a given that the Christians are the cause of every public catastrophe, every disaster that hits the populace. If the Tiber floods or the Nile fails to, if there is a drought or an earthquake, a famine or a plague, the cry goes up at once: Throw the Christians to the Lions!. (Tertullian in Cohn, 1993b:14)

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******IMPACT: SCAPEGOATING/NAZISM*****

This defamation of Christians that led to their exclusion from the boundaries of humanity and to their relentless persecution is a pattern that was repeated many times in later centuries, when both the persecutors and the persecuted were Christians (Cohn, 1993b:15). Bogomiles, Waldensians, the Fraticelli movement and the Catharsall the groups appearing in Umberto Ecos fascinating books, especially in The Name of the Rosewere later on persecuted within a similar discursive context. The same happened with the demonisation of Christians, the fantasy that led to the great witch-hunt. Again, the conditions of possibility for this demonisation can be accurately defined. First, some kind of misfortune or catastrophe had to occur, and second, there had to be someone who could be singled out as the cause of this misfortune (Cohn, 1993b:226). In Cohns view then, social dislocation and unrest, on the one hand, and millenarian exaltation, on the other, do overlap. When segments of the poor population were mesmerised by a prophet, their understandable desire to improve their living conditions became transfused with fantasies of a future community reborn into innocence through a final, apocalyptic massacre. The evil onesvariously identified with the Jews, the clergy or the richwere to be exterminated; after which the Saintsi.e. the poor in questionwould set up their kingdom, a realm without suffering or sin. (Cohn, 1993c:14-15) It was at times of acute dislocation and disorientation that this demonising tendency was more present. When people were faced with a situation totally alien to their experience of normality, when they were faced with unfamiliar hazards dislocating their constructions of realitywhen they encountered the realthe collective flight into the world of demonology could occur more easily (ibid.: 87). The same applies to the emergence ofmillenarian fantasies. The vast majority of revolutionary millenarian outbreaks takes place against a background of disaster. Cohn refers to the plagues that generated the first Crusade and the flagellant movements of 1260, 1348-9, 1391 and 1400, the famines that preluded the first and second Crusade, the pseudo-Baldwin movement and other millenarian outbreaks and, of course, the Black Death that precipitated a whole wave of millenarian excitement (ibid.: 282). It is perhaps striking that all the characteristics we have encountered up to now are also marking modern phenomena such as Nazi anti-Semitic utopianism. In fact, in the modern anti-Semitic fantasy the remnants of past demonological terrors are blended with anxieties and resentments emerging for the first time with modernity (Cohn, 1996:27). In structural terms the situation remains pretty much the same. The first condition of possibility for its emergence is the dislocation of traditional forms of organising and making sense of society, a dislocation

. Faced with such disorientating developments, people can very easily resort to a promise for the re-establishment of a lost harmony. Within such a context Hitler proved successful in persuading the Germans that he was their only hope. Heartfields genius collages exposing the dark kernel of National Socialism didnt prove very effective against Nazi propaganda. It was mass unemployment, misery and anxiety (especially of the middle classes) that led to Hitlers hegemony, to the hegemony of the Nazi utopian promise. At the very time when German society was turning into one of the great industrial powers of Europe, a land of factories and cities, technology and bureaucracy, many Germans were dreaming of an archaic world of Germanic peasants, organically linked by bonds of blood in a natural community. Yet, as Cohn very successfully points out, .such a view of the world requires an anti-figure, and this was supplied partly by the liberal West but also, and more effectively, by the Jews. (Cohn, 1996:188). The emergence of the Jew as a modern antichrist follows directly from this structural necessity for an anti-figure. Rosenberg, Goebbels and other (virtually all) Nazi ideologues
inflicted by the increased hegemony of secularism, liberalism, socialism, industrialisation, etc

used the phantom of the Jewish race as a lynch-pin binding the fears of the past and prospective victims of modernisation, which they articulated, and the ideal volkish society of the future which they proposed to create in order to forestall further advances of modernity. (Bauman, 1989:61)
No doubt a revival, in . There is clearly a connection between the famous forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the antichrist prophecy (Cohn, 1996:48). The Protocols were first published by Nilus as part of his book The Great in the Small: Antichrist Considered as an Imminent Political Possibility and were published in 1917 with the title He is Near, At the Door.Here comes Antichrist and the Reign of the Devil on Earth. As the famous Nazi propagandist Rosenberg points out .One of the advance signs of the coming struggle for the new organisation of the world is this understanding of the very nature of the demon which has caused our present downfall. Then the way will be open for a new age. (Rosenberg in Cohn, 1996:217). Within this schema the elimination of the antichrist, that is the Jews, is considered as the remedy for all dislocations, the key to a new harmonious world. Jews were seen as deserving death (and resented for that reason) because they stood between this one imperfect and tension-ridden reality and the hoped-for world of tranquil happinessthe disappearance of the Jews was instrumental in bringing about the world of perfection. (Bauman, 1989:76) As Sartre claims,

the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy is

a secularised form, of certain apocalyptic beliefs

for the anti-Semite the Good itself is reduced to the destruction of Evil. Underneath the bitterness of the anti-Semite one can only reveal the optimistic belief that harmony will be reconstituted of itself, once Evil is destroyed. When the mission of the anti-Semite as holy destroyer is fulfilled, the lost paradise will be re-established (Sartre, 1995:43-5). In Adorno.s words, .charging the Jews with all existing evils seems to penetrate the darkness of reality like a searchlight and to allow for quick and all comprising orientation.. It is the great
Panacea.the key to everything. (Adorno, 1993:311, my emphasis). Simply put, the elimination of the Jew is posited as the only thing that can transform the Nazi dream to reality, the only thing that can realise utopia. As it is pointed out by an American Nazi

propagandist, .our problem is very simple. Get rid of the Jews and we.d be on the way to Utopia tomorrow. The Jews are the root of all our trouble. (True in Cohn, 1996:264, my emphasis). The same is, of course, true of Stalinism. Zygmunt Bauman brings the two cases together: Hitlers and Stalins victims were not killed in order to capture and colonise the territory they occupied.. They were killed because they did not fit, for one reason or another, the scheme of a perfect society. Their killing was not the work of destruction but creation. They were eliminated, so that an objectively better human worldmore efficient, more moral, more beautifulcould be established. A Communist world. Or a racially pure, Aryan world. In both cases, a harmonious world, conflict free, docile in the hands of their rulers, orderly, controlled. (Bauman, 1989:93) In any case, one should not forget that the fact that the anti-figure in Nazi ideology came to be the Jew is not an essential but a contingent development. In principle, it could have been anyone. Any of us can be a substitute for the Jew. And this is not a mere theoretical possibility. In their classical study of the authoritarian personality Theodor Adorno and his colleagues point out that .subjects in our sample find numerous other substitutes for the Jew, such as the Mexicans and the Greeks. (Adorno, 1993:303). Although the need for the structural position of the anti-figure remains constant the identity of the .subject. occupying that position is never given a priori. This does not mean that within a certain historical configuration with a particular social sedimentation and hegemonic structure all the possibilities are open to the same extent; it means though that in principle nobody is excluded from being stigmatised. Of course, the decision on who will eventually be stigmatised depends largely on the availability within a particular social configuration of groups that can perform this role in social fantasy, and this availability is socially constructed out of the existing materials. As Lacan points out in Anxiety, although a lack or a void can be filled in several ways (in principle), experience.and, in fact, analytic experience.shows that it is never actually filled in 99 different ways (seminar of 21 November 1962).

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* IMPACT: ENJOYING OPPRESSIONJOUISSANCE SNATCHING *

THEIR ATTEMPT TO SNATCH A LITTLE POWER FROM THE MASTER IS PART AND PARCEL OF THE VERY STRUCTURE WHICH MAINTAINS OPPRESSIVE ECONOMIES OF POWER, AND NOT THE WAY TO ACTUALIZE STRUCTURAL CHANGE IEK, INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, 1997 [SLAVOJ, THE PLAGUE OF FANTASIES, 32-34]
Fantasy, desire, drive Desire emerges when drive gets caught in the cobweb of Law/prohibition, in the vicious cycle in which jouissance must be refused, so that it can be, reached on the inverted ladder of the Law of desire' (Lacan's definition of castration) and fantasy is the narrative of this primordial loss, since it stages the process of this renunciation, the emergence of the Law. In this precise sense, fantasy is the very screen that separates desire from drive: it tells the story which allows the subject to (mis)perceive the void around which drive circulates as the primordial loss constitutive of desire. In other words, fantasy provides a rationale for the inherent deadlock, of desire: it constructs the scene in which the jouissance we are deprived of is concentrated in the Other who stole it from us. In the anti-Semitic ideological fantasy, social antagonism is explained away via the reference to the Jew as the secret agent who is stealing social jouissance from us (amassing profits, seducing our women ...).32 In 'traversing the fantasy', we find jouissance in the vicious cycle of circulating around the void of the (missing) object, renouncing the myth that jouissance has to be- amassed somewhere else. Hysteria provides the exemplary case of desire as a defence against jouissance: in contrast to the pervert who works incessantly to provide enjoyment to the Other, the neurotic-hysteric wants to be the object of the Other's desire, not the object of his enjoyment she is well aware that the only way to remain desired is to postpone the satisfaction, the gratification of desire which would bring enjoyment. The hysteric's fear is that, in so far as she is the object of the Other's enjoyment, she is reduced to an instrument of the Other, exploited, manipulated by him; on the other hand, there is nothing a true pervert enjoys more than being an instrument of the Other, of his jouissance." In a typical case of hysterical triangulation, while a wife can fully enjoy illicit sex only, her message to her lover is: if her husband learns of her affair and leaves her, she will also have to drop him .... What we encounter here is the basic neurotic strategy of snatching back from the other part of the jouissance he has taken from us: by cheating her husband, she steals back from him part of the jouissance he 'illegitimately' stole from her. That is to say: a neurotic has made the sacrifice of jouissance (which is why she is not a psychotic), which enables her to enter the symbolic order, but she is obsessed with the notion that the sacrificed jouissance, the jouissance `taken' from her, is stored somewhere in- the Other who is profiting from it 'illegitimately', enjoying in her place so her strategy consists in getting at least part of- it back by transgressing the Other's norms (from masturbating and cheating, up to speeding without getting a ticket). In other words, the neurotic's basic notion is that the Other's authority is not 'legitimate': behind the facade of Authority, there is an obscene jouissance stolen from the neurotic (in the case of Dora, Freud's patient, her father is perceived by her as a dirty old man who, instead of loving her, 'castrated' her turned her into an object of exchange and offered her to Mr K in order to pursue his dirty affair with Mrs K). What the neurotic cannot stand is the idea that the Other is profiting from his sacrifice; he (typically the obsessional) is prepared to sacrifice everything on condition that the Other does not profit from it, that he does not amass the sacrificed jouissance, does not enjoy in his place. Through psychoanalytic treatment, the neurotic must be helped to stop blaming the Other (society, parents, church, spouse ...) for his 'castration', and, consequently, to stop seeking retribution from the Other. (There, in the strategy of culpabilizing the Other, also resides the limitation of postmodern' identity politics in which the deprived minority indulges in ressentiment by blaming, and seeking retribution from the Other.) In the dialectic of Master and servant, the servant (mis)perceives the Master as amassing jouissance, and gets back (steals from the Master) little crumbs of jouissance; these small pleasures (the awareness that he can also manipulate the Master), silently tolerated by the Master, not only fail to present any threat to the Master but, in fact, constitute the 'libidinal bribery' which maintains the servant's servitude. In short, the satisfaction that he is able to dupe the Master is precisely what guarantees the servant's servitude to him. Although both the neurotic and the pervert sacrifice enjoyment although neither of the two is a psychotic directly immersed in jouissance the economy of sacrifice is fundamentally different: neurotic is traumatized by the other's jouissance (an obsessional neurotic, for example, works like mad all the time to prevent the Other from enjoying or, as they say in French, pour que rien ne bouge pas dans l'autre) while a pervert posits himself as the object-instrument of the Other's jouissance; he sacrifices his jouissance to generate jouissance in the Other. In psychoanalytic treatment, the obsessional is active all the time, tells stories, presents' symptoms, and so on, so that things will remain the same, so that nothing will really change, so that the analyst will remain immobile and will not effectively intervene what he is most afraid of is the moment of silence which will reveal the utter vacuousness of his incessant activity. In an intersubjective situation permeated with an undercurrent of tension, an obsessional who detects this undercurrent will talk continuously, to the distraction of those around him, in order to prevent the awkward silence in which the underlying conflict might emerge.34

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IMPACT: OPPRESSION
THEIR BLINDNESS TO ENJOYMENT MAKES OF US SITTING DUCKS FOR OPPRESSION AND DOMINATION. JODI DEAN. ENJOYMENT AS A CATEGORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT.ANNUAL MEETING OF AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION, SEPTEMBER, JDEANICITE.TYPEPAD.COM/I_CITE/FILES/ASPA_05_ENJOYMENT.DOC 2005. DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION
One might have thought that the disintegration of restrictive symbolic norms, especially in the context of the speed and flows of communicative capitalism, would have ushered in a time of remarkable freedom. People in pluralist and pluralizing societies would be free to make the choices about who they want to be and how they want to live unhindered by racist and patriarchal conventions. Zizeks thesis, however, is that the decline of symbolic efficiency has introduced new opportunities for guilt and anxiety, new forms of submission, dependence, and domination. His account of the fixity of enjoyment explains why. Given that activity depends on passivity, that the very capacity to act relies on a nugget of enjoyment, this makes sense. It tells us that in the face of injunctions to freedom, compulsions to individual self-creation, demands to choose and decide even when there are no reliable grounds for a decision, subjects will cling all the more desperately to the objects that sustain them, whether these objects are the myriad available momentary enjoyments provided by capital or the others as objects enjoying in our stead. We depend on these contingent enjoyments to be at all. Indeed, Zizek argues that contemporary imperatives to freedom produce even more radical attachments to domination and submission. This attachment repeats the simple dynamic of transgression. If authorities say dont do X, then doing X will provide jouissance (because prohibition relies on the fantasy that were it not for the prohibited object, one would enjoy). Conversely, if authorities say, do X, then not doing X provides jouissance. Thus, Zizek insists that contemporary subjectivities confront an obscene need for domination and submission and he defends is point with reference to the growth of sado-masochistic lesbian couples.68 I think this example is absurd (and likely an instance of where Zizeks own enjoyment irrupts in the text). We can find much more powerful and widespread examples of contemporary attachments to domination in enthusiasm for coercive law, for strict sentencing, the death penalty, and zero tolerance toward law-breakers.69 And, we can better account for impulses to submission, for the surprising willingness of many to accept even the most unconvincing pronouncements in a time of fear, uncertainty, and insecurity, by emphasizing, again, not sexual anecdotes but the need for relief from the injunction to decide for oneself when one has no grounds for choosing. Submission enables someone else to do what needs to be done for us, to be the object or instrument of our willand, precisely because we dont even know what to will, we dont even have to willwe escape from the pressures of guilt and responsibility.

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* 1NC ROLE OF THE ANALYST ALTERNATIVE*

ALTERNATIVE IS TO ADOPT THE ROLE OF THE ANALYSTINSTEAD OF ASKING WHAT THE NEGATIVE SHOULD DO INSTEAD, YOU SHOULD LIMIT YOUR DECISION TO WHAT THE AFFIRMATIVE SHOULD DO DIFFERENTLY. VOTING NEGATIVE IS NOT A MATTER OF SAYING YES OR NO TO THE AFFIRMATIVES PLAN, BUT A MATTER OF ANALYZING THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INVESTMENT THAT THE AFFIRMATIVE HAS IN THE POLITICS OF THE STATUS QUO, AND THEIR ATTENDENT STRUCTURES OF EXCLUSION AND DEPOLITICIZATION. ONLY BY ANALYZING THESE STRUCTURES DO WE CLEAR THE WAY FOR AUTHENTIC POLITICAL ACTS THAT CAN TRANS FORM THE ENTIRE IDEOLOGICAL SYSTEM

THE

IEK, SENIOR RESEARCHER AT THE INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE (UNIVERSITY [SLAVOJ, CONTINGENCY, HEGEMONY, UNIVERSALITY, P. 124-127]

OF

LJUBLJANA), 2000

Now I can also answer the obvious counter-argument to this Lacanian notion of the act: if we define an act solely by the fact that its sudden emergence surprises/transforms its agent itself and, simultaneously, that it retroactively changes its conditions of (im)possibility, is not Nazism, then, an act par excellence? Did Hitler not do the impossible', changing the entire field of what was considered `acceptable' in the liberal democratic universe? Did not a respectable middle-class petit bourgeois who, as a guard in a concentration camp, tortured Jews, also, accomplish what was considered impossible, in his previous decent existence and acknowledge his passionate attachment to sadistic torture? It is here that the notion of traversing the fantasy, and - on a different level - of transforming the constellation that generates social symptoms becomes crucial. An authentic act disturbs the underlying fantasy, attacking it from the point of `social symptom' (let us recall that Lacan attributed the invention of the notion of symptom to Marx!). The so-called `Nazi revolution', with its disavowal/displacement of the fundamental social antagonism ('class struggle' that divides the social edifice from within) - with its projection/externalization of the cause of social antagonisms into the figure of the Jew, and the consequent reassertion of the corporatist notion of society as an organic Whole - clearly avoids confrontation with social. antagonism; the Nazi revolution is the exemplary case of a pseudo-change, of a frenetic activity in the course of which many things did change something was going on al1 the time - so that, precisely, something.- that which really matters - would not change; so that things would fundamentally 'remain the same'. In short, an authentic act is not simply external with regard to the hegemonic symbolic field disturbed by it: an act is an act only with regard to some symbolic field, as intervention into it. That is to say: a symbolic field is always and by definition in itself 'decentred', structured around a central void/impossibility (a personal life-narrative, say, is a bricolage of ultimately failed attempts to come to terms with some trauma; a social edifice is an ultimately failed attempt to displace/obfuscate its constitutive antagonism); and an act disturbs the symbolic field into which it intervenes not out of nowhere, but precisely from the standpoint of this inherent impossibility, stumbling block, which is its hidden, disavowed structuring principle. In contrast to this authentic act which intervenes in the constitutive void, point of failure - or what Alain Badiou has called the 'symptomal torsion of a given constellation - the inauthentic act legitimizes itself through reference to the point of substantial fullness of a given contellation (on the political terrain: Race, True Religion, Nation...): it aims precisely at obliterating the last traces of the 'symptomal torsion' which disturbs the balance of that constellation. One palpable political consequence of this notion of the act that has to intervene at the `symptomal torsion' of the structure (and also a proof that our position does not involve `economic essentialism') is that in each concrete constellation there is one touchv nodal point of contention which decides where one 'truly stands'. For example, in the recent struggle of the so-called `democratic opposition' in Serbia against the Milosevic regime, the truly touchy topic is the stance towards the Albanian majority in Kosovo: the great majority of the `democratic opposition' unconditionally endorse Milosevics anti-Albanian nationalist agenda, even accusing him of making compromises with the West and `betraying' Serb national interests in Kosovo. In the course of the student demonstrations against Milosevic's Socialist Party falsification of the election results in the winter of 1996, the Western media which closely followed events, and praised the revived democratic spirit in Serbia, rarely mentioned the fact that one of the demonstrators' regular slogans against the special police was `Instead of kicking us, go to Kosovo and kick out the Albanians!'. So - and this is my point - it is theoretically as well as politically wrong to claim that, in today's Serbia, 'anti-Albanian nationalism' is simply one among the `floating signifiers' that can be appropriated either by Milosevic's power bloc or by the opposition: the moment one endorses it, no matter how much one 'reinscribes it into the democratic chain of equivalences', one already accepts the terrain as defined by Milosevic, one - as it were - is already `playing his game'. In today's Serbia, the absolute sine qua non of an authentic political act would thus be to reject absolutely the ideologico-political topos of the Albanian threat in Kosovo.

Psychoanalysis is aware of a whole series of `false acts': psychotic-paranoiac violent passage a l'acte, hysterical acting out, obsessional self-hindering, perverse self-instrumentalization all these acts are not simply wrong according to some external standards, they are immanently wrong since they can be properly grasped only as reactions to some disavowed trauma that they displace, repress, and so on. What we are tempted to say is that the Nazi anti-Semitic violence was `false' in the same way: all the shattering impact of this large-scale frenetic activity was fundamentally `misdirected', it was a kind of gigantic passage a l'acte betraying an inability to confront the real kernel of the trauma (the social antagonism). So what we are claiming is that anti-Semitic violence, say, is not only `factually wrong' (Jews are `not really like that', exploiting us and
organizing a universal plot) and/or morally wrong (unacceptable in terms of elementary standards of decency, etc.), but also `untrue in the sense of an inauthenticity which is simultaneously epistemological and ethical, just as an obsessional who reacts to his

[sic] disavowed sexual fixations by engaging in compulsive defence rituals acts in an inauthentic way. Lacan claimed that even if the patient's wife is really sleeping around with other men, the patient's jealousy is still to be treated as a pathological condition; in a homologous way, even if rich Jews `really' exploited German workers, seduced their daughters, dominated the popular press, and so on, anti-Semitism is still an emphatically `untrue', pathological ideological condition - why? What makes it pathological is the disavowed subjective libidinal investment in the figure of the Jew the way social antagonism is displaced-obliterated by being 'projected' into the figure of the Jew. So - back to the obvious counter-argument to the Lacanian notion of the act: this second feature (for a gesture to count as an act, it must 'traverse the fantasy') is not simply a further, additional criterion, to be added to the first ('doing the impossible', retroactively rewriting its own conditions): if this second criterion is not fulfilled, the first is not really met either - that is to say; we are not actually `doing the impossible', traversing the fantasy towards the Real.

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* ALT: ROLE OF THE ANALYSTCOMES FIRST *

THE ROLE OF THE CULTURAL ANALYST IS NOT TO PROVIDE NEW MEANINGS, BUT TO EXPOSE THE PATHOLOGICAL NATURE OF THE AFFIRMATIVES INVESTMENTSTHIS IS A NECESSARY PREREQUISITE FOR ANY TYPE OF PUBLIC DELIBERATION

MOOTZ, VISITING PROFESSOR OF LAW AT PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, 2000 [FRANCIS J., II, PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC PRACTICE AS A MODEL FOR POSTMODERN LEGAL THEORY, YALE JOURNAL OF LAW & THE HUMANITIES, SUMMER, 12 YALE J.L. & HUMAN. 299]
Habermas does not pretend that his theoretical reconstruction of the idealizations subtending communicative reason can spell out in advance what the content of rational communication will be. Nevertheless, he does make the strong claim that rationality is defined by universal stages of development, closely tracking Lawrence Kohlberg's claim that there is an invariant pattern in the development of the capacity for moral judgment. 70 Kohlberg underwrites Habermas's insistence that we must distinguish the claim that there is a universal capacity for rational moral judgment from the admission that moral philosophy "does not have privileged [*323] access to

critical theory cannot dictate the elements of the "good life" that pertain within a particular social setting but can only describe the a theoretical reconstruction points the way not to resolutions of particular problems facing the patient, but rather to an understanding of the conditions under which an individual obtains the autonomy to handle life's demands in a rational manner. The theoretically-guided role of the analyst (critical theorist) is not to tell the patient (society) how to live her life (organize itself), but instead to work from universal idealizations to identify and eradicate distortions that prevent the patient (society) from exercising her autonomy to make rational, rather than pathological, life choices. Although Habermas does not expressly invoke his psychoanalytic model of critical theory in support of his philosophy of communicative reason, he returns to the model to explain the crucial difference between the simple manipulation of dialogue by one communication partner and the unconscious, mutual deception that occurs in systematically distorted communication. 73 Similarly, Habermas reiterates his critique of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics for its inability to underwrite a critical perspective on received traditions, arguing that a hermeneutical
particular moral truths." 71 In light of this distinction, conditions under which the social actors may together agree on these elements in a rational manner. 72 In this respect, Habermas follows Freud's insight that exegesis cannot be rational under conditions of systematically distorted communication. 74 It seems clear that the theory of communicative [*324] rationality plays the role in Habermas's critical theory that Freud's theories of ego development and neuroses played in his psychoanalytic practice. The theory of communicative rationality invests the seemingly artful and individual practice of social critique with the authority of theoretical knowledge, even if Habermas's proceduralist approach remains quite subdued when compared with Freud's claims. Admittedly, Habermas's revised approach implicitly concedes much to the force of Gadamer's critique. Even after his sharp criticism of Freud's theoretical overreaching, Habermas's psychoanalytic model accorded a unique role to critical theory in unmasking the distorting effects of social organization. In contrast, Habermas's theory of communicative action looks within the practical experience of dialogue to locate the quasi-transcendental, regulative ideal that grounds the critical enterprise. The critical impulse becomes one of clarification and extension in Habermas's recent writings, since the critical standards upon which he draws are always already instantiated in intersubjective practices and, in fact, have served as the foundation of the modernist expansion of rationality. 75 Critical theory works from within rationality, one might say, to identify social deformations against the internal standards of rationality itself. 76 Despite Habermas's reversion to the priority of practice, Paul Fairfield has correctly argued that

Habermas remains enmeshed in precisely the problems that he diagnosed in Freud's metapsychology. By adopting Kohlberg's developmental stages of moral reasoning, Habermas participates in the "myth of the expert, the social critic "in the know' whose standpoint within the "conversation that we are' is to be awarded a position of privilege." 77 Fairfield persuasively [*325] demonstrates that Habermas's initial attention to the dialogic encounter of psychoanalytic practice remains overshadowed by his desire to establish a properly theoretical role for the social analyst, "whose self-appointed task is not to persuade but to "diagnose,' not to submit interpretations to one's interlocutors but to "enlighten' and "explain,' not to listen to the claims of others but to "score' their judgments" on a developmental scale. 78 The critic does not seek mutual understanding, but instead first discovers universal criteria in the very use of language. The critic lays claim to expert knowledge about the existence of systematically distorted communication that must be eradicated before ordinary conversation among citizens may proceed in a rationally justified manner.

Habermas recently has extended the discourse principle of his moral philosophy to the pragmatic arena of law and politics, thereby providing a striking contextual example of his approach to critical theory that clearly reveals the continuing tensions in his psychoanalytic model. Habermas argues that the conflict between the empirical features of legal institutions and the normative requirement that lawmaking processes be legitimate imposes a heavy burden on legal systems. He regards the historical development of the modern constitutional state as a series of attempts to bear this burden successfully. 79 Criticizing a wide range of philosophers who have suppressed either the factual or normative aspects of legality, Habermas insists that the task of political theory is to synthesize the sociology of legal power and the philosophy of legal legitimacy. By grounding legal rationality in the universal discourse principle that is presupposed by communicative action, Habermas argues that he is uncovering universal critical standards, albeit standards that regulate only the procedures of employing social reason. Unlike the classical form of practical reason, communicative reason is not an immediate source of prescriptions. It has a normative content only insofar as the communicatively acting individuals must commit themselves to pragmatic presuppositions of a counterfactual sort. That is, they must undertake certain idealizations... [and] are thus subject to the "must" of a weak transcendental necessity, but this does not mean they already encounter the prescriptive "must" of a rule of action... ... Communicative reason thus makes an orientation to validity [*326] claims possible, but it does not itself supply any substantive orientation for managing practical tasks - it is neither informative nor immediately practical. ... [Nevertheless] the concept of communicative reason... offers a guide for reconstructing the network of discourses that, aimed at forming opinions and preparing decisions, provides the matrix from which democratic authority emerges. [This reconstruction would provide] a critical standard, against which actual practices - the opaque and perplexing reality of the constitutional state - could be evaluated. 80 Habermas's conception of critique clearly accords with the psychoanalytic model that he developed thirty years earlier. He begins with theoretical insights into the universal characteristics of reason and works toward concrete claims about the shape of reason in modern constitutional democracies as a standard for judging current practices. Yet he does not presume that his theory can deliver the correct answers to specific political questions. He is content to leave the substance of social policy-making to democratic resolution, but only after the procedural requirements of rationality that the philosopher identifies have been institutionally realized. 81 The irony in Habermas's approach is clear. The philosopher delivers theoretical knowledge about the general features of the democratic constitutional state without need for conferences with his fellow citizens. Recognizing the tension between facts and norms in modern society is a matter of historical reconstruction and the elucidation of the principles of communicative rationality. The philosopher's power is limited, however, to a rather thin conception of rationality, with the "good life" to be defined and pursued only in the actual coordination of life plans by the members of society. Nevertheless, these actual communicative exchanges are adjudged rational only by virtue of a philosophical inquiry into procedural prerequisites by the expert critic who stands outside these exchanges in his role as critic. While far more subtle and less hubristic than Freud's metapsychology, Habermas's philosophy of communicative rationality plays the same role as a regulative theoretical truth. In his [*327] recent work, then, Habermas has attempted to make good on his earlier intuition that the "structural model which Freud introduced as the categorical framework of metapsychology is... reducible to a theory of deviations in communicative competence." 82 I have argued that Habermas's most recent work continues to reflect his thesis that psychoanalytic critique is an appropriate model of critical social theory. Far from embracing a crude conception of psychoanalytic theory, Habermas's criticism of Freud's self-misunderstanding is persuasive and devastating. Nevertheless, he connects the legitimacy of critical theory to a strong, even if thin, conception of the power of theory. The social theorist is never engaged in conversation with others in his role as social theorist, but rather is engaged in a theoretical project of reconstruction. Only after clearing the ground for rational discourse does the philosopher resume his place in social dialogue with others. Like a good psychoanalyst, the social critic cannot take seriously (at face value) the communicative exchanges within society until he has assured himself that the theoreticallyascertained prerequisites of rational communication are satisfied.

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WHAT IS TRUE OF THE LACANIAN ANALYSIS IS TRUE OF THE POLICY ANALYSTWE MUST FIRST UNDERSTAND PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF THE AFFIRMATIVE BEFORE ANY ALTERNATIVES ARE POSSIBLE. THE ROLE OF THE ANALYST IS TO CRITIQUE THE AFFIRMATIVE, NOT TO PROPOSE NEW SOLUTIONS HAJER & WAGENAAR, PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM, 2003 [MAARTEN & HENDRIK, EDITORS INTRODUCTION, DELIBERATIVE POLICY ANALYSIS: UNDERSTANDING GOVERNANCE IN THE NETWORK SOCIETY, HTTP://72.14.253.104/SEARCH?Q=CACHE:BHR023OLMMQJ: WWW.ESSEX.AC.UK/ECPR/STANDINGGROUPS/PERSPECTIVES/PAPERS/HAJER_WAGENAAR_EDITORS_INTRO.PDF +%22THE+ROLE+OF+THE+ANALYST+IS+NOT%22&HL=EN&CT=CLNK&CD=10&GL=US, P. 32-33]
The third section, Methods and Foundations of Deliberative Policy Analysis, contains three papers addressing the philosophical assumptions and professional implications of a post- empiricist, deliberative policy analysis. Their common theme is that one cannot understand the practical failings of traditional policy professionalism, nor formulate a viable alternative, without a firm grasp of the philosophical underpinnings of both approaches. Fischers contribution is a case in point. He begins his paper with the familiar observation that traditional policy science has failed to live up to its ambition: to contribute to an understanding, let alone amelioration, of the kind of wicked problems that confronts modern society. He argues that the cause of this failure resides in the misconceived epistemological and methodological nature of traditional policy science. Locked inside a positivist image of science, traditional policy analysis, he argues, has failed to understand the socially constructed, pragmatically driven nature of scientific knowledge production, a point that is picked up and extended by Gottweis in his chapter. The facts and concepts of policy analysis, both authors argue, are inscribed upon the social and natural world through practices of scientific representation. Our grasp of the objects of policy analysis, these authors conclude, rests on contextually situated, normatively-driven, practical reasoning. As Yanow puts it succinctly in her chapter, the understanding of public policy requires local knowledge the very mundane, but still expert understanding of, and practical reasoning about, local conditions derived from lived experience. Policy objects, as these authors argue, are essentially contested. The representation of an issue (unemployment, global warming, genetic engineering, airport noise) is the issue. The object of post-empiricist policy analysis (as Fischer calls it) is therefore not only fundamentally dispersed (No longer selfevidently located in the halls of government, but instead spread out over the communities of citizens, administrators, and executive agencies. As Gottweis calls it, governing is the resultant of a regime of practices.), but also recast (Policy analysis is, above all, concerned with the communicative, deliberative nature of political activity.). All three authors in this section, sketch the implications of these insights for the object and role of policy analysis. The objects of analysis, far from being unproblematic entities in the political landscape, are seen as the outcome of complex, socially patterned, processes of articulation by, and contestation between, shifting groups of actors. Policy analysis is in this sense fundamentally interpretative and reflexive. Yanow draws out what an interpretative approach implies for the role of the analyst. She demonstrates that interpretative analysis is just as systematic and methodical as traditional methods (interpretative is not impressionistic, as she formulates it), and discusses at length the various methods that are available to the interpretative analyst. Gottweis explores the reflexive implications of post-empiricist policy analysis. Instead of assuming governability and policy making, the complex appreciations and political judgments that constitute it must itself be posed as a problem. Second, as both Fischer and Yanow explain, in the essentially discursive and fragmented field of policymaking, the role of the analyst is not to suggest effective or efficient solutions that bring political discussions to an end. Instead his role should be to facilitate the citizens and clients capacity for democratic deliberation and collective learning: about value and preferences, about assumptions of self and others, about mutual dependencies and power differentials, about opportunities and constraints, about the desirability of solutions and outcomes, in sum, about what it means to be an engaged citizen. In this way, these three authors, in conjunction with the other contributors to this book, give new meaning to Harold Lasswells ideal of a policy science of democracy

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THE AFFIRMATIVES DEMAND FOR AN ALTERNATIVE IS SIMPLY AN ATTEMPT TO SIDESTEP THE PROBLEMS OF THE 1ACINSTEAD OF CONFRONTING THE LIBIDINAL INVESTMENTS PRESENTED BY THE AFFIRMATIVE, THEY DEMAND THAT OTHERS PROVIDE THE ANSWER FOR THEM. THIS ALLOWS THEM TO DISPLACE THEIR PROBLEMS ONTO A NEW OBJECTTHE NEGATIVEWHILE EMBRACING THEIR OWN SUBJUGATION TO THE WILL OF OTHERS SUCH AS THE NEGATIVE RAGLAND, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND LITERARY THEORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI, 1985 [ELLIE, WHO IS TRANSFERRING WHAT TO WHOM? PAPER PRESENTED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, AMHERST AT THE CONFERENCE ON THE TRANSFERENCE, HTTP://WWW. ACADEMYANALYTICARTS.ORG/RAGLAND.HTM#RAGLAND]
I am aware that the question in the title of this paper may seem naive to some and purely rhetorical to others. But Lacan posed it in the Discourse of Roma in 1953, the year from which he dates his official teaching. Whoever revives this question in 1985 or 1998 in North America may well suppose the answer to be obvious. Surely it is the analysand who is transferring his or her child-to-adult feelings towards the analyst. Or is it the patient transferring her or his hopes, ego ideals, love and suffering onto the idealized doctor? Whatever is being transferred, the neo-Freudian standard of transference in North American clinical practice makes the patient the source of the transference and the analyst its object. Furthermore, the analyst is supposed to know the answers to what will help the patient. Should the analyst reciprocate any feeling towards the patient, he or she is guilty of a countertransference and this indicates he or she should be analyzed anew. Lacan's critique here addresses only ego psychology and makes no account of the 'uses' of the counter-transference in object-relations theories and praxes. That is not to say that Lacan did not develop a thoroughgoing rethinking of the concept of the object as understood in object-relations theories and practices. He did so in the correspondence he maintained with Donald Winnicott with whom he had a friendship of many years. Indeed, they exchanged some 70 to 100 letters, as well as visits for lectures. Although Lacan discussed object-relations theories and the uses made of various concepts of 'the object' in the counter-transference throughout his work-a thinking that is incipient in his discussions with Winnicott-, it is elaborated in the greatest depth in his two major Seminars on 'the object': Le seminair, livre IV: La relation d'objet (On the object relation [19561957]) and in Le seminair, livre XIII: L'objet de la psychanalyse (On the object of psychoanalysis [1966-1967]). However, the focus of my article here is on Lacan's view of the practice of ego psychology, not his theories concerning 'the object' or object-relations theories and practices. 1

The Lacanian analyst, on the other hand, places himself or herself in the difficult position of encouraging a "negative" transference in order that an analysand become acquainted with his or her own unconscious structure, and name her or his own Desire. Lacan's model goes in the opposite direction of the ego-psychology paradigm. American neo-Freudians use the reality of transference love to help the patient make over his ego based on the doctor's supposedly healthy, reality ego. A Lacanian model would argue that transference love blocks unconscious truth and leaves the analysand the slave of the Other's Desire. The Lacanian analyst, therefore, presumes to inscribe himself or herself in the action of the transference with the goal of helping the analysand to see her own ego as an object, enslaved to the Desire and language of the Other. For the analysand's suffering does, indeed, come from living in a state of unconscious subjugation and alienation. But as long as the analyst literally takes a patient's transference--positive or negative-to be aimed at her and believe she or he is supposed to respond to the hysteric's demand for love, the obsessional's search for answers, or serve as a stand-in for better parents, the analysand will remain imprisoned. Lacan's campaign against ego psychology manifests itself throughout his thought. He naturally opposed the idea that there is a whole self that serves as an agent of strength, synthesis, mastery, integration, and adaptation to realistic norms. Lacan perceived partisan analysts pushing analysands toward an ideal of health which merely defined group norms. In his early essays, indeed, he accused the psychoanalytic establishment of having rendered Freud's revolutionary discoveries banal. By prizing
technique above the meaning of the unconscious, such analysts believed that Freud's rules themselves provided direct access to truth. But since these rules had evolved into a ceremonial formalism, any questioning of the neoFreudian canon amounted to heresy. Lacan alleges that Freud's miraculous structures have, therefore, been reduced to the nonconceptual, nonintellectual conformism of social suggestion and psychological superstition (Sheridan, Ecrits, p. 39). Lacan's particular aversion to psychoanalytic practice in the United States can be partly attributed to cultural differences in intellectual formation. Whereas pragmatism and empiricism have long reigned supreme in AngloAmerican investigation, the French academy has given primacy to theoretical conceptualization from at least the time of Descartes. It is not Lacan's concern to thrash out the relative merits of induction or deduction. Nor can Lacan's epistemology be reduced to a deductive methodology. But while his "empirical" data are not those of quanitifiable studies, they are certainly "scientific": those of Jacques Monod's biological theories on perception; mathematical symbolism; ethnological realities; animal behavior; the Real of psychic pain. In a sense, the criticism that Lacan has aimed at the American establishment should be more correctly aimed at nineteenth-century Austria, where psychoanalysis was born, or at England whither it fled during World War II. Freud himself contributed to the image of the analyst as an objective, scientific observer who regarded the patient's behavior as an object of study outside the analyst. One might even call Freud's "scientism" an Anglo-Austrian neopositivism in the wake of Darwinian evolutionary materialism. Freud, like his daughter Anna after him, increasingly stressed the defensive, synthesizing, and adaptive functions of the ego. Lacan has not, however, attacked Freud's implicit Darwinianism so much as the general Anglo-American belief in the possibility of an objectifiable reality ego. Lacan has unflaggingly insisted that the human subject is neither unified nor unifiable. But because Lacan delimits consciousness and makes consciousness and language themselves defenses against unconscious meaning, he is not generally understood by ego psychologists who place defenses in the ego itself. The Lacanian subject (je/moi) is not unified in consciousness. The ego or moi, however, is intrinsically unified-except in dreams, psychosis, and other unraveling manifestations-and projects itself into consciousness as the principle of individuality. But because it emanates from the unconscious and yet must continually verify itself through the very means of its occultation-consciousness and language-the moi cannot "see" itself as it really is. This is quite a different theory from the popular misconception that the Lacanian "subject" is in a state of permanent fragmentation.

The idea that the ego is whole has led psychoanalysts to analyze what they call "unconscious defenses" in terms of the conscious ego's typical patterns. Partisan analysts then apply their own conceptions of health in an attempt to remodel the patient's defenses. Lacan calls this a surface approach, which muddles psychic truth and reality and allows the unwary analyst to take her or his own unquestioned postulates to be objective viewpoints. The analysand becomes a victim of the analyst's illusions and is unaware that Freud's discovery did not situate truth or reality in the analyst or in technique, but placed "truth" itself in question. Lacan described a typical neo-Freudian concept of
cure as the analyst's imposition of her or his own Desires and symptoms on the analysand, thereby infusing him with "reality" and making him more capable of tolerating frustration. Such a procedure is meant to "strengthen" a weak ego. What really occurs, from a Lacanian standpoint, is a deepening of the patient's alienation from the truth of his or her being. The moi has already been alienated in the Other(A) and in language. Subjugating an analysand to the analyst's ideals merely pushes the moi farther in the direction that has already led to the subjugation to the Other(A). Current Anglo-American psychoanalytic theory has focused much attention on the analysis of a patient's resistance (Widerstand) as well as on transference. Resistance has a negative connotation in standard analytic speech, while transference offers the positive affective means by which to overcome resistance through the "false" love that the patient feels for the doctor. The failure of an analysand to attain a new level of behavior or understanding is labeled resistance. The analyst then aims to liquidate the defenses that cause resistance. But Lacan's elevation of the subject of the unconscious over consciousness sheds new light on the phenomenon of resistance. It is the insistence of an unconscious discourse, which prefers to repeat itself in language and behavior (rather than to know itself), that must be called resistance. So seen, resistance becomes an Imaginary function of the moi. Resistance is not a function of conscious ego defenses, therefore, but a revelation of the fact that moi (being) is different from je (speaking) (Seminair XI, pp. 148, 246).

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Resistance, like transference, is "invisible" proof of an unconscious topology in being. Resistance is not simple passivity or a matter of grandiosity or a dogmatic adhesion to the known. Rather, it takes on a cosmic meaning: that of maintaining a sense of "self" unity over and above the fragmentary and alien nature of the moi. In other words, resistance is not iust a pathological clinging to neurosis (inertia), but the human incapacity to recognize the gaps between being, wanting and speaking (je), and with it the primary Other(A) meanings which condition secondary meaning in a syncopated logic from the past. Je speech provides a mechanism for either rendering or avoiding the moi discourse of identificatory truth. The basis of any Lacanian transference is the analysand's imputing a "subject" to unconscious or repressed knowledge, and mistaking the source or meaning of such knowledge. Surprisingly, Lacan declares elsewhere that resistance comes from the analyst, not from the analysand. The patient's symptoms--metaphors of unconscious truth--speak loud and clear and insist at the surface of life in language, but also above and beyond consciousness and discourse. Analysts are resisting when they do not understand the symptom or when they believe "interpretation" means pointing out to the analysand that he or she really desires some sexual object. For Lacan, the efficacious action of an analysis occurs when the analysand is brought to the point of naming the Desire which insists beyond his or her awareness. The difficulty confronting the analyst is that the "something" to be recognized does not already exist somewhere, as an entity just waiting to bc coopted. By naming Desire, the subject creates it--gives it conscious form--a new presence in the world (Seminair II, p. 267). Once named, the Desire can be analyzed. Structurally speaking, it always reveals the "lack" in the Other(A) as it relates to Castration and the Law of the Name-of-the-Father. Lacan claims that contemporary psychoanalysts fail to understand resistance because they view the patient as a kind of object under observation. This two-body, object-relations analysis takes its model from bastard forms of phenomenology and basks in that mirage of consciousness that believes an ego can be a simple object for the other as subject. Such an assumption also leads to the claim that one ego can substitute itself for another through transference (Seminair XI, p. 119). The healthy part of the patient's ego is supposed to identify with--or conform to--the analyst's ego in order to achieve "cure" by adapting to reality (Sheridan, Ecrits, pp. 9, 135). The endpoint of the analysis--its positive resolution--requires that the patient's ego be identified with the analyst's. In reality, the patient is encouraged to bid masochistically for approval from a master (Sheridan, Ecrits, p. 135). Lacan wonders humorously if a desk might not be an ideal patient? For never having had an ego, it would not resist the substitution of someone else's ego for its own (Sheridan, Ecrits, pp. 135-36). The only object genuinely

Instead of using this link to "understand" the patient, Lacanian analysts must resist their own subjective interpretations of the analysand. The analyst's Desire, indeed, should be to obtain absolute difference: the very opposite of Imaginary identification (Seminair XI, p. 276). The role of the analyst is not to "understand" the patient, then, but to surprise the liberty which resides in nonsense; to see how the analysand debates with his or her jouissance; to ascertain to what primitive discourse effects the analysand is subjected. The analyst should restitute what is signified or implied in a discourse and banish the Other's jouissance symbolized by the analysand's own body; and, finally, decide not to decide if the "case" should so dictate.
accessible to the analyst is not a hidden "self" which can be archeologically unearthed, but the link between doctor and patient qua ego in its automatic intersubjectivity (Sheridan, Ecrits, p. 45). One goal of the neo-Freudian school is to try and frustrate the analysand in order to expose the emotions that hide behind the intellect. For Lacan, frustration forms but the tip of the analytic iceberg, and he is intrigued by the metaphysical plight that makes frustration such a telling response. Analysts know how to induce it, he says, and how to link it to anxiety, aggression, and regression, but they cannot explain its source except as an empirical description of a function. Lacan's explanation of frustration has placed psychoanalysis in the category of the Ur-human science and undermined the illusion that the world is divided into normal and pathological people. Frustration initially arises from the dialectical presence of the moi versus the Other(A) and the je's efforts to deny or convey such "knowledge," although the conflict is always replayed via others. For this reason, Lacan does not see how analysis can proceed toward truth unless aggressiveness is first aimed at the analyst (qua other), so that it can be returned to its source in the Other(A). Aggressiveness, therefore, is the first knot in the analytic drama. The Lacanian analyst uses the transference phenomenon as a way to get the patient to talk about the analyst, so that the moi can be seen in projection and eventually relocated within the Other's Desire on the Imaginary axis wherein varied unconscious components of the Ideal ego are reflected in relations with, and choices of, ego ideals (others). Lacan never disagreed with Freud's basic discoveries regarding the unconscious. For example, he fully concurred that without transference there could be no psychoanalysis. Certain psychoanalysts have misconstrued Lacan's innovations here. For example, Francois Roustang misinterprets Lacan's statements regarding the liquidation of a transference in analysis (Seminair XI, p. 267). Roustang's interpretation confuses the idea of liquidating transference with Lacan's play on the concept of the sujet suppos savoir. Lacan argued that the analyst should aim to maintain a rather continuous transference with the goal of liquidating the analysand's Imaginary projections; that is the narcissistic bond that elevate moi fantasies over any knowledge of the Real of unconscious truth. By enabling the analysand to see that the transference with the analyst was based on fiction and illusion, Lacan hoped to teach that the Real transference was the intrasubjective exchange between the analysand's own moi and Other(A) and the je and the Other(A). What is to be liquidated or vaporized, then, is not transference as a phenomenon, nor the unconscious, but the presupposition of a unified relationship bctween analyst and analysand. By clinging to an Imaginary identification with the analyst, the analysand remains blocked by the other from hearing the knowledge contained in the Other(A). When the analyst's actual personhood begins to be grasped because moi fantasies are broken up, a paradox occurs. The subject is no longer subject to illusion, but for that moment has assumed knowledge of his or her unconscious, has assumed subjectivity. By revealing various pitfalls in transference, not the least of which is the analyst's satisfaction at being recognized, Lacan demonstrated how transference could be used to lead both analyst and analysand beyond narcissistic fixations, aiming the analysand toward knowledge of his or her Desire, and away from the personhood of the analyst. Identification with the analyst can never be a final goal, then, since any life is an ever-moving, endlessly unfolding Desire and Law epic (Seminair XI, p. 133). The analysis forms one fixed moment in the dialectical writing of the analysand's potential life story. In this way psychoanalysis is an apprenticeship in freedom won through locating the roots of the moi and je in an-Other's Desire (Seminair XI, pp. 108-09). The end of analysis has been described as death's death, which is paid for with a de-being but offers the freedom to live (Schneiderman, Returning, pp. 166-67). But the standard neo-Freudian transference (Ubertrgung) goes in the opposite direction and works by the law of misrecognition (mconnaissance). In such a situation analysands think they are talking directly to the analyst about them- "selves" and solving problems once and for all. In fact, they are merely rephrasing the identity question to yet one more substitute other. Insofar as people take their perceptions to be objective and true, most analysands miss the circular subjectivity of their seemingly linear quest. In reality, both patient and doctor constitute each other subjectively-objectively, each according to the permanent narcissistic (moi) modes that make up their individuality (Sheridan, Ecrits, p. 225ff.). In Seminar Eleven Lacan taught that--through transference--the analysand "acts" out of the reality of the unconscious (p. 158). In the countertransference, the analyst returns the sum of the prejudices, passions, embarrassments, even insufficient information which characterize the analyst at a given moment in the dialectical process (Wilden, Language of the Self, pp. xi-xii).

The analyst, then, is above all a human being, Lacan has said, in constant flux. However much a patient may not wish to recognize that flux, and however much the analyst may succeed by his steadfastness in creating the illusion of fixity, the facts are otherwise. The analyst is not a fixed point more than any other person. In standard neo-Freudian practice the patient's transference is considered a neurosis or distortion, yet also a path along which to reeducate the patient. The analyst, on the other hand, is not supposed to experience countertransference (unless his or her own neuroses remain unresolved). Lacan condemns this static picture of the analyst/analysand interaction as much as he condemns the illusion of an objective therapist and a fantasy-logged patient. Partisan analysts take their own perceptions as the measure of the real and true, even to the point of confusing conscious intuition with an unconscious empathy or "listening" (e.g., Heinz Kohut).

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IN

LJUBLJANA, 2001 [SLAVOJ, DID

The standard motto of ethical rigour is 'There is no excuse for not accomplishing one's duty!'; although Kant's 'Du kannst, denn du sollst! [You can, because you must!]' seems to offer a new version of this motto, he implicitly complements it with its much more uncanny inversion: 'There is no excuse for accomplishing one's duty!'73 The reference to duty as the excuse for doing our duty should be rejected as hypocritical; suffice it to recall the proverbial example of a severe sadistic teacher who subjects his pupils to merciless discipline and torture. Of course, his excuse to himself (and to others) is: 'I myself find it hard to exert such pressure on the poor kids, but what can I do it's my duty!' The more pertinent example is precisely that of a Stalinist Communist who loves humankind, but none the less performs horrible purges and executions; his heart is breaking while he is doing it, but he cant help it, its his Duty towards the Progress of Humanity . What we encounter here is the properly perverse attitude of adopt-ing the position of the pure instrument of the big Others Will: its not my responsibility, it's not I who am actually doing it, I am merely an instrument of a higher Historical Necessity. The obscene jouissance of this situation is generated by the fact that I conceive of myself as exculpated for what I am doing: isn't it nice to be able to inflict pain on others in the full awareness that Im not responsible for it, that I am merely an agent of the Other's Will? . . . This is what Kantian ethics prohibits. This position of the sadistic pervert provides the answer to the answer to the question: How can the subject be guilty when he merely realizes an objective externally imposed necessity? By subjectively assuming this objective necessity by deriving enjoyment from what is imposed on him. So, at its most radical, Kantain ethics is not sadistic, but precisely what prohibits assuming the position of a Sadeian executioner. What, then, does this tell us about the respective status of coldness in Kant and in Sade? The conclusion to be drawn is not that Sade sticks to cruel coldness, while Kant somehow has to allow for human compassion, but quite the opposite: it is only the Kantian subject that is in fact thoroughly cold (apa-thetic), while the sadist is not 'cold' enough, his apathy is a fake, a lure concealing his toopassionate engagement on behalf of the Other's jouissance, And, of course, the same goes for the passage from Lenin to Stalin: the revolutionary political counterpoint to Lacan's Kant avec Sade is undoubtedly Lenin avec Stalin it is only with Stalin that the Leninist revolutionary subject turns into the perverse object-instrument of the big' Other's jouissance.

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ALT: IDENTIFY WITH THE ABJECT

ALTERNATIVE IS TO UNIVERSALIZE POLITICS ON BEHALF OF THE ABJECT. THIS IS A DECISIONIST POLITICS WHICH TAKES AS ITS STARTING POINT AN IDENTIFICATION WITH THOSE EXCLUDED FROM THE GLOBAL SOCIO-ECONOMIC SYSTEM. THIS MODE OF IDENTIFYING WITH THE ABJECT IS THE ONLY CONDITION FOR A POLITICS THAT TRAVERSES IDEOLOGICAL FANTASIES AND MAKES POSSIBLE NEW CONDITIONS FOR RELATING TO ONE ANOTHER.
RENS VAN MUNSTER, 2004 DEPARTMENT OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS, UNIVERSITY OF WALES. THE DESECURITISATION ILLEGAL MIGRATION: THE CASE FOR A EUROPEAN BELONGING WITHOUT COMMUNITY. MARIE CURIE WORKING PAPERS, NO 7
OF

THE

To face the nothingness behind every attempt to articulate a social order thus requires that one abandons the idea that the abject other is the positive cause of all social problems. It is a radical act in which one comes to acknowledge that there is nothing behind the ideology of security: security is just a screen covering the void behind it. From this it follows that the illegal migrant should not be understood as
responsible for all ills of the polis or as the apocalypse on the move but as a symptom that precisely turns we into a problem, perhaps makes it impossible (Kristeva, 1991: 1). However, not everyone is convinced about the usefulness of an approach that considers the decision itself as an ethical act. For example, it has been argued that a decisionist ethics gives rise to irrational voluntarism or a quasi-heroicism in which ethics is reduced to a radical and contingent assertion of the subjective will (for a discussion, see Huysmans, 1998a: 582-84; see also Wlin, 1990). This critique resonates well with similar critiques from Gigante (1998) and Homer (1995), who claim that a decisionist rendering of ethics fails to advance a specific view on its own and, hence, such a position in fact amounts to taking no position at all: Where iek is unique, and where he makes his radical break with other literary theorists who take up a position, any position at all that pretends to some notional content, is the fact that he fundamentally has no position (Gigante cited in Myers, 2003: 121). But if decisonism seems to privilege the act over its outcome, this is partly due to the fact that a notion of being that suspends the current social norms is beyond imagination. Still, while there is no name for that what is beyond the suspension of the current order, it is exaggerated to suggest that a decisionist ethics does not address these issues at all. For while iek no doubt privileges the negative gesture of withdrawal, he has also albeit in somewhat general terms discussed what such an act looks like more positively. Hence, contrary to what some critiques seem to suggest, it is not completely impossible to translate the negative gesture of the act into a political
17

strategy. Indeed, iek argues that any act should take point of departure in the excluded or securitised and turn these marginal, abject figures into the political figure per se, that is, as a constitutive force that can move the institutional scheme of belonging beyond the status quo. As such, the negative gesture of withdrawal can be translated more positively as the identification with the abject, illegal migrant as the point from which to re-imagine the structure of belonging. Whereas the objective of security is to establish a sense of immunity vis--vis the abject and excluded other, a desecuritising act thus takes point of departure in the abject as the point from which to articulate new forms of community. In contrast to the security view of migration as an emergency that requires extraordinary measures, desecuritisation conceptualises migration as the advent or emergence of new political structures (cf. Edkins, 1999: 10). As Daly argues, a decisionist ethics considers undecidability as both an inherent limit and an inherent opening/beginning: the radically negative dimension that is the condition of creation ex nihilo and the political itself (Daly, 2004: 11). The decision as an ethical act is thus not just a practical intervention that brings about a new closure but a kind of negation which opens up the possibility for reinvention. While it is an act of self-denial in which one withdraws from the social order, it also is a new beginning. The next section will discuss what this may entail more concretely within the context of illegal migration and European belonging.

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ALT: IDENTIFY WITH THE ABJECT

WITH THE ABJECT IS NOT JUST A SIMPLE POLITICAL MOVE. IT IS WAY OF POLITICIZING ALTERITY IN SUCH A WAY AS TO CALL INTO QUESTION FUNDAMENTAL POLITICAL PRESUMPTIONS ABOUT HOW COMMUNITY IS FORMED. IT IS A NECESSARY PRECONDITION TO RADICALLY QUESTIONING THE POLITICAL ORDER.
RENS VAN MUNSTER, 2004 DEPARTMENT OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS, UNIVERSITY OF WALES. THE DESECURITISATION ILLEGAL MIGRATION: THE CASE FOR A EUROPEAN BELONGING WITHOUT COMMUNITY. MARIE CURIE WORKING PAPERS, NO 7
OF

IDENTIFYING

In contrast to discourses of security which seek to define illegal migration mainly in terms of a managerial problem to the functioning of the internal market, a desecuritising act thus seeks to politicise illegal migration as a force that can renew the fundament on which political struggle unfolds in the European polity. It is a political activity that seeks to constantly (re)articulate public space on behalf of the excluded. Rather than repressing the illegal migrant as a threat that makes society impossible, we should, in a desecuritising move, identify with the abject. Or as Balibar puts it: [W]e must attack the obsessive question of collective insecurity by beginning precisely with the situation of the most insecure, the nomadic populations who are the source of and target of the obsession with law and order that is so closely intertwined with the obsession with identity (Balibar, 2004: 177). Hence, in the current European context illegal migrants should not be considered a threat to be hold at bay but as the representatives, the stand-ins, for the Whole of Society, for the true Universality (we the nothing, not counted in the order are the people, we are All against others who stand only for their particular privileged interest) (iek, 1999b: 188). For the true measurement of universal belonging lies not in an abstract Universal ideal, but in the ways in which a community relates to its lowest part. As such, the only way to be effectively universal is not by imposing a Universal scheme (European citizenship as membership to the EU as an area of freedom, security and justice), but by taking sides, by locating a concrete universality at the level of the abject that represents the void that subverts the positive social order. Indeed, to identify with the securitised other means to recognize in the excesses, in the disruption of the normal way of things, the key offering us access to its true functioning (iek, 1989: 128). In this view, then, the desecuritisation of illegal migration does not just address the particular demands of a group of people but concerns the metaphorical universalisation of their particular interests: the restructuring of the emerging European order itself. To desecuritise illegal migration is to link the question about the correct or responsible treatment of illegal migrants to the broader question of the way in which EU-identity and EU-belonging are constituted (cf. Huysmans, 2000a: 157)

ALT: ID W ABJECT/METAPHORIC CONDENSATION

ALTERNATIVE IS NOT JUST A RHETORICAL GESTURE TOWARD THE OPPRESSED BUT AN ACTIVE IDENTIFICATION WITH THE ABJECT OF THE GLOBAL SYSTEM. IDENTIFYING WITH THE ABJECT IS THE CONDITION FOR A RADICAL POLITICS CAPABLE OF TRANSFORMING THE COORDINATES OF THE SOCIAL ORDER.

THE

ZIZEK, (SLAVOJ, A LEFTIST PLEA FOR EUROCENTRISM. CRITICAL INQUIRY, VOL. 24, NO. 4) 1998
politics proper?1 It is a phenomenon that appeared for the first time in ancient Greece when the members of the demos (those with no firmly determined place in the hierarchical social edifice) presented themselves as the representatives, the stand-ins, for the whole of society, for the true universality ("we--the 'nothing,' not counted in the order--are the people, we are all, against others who stand only for their particular privilieged interest"). Political conflict proper thus involves the tension between the structured social body, where each part has its place, and the part of no-part, which unsettles this order on account of the empty principle of universality, of the principled equality of all men qua speaking beings, what tienne Balibar calls galibert.2 Politics proper thus always involves a kind of short circuit between the universal and the particular; it involves the paradox of a singular that appears as a stand-in for the universal, destabilizing the "natural" functional order of relation in the social body. The singulier universal is a group that, although without any fixed place in the social ediface (or, at best, occupying a subordinated place), not only demands to be heard on equal footing with the ruling oligarchy or aristocracy (that power) but, even more, presents itself as the immediate embodiment of society as such, in its universality, against the particular power interests of aristocracy or oligarchy. This identification of the nonpart with the whole, of the part of society with no properly defined place (or which resists its allocated subordinated place) with the universal, is the elementary gesture of politicization, discernable in all great democratic events, from the French Revolution (in which the Third
Let us begin with the question, What is Estate proclaimed itself identical to the nation as such against the aristocracy and clergy) to the demise of European socialism, in which groups such as the Czech Civic Forum proclaimed themselves representative of the entire society against the party nomenklatura.

When the excluded, from the Greek demos to Polish workers, protested against the ruling elite (the aristocracy or nomenklatura), the true stakes were not only their explicit demands (for higher wages, better working conditions, and so forth) but their very right to be heard and recognized as an equal participant in the debate. In Poland, the nomenklatura) lost the moment it had to accept Solidarity as an equal partner. In this precise sense, politics and democracy are synonymous: the basic aim of antidemocratic politics always and by definition is and was depoliticization, that is, the unconditional demand that things should return to the normal, with each individual doing his or her particular job. Jaques
The political struggle proper is therefore never simply a rational debate between multiple interests but, simultaneously, the struggle for one's voice to be heard and recognized as that of a legitimate partner. Rancire, of course, emphasizes how the line of seperation between what he calls policing (in the broad sense of maintaining social order, the smooth running of the social machine) and politics proper is always blurred and contested. In the Marxist tradition, for instance, proletariat can be read as the subjectivization of the part of no-part that elevates its injustice into the ultimate test of universality and, simultaneously, as the operator that will bring about the establishment of a postpolitical, rational society.

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ALT: MOURNING
USE MOURNING AS A TOOL TO REALIZE YOUR VISION WILL NEVER OCCUR IN THE WAY YOU WANT, THE UTOPIAN ATTEMPT TO ERASE THE BAD THING FROM THE WORLD CREATES CYCLES OF VIOLENCE AND REPLICATIONS OF YOUR CASE HARMS WHICH LEAD TO VIOLENT SCAPEGOATINGTURNS CASE. RADICAL DEMOCRACY IS KEY TO AMEND THE FALSE REACTIONARY RELATIONSHIP TO LACK AND REORIENT DESIRE STAVRAKAKIS, PROF PSYCHOANALYSIS @ U ESSEX, 03 [YANNIS , PARALLAX, 2003, VOL. 9, NO. 2, 5671 REACTIVATING THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION: THE POLITICS OF TRANSFORMATION BEYOND REOCCUPATION AND CONFORMISM]
reoccupying the ground of pre-modern metaphysics, is best exemplified by some mutations of modern political utopianism. I use utopia here in the strong sense of the word, as a discourse that offers final political solutions from the point of view of a subject supposed to know, whose opaqueness and authority is never questioned per se.10 Fascism and Stalinism are two obvious examples. What is dominant here, is a fear to encounter negativity without recourse to the certainty of attaining another order, a utopian society, a harmonious future eliminating negativity once and for all. If today we are implicated in a process of mourning revolution, it is because the fantasmatic horizon of such a utopian mentality has failed to realise its maximalist promise. To clarify this a bit further, the problem with revolution is not that it refers to the overdetermination of a set of struggles in a point of
The Utopian Reoccupation The first response, one political rupture, from which there follow a variety of effects spread across the whole of the fabric of society, but that it implied the foundational character of the revolutionary act, the institution of a point of concentration of power from which society could be rationally reorganized;11 indeed reorganised in a totally novel way eliminating negativity. In other words, the problem is its attachment to utopian imagination. In that sense,

there is nothing wrong in mourning revolution as the radical act that would transform society into a utopian terrain of fullness and abundance immune from the incursions of the negative. However painful, mourning has been described by Freud as a regular reaction to the loss of some abstraction [] such as ones country, liberty, an ideal, and so on. It is also the case that, although mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude of life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition [] We rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time, and we look upon any interference with it as useless or even harmful.12 Especially in this case mourning becomes an act of assuming responsibility for the political implications of a modernity aware of negativity, aware both of its (modernitys) political potential as well as its limitations. In fact, whenever a conscious attempt was made to realise utopia, to institute human reality according to a plan promising to resolve social contradiction and dissimulate political antagonism, the results were catastrophic. To use a well-known Lacanian phrase, what was foreclosed in the symbolic appeared in the real; the real of terror and extermination. Realising the promise of full positivity seems to open the road parallax 57 to a proliferation of negativity. The result is the triple knotted effect, of ecstasy, the sacred and terror that Alain Badiou has called disaster.13 There are at least two ways to ground
such a view on modern utopianism.14 One can articulate a historical argument according to which political attempts to realize modern utopian fantasies (notably the ideal of an Arian Nazi order and that of a proletarian

The way all these discourses deal with negativity is more or less the following: Utopian fantasies promise to eliminate forever negativity in whatever sociopolitical form it takes. In order to achieve this impossible goal, utopian discourses localize the cause of negativity in one particular social group or political actor. Thus, the essential by-product of the utopian operation is invariably the stigmatization and even the elimination of the social group presented as incarnating negativity (qua Evil). This historical argument can be supported by a psychoanalytic argument, regarding the function of fantasy in politics. From the point of view of a Lacanian ontology, fantasy becomes the explosive union of two contradictory forces. It involves the dream of a state without disturbances and dislocations, a state in which we are supposed to get back the enjoyment ( jouissance) sacrificed upon entering the symbolic order, while at the same time relies on the production of a scapegoat to be stigmatized as the one who is to blame for our lack, the Evil force that stole our precious jouissance. In order to sound credible in its promise to eliminate negativity it has to attribute to it a localized, controllable cause (be it the Jews, the kulaks, etc).15 The Democratic Revolution If this is the case, then surely one of the most urgent political tasks of our age is to traverse the fantasy of utopia and reinvent transformative politics in a postfantasmatic direction. As Zizek has put it, today the question of la traversee du fantasme one of the aims of analytic treatment in Lacanian psychoanalysis becomes perhaps the foremost political question.16 But what does it mean to move in such a post-fantasmatic direction? Fortunately, it might
revolution leading to a future Communist society) have only reproduced a pattern typical of pre-modern eschatological discourses such as revolutionary millenarianism. not entail reinventing the wheel, it might not require a shift of Herculean proportions. One can encounter elements of such a political project in what is usually called the democratic invention or the democratic revolution. This brings us to the second response to negativity present in political modernity, the one closest to assuming either consciously or unconsciously the responsibility for its constitutive and irreducible character.17 No

final resolutions are promised here, no political Auf hebung; antagonism is and remains constitutive. Democratic revolution an expression coming from de Tocqueville18 but radically refashioned by Lefort and others marks a discontinuity from the heteronomous legitimacy of the pre-modern ancien regime into a new form of the political institution of the social, a society becoming aware of its own historicity. The modern democratic revolution is best recognized in this mutation: there is no power linked to a body. The place of power now appears as an empty place which can be occupied only temporarily: There is no law that can be fixed, whose articles cannot be contested, whose foundations are not susceptible to being called into 58 question. Lastly, there is no representation of a centre and of the contours of society: unity cannot now efface social division. Democracy, according to Lefort, institutionalizes the experience of an ungraspable, uncontrollable society, in which even the identity of the sovereign people will constantly be open to question.19 This is clearly the boldest attempt to institute a political order on the lack of ultimate foundations typical of a modernity worthy of its name. This is not to say that all modern political forms claiming the name democracy obey such a principle of organization. One can clearly have an essentialist (predemocratic) or a post-democratic conceptualization of democracy, which remains blind to
negativity. We all know that there is no dictator that has not tried to manipulate, at least once, the vocabulary of democracy. And no citizen of a Western liberal democracy would perhaps instantly identify his own political experience with our picture of the guiding principles of the democratic revolution. This is not surprising. It is due to the fact that our current experience is marked by a third way of responding to negativity characteristic of political modernity, the response of consumerist post-democracy typical of the current articulation between the capitalist order and versions of liberalism.

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ALT: RADICAL DEMOCRACY

OF THE HOLLOW POLITICS OF THE AFFIRMATIVE, OUR ALTERNATIVE IS A POLITICS OF RADICAL DEMOCRACYINSTEAD OF STANDING ON THE SIDE OF HEGEMONIC IDEOLOGY, YOU SHOULD ALIGN YOUR BALLOT WITH THE OPPOSITIONAL FORCE THAT CREATES CHAINS OF EQUIVALENCE AROUND THE IMPOSITION OF ABJECTION ON DISENFRANCHISED SOCIAL BEINGS. NO MORE UTOPIA, NO MORE REVOLUTION, BUT A CONSTANT AND CRITICAL POLITICS

INSTEAD

STAVRAKAKIS, PROF PSYCHOANALYSIS @ U ESSEX, 03 [YANNIS , PARALLAX, 2003, VOL. 9, NO. 2, 5671 REACTIVATING THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION: THE POLITICS OF TRANSFORMATION BEYOND REOCCUPATION AND CONFORMISM]
Seen as a distinct form of politics, radical democracy takes an antiessentialist ontology of lack and negativity as its condition of possibility.36 It is not only that one has to acknowledge that at the base of any struggle lies [] the experience of dislocation and antagonism; it is not only that the radical absence of foundation now becomes the basis for a critique of any form of oppression.37 It is also that accepting the impossibility of any ultimate reconciliation and coming to terms with the irreducibility of antagonism becomes the ethical nodal point of a new political order worthy of the democratic tradition. Worthy because it registers and extends the same democratic principles, the same non-reductive stance vis-a`-vis negativity. The way radical democracy deals with negativity is by acknowledging its constitutive character and by assuming responsibility for its open, antagonistic administration, resisting at the same time, the fantasy of its permanent resolution or its reduction into an advertising spectacle. In Lacanian terms, we can assert that radical democracys deepening of the democratic revolution involves adopting an ethical position beyond the fantasy of harmony. It is here that the Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis can lend support to a radical democratic project.38 This is not to say, however, that this is an easy task. On the contrary, it is something that is becoming increasingly difficult. In Jason Glynos words: How does one even begin to bring about this radical democratic ethos? What are the main obstacles to this? Is it sufficient to rely upon intellectualist-cognitivist strategies of persuasion?39 These are open questions that require urgent attention. It is clear, in any case, that, at least from a psychoanalytic point of view, persuasion is not enough to shake ethical and political identifications. What underlies such identifications is a particular relation to enjoyment ( jouissance) structured in fantasy. Thus, a

passionate endorsement of radical democracy would require the cultivation and hegemony of a different type of ethical relation to negativity and enjoyment, an ethos beyond the politics of fantasy (in either of its forms: utopian reoccupation and quasi-utopian post-democracy). It
seems, however, that the complexities of such a task have led many on the left to opt for a nostalgic return to the old defeated and dangerous politics of reoccupation. In fact, a substantial part of the left has never managed to distance itself sufficiently from a particular version of political imagination, utopian revolutionary imagination. To put it in Freudian terms, for some the process of mourning has not even started; or

rather, it has been interrupted and the object of mourning has been displaced to democracy itself. Today, it is more fashionable to mourn democracy than utopian imagination. Even for someone like Zizek, democracy is more and more a false issue, a notion so discredited by its
predominant use that, perhaps, one should take the risk of abandoning it to the enemy.40 But if democracy has been discredited by its post-democratic use, is the situation any better with Left utopianism, with the dream of a revolutionary radical re-foundation of the social? Are not the risks involved in the politics of reoccupation substantially higher than those involved in the radicalization of democracy? Are not the supposed benefits of an illusory and ambiguous nature? It seems that the politics of nostalgia presuppose a very selective memory. In the case of Zizek, as Laclau has observed, despite his professed Marxism, [Zizek] pays no attention whatsoever to the intellectual history 62 of Marxism, in which several of the categories he uses have been refined, displaced, or to encapsulate it in one term deconstructed.41 On the other hand, many of those resisting the politics of reoccupation have also opted to disavow the promise of the democratic revolution, this time in a post-democratic direction (I am mainly referring to projects such as the Third Way). It is worth remembering here, the difference between mourning and melancholia as developed by Freud. The two seem indistinguishable in all but one of their characteristics: melancholia entails a generalised depreciation of oneself, a depreciation that engulfs the melancholics whole history.42 In political terms, such a depreciation can only lead to a generalized rejection of the political tradition of the modern Left in which paradoxically both its utopian guise and its democratic version are sacrificed in favour of a post-democratic political imaginary.43 In that sense, both the return to the politics of reoccupation and the recasting of some kind of centre-left strategy in a post-democratic direction, presuppose the disavowal of the radical potential of the democratic revolution. Such an unholy convergence must be of some significance; it certainly reveals a lot. However, mourning utopia

is not equivalent to mourning radical politics, while mourning revolution should not be extended to mourning the democratic revolution. What is most troubling in this conjuncture, is that a substantial part of the left still willing to consider the prospect of a transformation of the existing order, seems unable to register the distinction between democracy and the radical promise of the democratic revolution and post-democracy. Fuelled by the resentment caused by the hegemony of globalized capital, it longs for a supposedly real, positive politics even if such a politics has been proved unable to deal in a consistent way with the intricacies of modernity and negativity.

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ALT: REJECTION
THE REALIST SITUATION OF THE AFF IS NO LESS IDEOLOGICAL AND UTOPIAN THAN THE ALT, BUT THE AFFS CLOSED IDEOLOGY IS THE BLOCK THAT PREVENTS US FROM IMAGINING SOCIAL CHANGE. WE MUST LEAVE THE PLACE OF THE GLOBAL ALTERNATIVE OPEN, EVEN IF IT IS GOING TO MEAN WAITING FOR CHANGE.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK, SENIOR RESEARCHER AT THE INSTITUTE OF SOCIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA, 2000, CONTINGENCY, HEGEMONY, UNIVERSALITY, HOLDING THE PLACE , P. 324-5
The first thing to note about this neoliberal clich is that the neutral reference to the necessities of the market economy, usually invoked in order to -categorize--grand ideological projects as unrealistic utopias, is itself to be inserted into the series of great modern utopian projects. That is to say - as Fredric Jameson has pointed out - what characterizes utopia is not a belief in the essential goodness of human nature, or some similar naive notion, but, rather, belief in some global mechanism which, applied to the whole of society, will automatically bring about the balanced state of progress and happiness one is arian' potential todays predominant forms of ideological closure' takes the precise form of mental block which pre1!ents us .from imagining fundamental social change, in the interests of an allegedly <realistic' and <mature' attitude. longing for - and, in this precise sense, is not the market precisely the name for such a mechanism which, properly applied, will bring about the optimal state of society? So, again, the first answer of the Left to those - Leftists themselves who bemoan the loss of the utopian impetus in our societies should be that this impetus is alive and wellnot only in the Rightist 'fundamentalist' populism which advocates 'the return to grassroots democracy ,'but above all among the advocates of the market economy themselves. 12 The second answer should be a clear line of distinction between utopia and ideology: ideology is not only a. utopian project o{ social transformation with no realistic chance of actualization; no less ideological is the antiutopian stance of those who 'realistically' devalue every global project of social transformation as 'utopian', that is, as unrealistic dreaming and/ or harboring totalit In his Seminar on the Ethics qf Psychoanalysis, 13 Lacan developed an opposition between 'knave' and 'fool' as the two intellectual attitudes: the right-wing intellectual is a knave, a conformist Who considers the mere e;xistence of the given Qrderas an argument for it, and mocks the Left for its 'utopian' plans, which necessarily lead to catastrophe; while the left-wing intellectual is a fool, a court jester who publicly displays the lie of the existing order, but in a way which suspends the performative efficiency of his speech. In the years immediately after the fall of Socialism, the knave was a neoconservative advocate of the free market who cruelly rejected all forms of social solidarity as counterproductive sentimentalism; while the fool was a deconstructionist cultural critic who, by means of his ludic procedures destined to 'subvert' the existing order, actually served as its supplement. . Today, however, the relationship between the couple knave-fool and the political opposition Right/Left is more and more the inversion of the standard figures of Rightist knave and Leftist fool: are not the Third Way theoreticians ultimately to day's knaves, figures who preach cynical resignation, that is, the necessary failure of every attempt actually to change something in the basic functioning of global capitalism? And are not the conservative fools - those conservatives whose original modern model is Pascal and who as it were show the hidden cards of the ruling ideology, bringing to light its underlying mechanisms which, in order to remain operative, have to be repressed - far more attractive? Today, in the face of this Leftist knavery, it is more important than ever to hold this utopian place of the global alternative open, even if it remains empty, living on borrowed time, awaiting. the content to fill it in.

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ALT: SOLVES CASE AND FEMINISM

CURRENT MULTICULTURAL MOVEMENTS WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF LIBERALISM WILL FAIL. ONLY A NEW RADICAL POLITICS THAT ENVISIONS A COMMUNITY WITHOUT SUBSTANCE, WITHOUT UNDERLYING NORMS THAT INEVITABLY EXCLUDE OTHERS CAN HOPE TO COMBAT THE VIOLENT ENDEMIC TO THE STATUS QOU. THE ALTERNATIVE FORM OF COMMUNITY IS ESPECIALLY CRUCIAL TO RESISTANT SEXUAL POLITICS. TRACEY SEDINGER 2002(ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN COLORADO AND COORDINATOR OF THE WOMEN'S STUDIES PROGRAM, NATION AND IDENTIFICATION PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE, CULTURAL CRITIQUE ) P. 63-65
Though Schmitt did not limit the exercise of the political to the state (20-22), in the modern world nation-states are the primary entities organized according to the friend-enemy distinction. The nation, as Ernest Gellner argued, remains one of the primary modern means of externally delimiting the people in the demos. Though it is precisely [End Page 63] this unity of the people that multiculturalism has challenged, nevertheless the challenge (when issued on behalf of culture or the nation-trope) remains on a liberal terrain. Charles Taylor has attempted to distinguish between a procedural liberalism, one that insists on a uniform application of rules and distribution of rights and eschews defining for its citizens the "good life," and a "cultural" liberalism (my term), one that recognizes liberalism to be constitutive of a specific way of life and therefore with specific content. Though Taylor prefers the latter (calling it his "fighting creed" [62]) and sees it as more in accord with multiculturalist goals, in some fundamental ways neither is opposed to multiculturalism. For whether it legislates competing goods or mandates the good, contemporary liberalism gives concrete form to the good. In its efforts to eradicate political antagonism and conflict from the social space, liberalism imposes formal homogeneity on different collectives, transforming them into competitors (in an economic sense) for the distribution of social and economic goods. In contemporary societies, liberalism mediates between different interest groups, all of which are reduced to the same form, ruled by what Wendy Brown has called "the conversion of attribute into identity" (1995, 21). Though the contents of the interest groups change, the groups, in order to occupy the same field, are similarly structured via the discourses of possessive individualism and recognition, as underwritten by culture or the nation-trope. In Brown's brilliant analysis, identities become structured around "wounded attachments" to a lost substance, a culture that requires recognition. Hence the appealas well as the homogenizing dangersof what Janet Halley has called "like race" arguments. Mouffe's adoption of Schmitt's challenge to liberalism suggests that we need to rethink the possibility of political communities that would not have some substance (such as culture) as their essence. Mouffe departs from Schmitt's prognostications for liberalism's doom by arguing that Schmitt overly emphasized the unity, and hence identity, of the people. Mouffe, on the other hand, argues that though the "people" requires a limit to be constituted as a people, and hence as a political entity, the limit need not be exterior to the people, as Schmitt argued (56). In other words, it may be possible to conceptualize the limit as internal to the people. Mouffe raises the possibility of a [End Page 64] community in which antagonism is immanent, as opposed to externally directed toward an enemy. This possibility has both a concrete and a utopian dimension. In terms of the former, it means the refusal of a social imaginary that itself disguises political conflict via such oxymorons as "responsible development" or "compassionate conservatism." Mouffe therefore seeks to revitalize our political discourse and institutions by reminding us that politics is about struggle and choice, something that Western democracies increasingly forget. But Mouffe's critique of liberalism also has a utopian dimension: a community in which antagonism is immanent as opposed to external would be a community without foundation, essence, or substance. In the absence of a common substance (such as culture) to provide the glue for what Jean-Luc Nancy has called "being-in-common," it would be possible to imagine new forms of community, consubstantial with a form of commonality based on a lack of identity rather than shared identity (Nancy, xxxviii-xxxix, 25); or what Giorgio Agamben has called a "whatever singularity," a singularity defined not by properties or the absence of properties, but by virtue of belonging itself (84). Though neither Nancy nor Agamben consider how sexual difference might structure such a community, Lacan's formulas suggest how fraternity has given substantive form to present liberal communities; as a consequence, a community that attempts to implement the paradoxical logic of femininity might offer a way out of the cul-de-sac of both liberalism and multiculturalism. As R. Radhakrishnan has argued, contemporary feminism should reject both nationalism and liberalism, so as to develop an as yet unarticulated (and perhaps inarticulable within a politics that takes the nation as its norm) "relational-integrative politics" that eschews totalization (78-79). In other words, a feminist politics that does not attempt to speak for some collective entity called "women" might proffer a new, as yet unarticulated, democratic politics, one that surmounts the temptations of imaginary and voluntarist identifications. Lacan's formalization of sexual difference suggests both the exclusions occasioned by the modern formation and delimitation of the people, and the utopian possibility of new forms of community that would refuse the boundaries of the people without falling into pre- or postpolitical cosmopolitan humanism.

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ALT: SOLVENCY
IT IS THE BRUTAL REALIZATION OF OUR DISLOCATION FROM MEANING, THE TRUE ENCOUNTER WITH THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF FULLNESS AND WITH THE BLEAKNESS THE HUMAN CONDITION; THAT CONSTITUTES RATHER THAN FORECLOSES ETHICAL AND MEANINGFUL POSSIBILITY, EDKINS, PROFESSOR AT ABERYSTWYTH 2002 [JENNY THE SUBJECT OF THE POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY AND SUBJECTIVITY]
If, by "a crack in the ontological edifice of the universe," Zizek is invoking a fissure that arises because of the impossibility of defining a total context, then ethics enters into the equation because it "designates fidelity to this crack." In other words, it designates a fidelity to difference; that is to say, it opens up the possibility of the "nonmasterable dissemination" of meaning.18 If a "nonmasterable dissemination" is one in which there are always possibilities for the relocation of signs in different contexts and in which, therefore, meanings are not self-identical and ontologically "full," then ethics is about not denying this However, there is a drawback. Within logocentrism, language is what it is, language, only insofar as it can then master and analyze polysemia. With no remainder. A nonmasterable dissemination is not even a polysemia, it belongs to what is outside language. . . . Each time that polysemia is irreducible, when no unity of meaning is even promised to it, one is outside language. And consequently, outside humanity.19 In other words, to return to the notion of the master signifier, a nonmasterable dissemination is one that has no authority, no master signifier to halt the sliding of signifier over signified, where polysemia is irreducible. Not only do words have many meanings, but the number of meanings is not finite. What Derrida is saying, then, is that without a master signifier we can have no language, no symbolic order. The implication might be that in that case, no human subject as such is possible either. The politico-ethical implications of the notion of fidelity to the dislocation of signs may be the impossibility of what we call social reality. Without reality or social fantasy as a support, we are left to face the traumatic real. Ethics, then, is also to be found in the constitution of the subject in the face of trauma. This is "an ethics grounded in reference to the traumatic Real which resists symbolization the Real which is experienced in the encounter with the abyss of the Others desire."20 It is through this encounter that the subject is formed, as we have seen: the subject is constituted as subject within the symbolic only in a concealment of the traumatic real through social fantasy. Le ethical possibility for zizek lies in maintaining a grasp of this as fantasy, or in other words, accepting the impossibility of ontological fullness (as we have called it), the impossibility of symbolizing all aspects of a context and therefore of meaning This leads back to the master signifier or, in our case, sovereignty, and to what Zizek sees as the role of the critical intellectual in maintaining a distance from the master signifier, making its constituted nature visible and challenging claims to naturalness. This is an ethics of fidelity to "the Real which is expressed in the encounter with the abyss of the Other's desire." This encounter is an encounter with the impossibility of fullness and with the bleakness of la condition humaine. It is fidelity to this, then, that we are arguing constitutes rather than forecloses ethical possibility,)

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AT: ALTERNATIVE FAILS (TAKE THE RISK)

TAKE THE RISK OF THE ALTERNATIVE EVEN IN THE FACE OF THEIR SKEPTICISM RADICAL POLITICS REQUIRES TAKING REAL RISKS, WHILE THEIR POLITICAL TIPTOEING GUARANTEES THE ETERNAL REPRODUCTION OF THE STATUS QUO.
JODI

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POLITICAL THEORY @ HOBART

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WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGE,

2005.

ZIZEK AGAINST DEMOCRACY.

HTTP://JDEANICITE.TYPEPAD.COM/I_CITE/FILES/ZIZEK_AGAINST_DEMOCRACY_NEW_VERSION.DOC )

For Zizek, the only way to break out of this stultifying deadlock is through a radical political act.xiv As Zizek conceives it, the act is a radical, uncertain gesture that breaks through the symbolic order. From the standpoint of this order, then, and like the very foundation of the order itself, the act is shattering, unethicaland this is the point, to break through the boundaries of the situation, to change its basic contours. In this way, the act is non-democratic; it is not democratically legitimized in advance. Rather, it is a risk.xv There are no guarantees of success. Only retroactively, in light of what follows, can there be any sense of the act. Zizek writes: an act is always a specific intervention within a socio-symbolic context; the same gesture can be an act or a ridiculous empty posture, depending on this context.xvi Rather than a radical step toward freedom, the Boston Tea Party could well have been a pathetic act of vandalism by men in unfortunate costumes. Likewise the Los Angeles riots could have been the moment when the structures of class and race were radically transformed rather than merely the moment when rage combusted into violence and looting. Zizek emphasizes two features of the political act. First, it is external to the subject. The act is not something that the subject figures out and decides to do having rationally considered a number of different options. On the contrary, insofar as the act is an intrusion of the Real, the act is precisely something which unexpectedly just occurs.xvii An act is not intentional; it is something that the subject had to do, that it could not do otherwise, that just happened. Second, the genuinely political act intervenes from the position of the social symptom; it is not simply some sort of transformation of the subject. Zizek explains: an authentic act is not simply external with regard to the hegemonic field disturbed by it: an act is an act only with regard to some symbolic field, as an intervention into it.xviii To transform in this field, rather than remain trapped within it, an act has to intervene from the standpoint of its hidden structuring principle, of its inherent exception. For example, the political strategy of the Democratic Leadership Council in the United States has for all intents and purposes been to race the Republicans to the right. Clinton Democrats, then, emphasized wefare reform (turning it into workfare and capping lifetime receipt of benefits at five years) as they tried to appeal to what they perceived to be average or middle class Americans. Lost in this strategy are the poor: the exclusion of the poor was necessary for the restructuring of the Democratic party. The poor, then, would constitute the symptom of the Democratic Party and an act would intervene from this position

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AT: PERMUTATION
PERMUTATION DOES NOT SOLVE IT IS NECESSARY TO RESIST REOCCUPATIONS OF TRADITIONAL FANTASMIC POLITICS, TO ENABLE THE RADICALITY AND POLITICAL IMPORTANCE OF THE CRITIQUE. ITS THE DISTANCE FROM POLITICS IN THE TRADITIONAL SENSE THAT ALLOWS THE ALTERNATIVE TO BE TRULY POLITICAL.

THE

STAVRAKAKIS, DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, DIRECTOR OF IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS PROGRAM 1999 [YANNIS, LACAN AND THE POLITICAL, P.118-119]
In fact, articulating Lacanian theory with fantasmatic politics is equivalent to affirming the irrelevance of Lacanian theory for radical politics since this articulation presupposes the repression of all the political insights implicit in Lacan.s reading and highlighted in this book. The alleged irrelevance of Lacan for radical politics is also the argument put forward by Collier in a recent article in Radical Philosophy. Collier.s argument is
that since it is capitalism that shatters our wholeness and disempowers us (as if without capitalism we would be on the road to utopia; obviously, capitalism occupies the structural position of the antichrist in this sort of leftist preaching), then Lacan.s theory is, in fact, normalising capitalist damage, precisely because alienation is so deep for Lacan that nothing can be done to eliminate it (.Lacan is deeply pessimistic, rejecting cure or happiness as possible goals., my emphasis). 19 Thus Lacan has nothing to offer radical politics. Something not entirely surprising since, according to Collier, psychological theory in general has no political implications whatsoever. The conclusion is predictable: .Let us go to Freud and Klein for our psychotherapy [Lacan is of course excluded] and to Marx and the environmental sciences for our politics, and not get our lines crossed. (Collier, 1998:41-3). Surprisingly enough this is almost identical with Homer.s conclusion:

Lacanian theory is OK as an analytical tool but let us go back to Marx for our ideological seminar and our utopian catechism! It is clear that from a Lacanian point of view it is necessary to resist all such .reoccupations. of traditional fantasmatic politics. At least this is the strategy that Lacan follows on similar occasions. Faced with the alienating dimension of every identification, Lacan locates the end of analysis beyond identification. Since utopian or quasi-utopian constructions function through identification it is legitimate, I think, to draw the analogies with the social field. If analysis resists the .reoccupation. of the traditional strategy of identification.although it recognises its crucial, but alienating, role in the formation of subjectivity.why should psychoanalytic politics, after unmasking the crucial but alienating character of traditional, fantasmatic, identificatory politics, .reoccupy. their ground? This
rationale underlying the Lacanian position is not far away from what Beardsworth articulates as a political reading of Derrida. For Beardsworth, deconstruction also refuses to implicate itself in traditional politics, in the .local sense of politics. in Beardsworth.s terminology: In its affirmative refusal to advocate a politics, deconstruction forms, firstly, an account of why all political projects fail. Since the projection of any decision has ethical implications, deconstruction in fact generalizes what is meant by the political well beyond the local sense of politics. In this sense it becomes a radical .critique. of institutions. (Beardsworth, 1996:19) Similarly, the

radicality and political importance of the Lacanian critique depends on its ability to keep its distance from fantasmatic politics, from politics in the traditional sense; which is not the same as saying that psychoanalysis is apolitical: in fact, it becomes political precisely by being critical of traditional politics, exactly because, as argued in the previous chapter, the political is located beyond the utopian or quasi-utopian sedimentations of political reality.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO POINT OUT THE LACK IN THE OTHER AND AT THE SAME TIME ATTEMPT TO FILL IT. STAVRAKAKIS, DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, DIRECTOR OF IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS PROGRAM 1999 [YANNIS, LACAN AND THE POLITICAL, P.116-117]
Since, however, Lacanian political theory aims at bringing to the fore, again and again, the lack in the Other, the same lack that utopian fantasy attempts to mask, it would beself-defeating, if not absurd, to engage itself in utopian or quasi-utopian fantasy construction. Is it really possible and consistent to point to the lack in the Other and, at the same time, to attempt to fill it in a quasiutopian move? Such a question can also be posed in ethical or even strategic terms. It could be argued of course that Homer.s vision of a psychoanalytic politics does not foreclose the recognition of the impossibility of the social but that in his schema this recognition, and the promise to eliminate it (as part of a quasi-utopian regulative principle) go side by side; that in fact this political promise is legitimised by the conclusions of psychoanalytic political theory. But this coexistence is nothing new. This recognition of the .impossibility of society., of an antagonism that cross-cuts the social field, constitutes the starting point for almost every political ideology. Only if presented against the background of this .disorder. the final harmonious .order. promised by a utopian fantasy acquires hegemonic force. The problem is that all this schema is based on the elimination of the first moment, of the recognition of impossibility. The centrality of political dislocation is always repressed in favour of the second moment, the utopian promise. Utopian fantasy can sound appealing only if presented as the final solution to the problem that constitutes its starting point. In that sense, the moment of impossibility is only acknowledged in order to be eliminated. In Marx, for instance, the constitutivity of class struggle is recognised only to be eliminated in the future communist society. Thus, when Homer says that he wants to repeat Marx.s error today he is simply acknowledging that his psychoanalytic politics is nothing but traditional fantasmatic politics articulated with the use of a psychoanalytic vocabulary.

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AT: PERMUTATION/ ALT SOLVES

THE POLITICAL IS ASSOCIATED WITH THE MOMENT OF UNDECIDABLITY MARKING THE GAP BETWEEN THE DISLOCATION OF ONE SOCIO POLITICAL IDENTIFICATION AND THE CREATION OF THE DESIRE FOR A NEW ONE IT IS LOCATED PRIOR TO ALL ATTEMPTS AND PROMISES BY THE AFFIRMATIVE TO COVER OVER THE LACK STAVRAKAKIS, DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, DIRECTOR OF IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS PROGRAM 1999 [YANNIS, LACAN AND THE POLITICAL, P.74-75]
Underlying Lacan.s importance for political theory and political analysis is his insistence on the split, lacking nature of the symbolic, of the socio-political world per se. Our societies are never harmonious ensembles. This is only the fantasy through which they attempt to constitute and reconstitute themselves. Experience shows that this fantasy can never be fully realised. No social fantasy can fill the lack around which society is always structured. This lack is re-emerging with every resurfacing of the political, with every encounter with the real. We can speak about the political exactly because there is subversion and dislocation of the social. The level of social construction, of human creativity, of the emergence and development of socio-political institutions, is the level in which the possibility of mastering the real makes itself visible but only to be revealed as a chimera unable to foreclose a moment of impossibility that always returns to its place. Given this context, the moment of the political should be understood as emerging at the intersection of our symbolic reality with this real, the real being the ontological horizon of every play between political articulation and dislocation, order and disorder, politics and the political. 2 Let us summarise our Lacanian commentary on the concept of the political. The political is not the real per se but one of the modalities in which we experience an encounter with the real; it is the dominant shape this encounter takes within the socio-objective level of experience. The moment of the political is the moment made possible by the structural causality of this real, a moment linked to the surfacing of a constitutive lack within our fantasmatic representations of society. It amounts to the cut of dislocation threatening all symbolisations of the social, to the ultimate subversion of any sedimentation of political reality. It is the moment in which the ontological impossibility of the real affects sociopolitical reality. It is also a moment located prior to all attempts and promises to cover over this lack, to reconstitute the fantasmatic coherence of the dislocated reality. Although it is internal to the development of such a desire, although it constitutes its condition of possibility, it evaporates as soon as the play of construction begins: it is what makes possible the articulation of new political projects and new social fantasies but is not compatible with them; their constitution demands the repression of the political. The political is associated thus with the moment of contingency and undecidability marking the gap between the dislocation of one socio-political identification and the creation of the desire for a new one. 3

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AT: DECONSTRUCTION PERM

THE AFFS COMMITMENT TO UNDECIDABILITY UNDERMINES ANY SERIOUS POLITICAL COMMITMENT ERECTING AN INEVITABLE AND ANTAGONISTIC BARRIER OF IDENTITY BETWEEN SELF AND OTHER. REAL POLITICS REQUIRES MAKING RISKY DECISIONS, AND STANDING FIRMLY BEHIND THEM. THESE DECISIONS ARE CAPABLE, THOUGH, OF MAKING NEW RELATIONSHIPS POSSIBLE. THEIR VERSION OF POSTMODERN UNCERTAINTY PREVENTS DECISION, WHICH IS KEY TO ACCESSING THIS FORM OF POLITICS.
RENS VAN MUNSTER, 2004 DEPARTMENT OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS, UNIVERSITY OF WALES. THE DESECURITISATION ILLEGAL MIGRATION: THE CASE FOR A EUROPEAN BELONGING WITHOUT COMMUNITY. MARIE CURIE WORKING PAPERS, NO 7
OF

There is one crucial problem with the deconstructivist position, however. For while deconstructivism embraces the objective of desecuritisation, its theoretical maxim that identity is always constituted in the dialectics between two opposing terms which function as each others negation hampers them in reaching this goal. For if one accepts, if only tacitly, that identity is always constituted through an antagonistic relationship with the other, it becomes unclear how one can envisage desecuritised ways of mediating belonging between self and other (cf. Fierke, 2001; Hansen, 1997). Ole Wver observes in this context that [m]any [poststructuralist] authors including
Campbell balance between, on the one hand, (formally) saying that identity does not demand an Other, does not demand antagonism, only difference(s) that can be non-antagonistic and, on the other, actually assuming that identity is always based on an antagonistic relationship to an other, is always constituted as an absolute difference (Wver, 1996: 122; cf. Fierke, 2001: 119). Indeed, the theoretical maxim that identity always requires a constitutive outside logically

entails that only the particular contents of a specific friend/enemy figuration can be questioned, but never the antagonistic logic itself (see also Norval, 2000). If identity presupposes otherness, then every positive articulation of identity will automatically lead to the institutionalisation of a new, yet equally absolute, difference. Thus although deconstructivists are right to stress the principle openness of all articulations of belonging, they have so far not adequately theorised the reverse move from deconstruction to the decision as an ethical act. But without a theory of how to break free from the us/them dichotomy, there is nothing to guarantee that the deconstruction of a security story will contribute to political forms of identification that are less exclusive towards the other (Wyn Jones, 1999; Wver, 2000). Thus while it is no doubt true that the deconstruction of security stories is a necessary precondition for desecuritisation and the repoliticising of belonging, it does not in itself provide a guarantee against totalising discourses of closure. Hence Derridas claim that deconstruction is, in itself, a positive response to an alterity which necessarily calls, summons or motivates it (cited in Campbell, 1998a: 182) makes little sense as long as it is not supplemented theoretically with an account of how to bridge the gap between openness on the one hand and closure on the other. For without such a theory, deconstructivism risks getting caught on the abstract level of meta-politics in which its philosophical preferences for opening up and transgression are translated as something equally desirable on the less abstract level of politics (see also Wver, 2000: 283). Which is why Moran rightly objects that deconstruction runs the risk of appearing either as a critical Puritanism or as a series of empty, if largely unobjectionable platitudes (Moran, 2002: 125). Hence the deconstructive emphasis on the importance of ontological openness/ undecidability as the necessary precondition for every closure/decision needs itself to be supplemented with a theory of the decision if it is not appear either as substanceless cant or a new moral absolutism (Moran, 2002: 129). For if without the radical structural undecidability that the deconstructive intervention brings about, many strata of social relations appear as essentially linked by necessary logics, Laclau correctly observes that deconstruction in turn requires hegemony, that is, a theory of the decision taken in an undecidable terrain: without a theory of decision, that distance between structural undecidability and actuality would remain untheorised (Laclau, 1996: 59-60). In a similar critique, Critchley who agrees with Laclau that deconstruction is a necessary move against closure and for politics has pointed out that making politics possible is not the same as providing a politics. For him, the gap between undecidability and actuality points to the limits of deconstructivism as a political strategy: Decisions have to be taken. But how? And in virtue of what? How does one make a decision in an undecidable terrain? (Critchley, 1992: 199) Prozorov, too, comes to similar conclusions. For him, the idea that any decision presupposes contingency and undecidability is not just lamenting the obvious; it is also problematic from an ethical point of view. For if it is true that every decision requires undecidability, all decisions are responsible and hence ethical in Derridean terms. Yet, since all decisions effect a closure of the radical openness , they are all equally irresponsible and hence unethical. Thus, while it was argued that security is undesirable because it performs its
ordering function in an exclusionary way that closes off for alternative ways of deciding on belonging, it is at the same time also ethical because, like any other decision, it passages through the moment of undecidability. As a result, deconstructivism remains frustratingly caught above the abyss of undecidability in the desire to refrain from the closure that every decision inaugurates (Prozorov, 2004: 13). What is needed, therefore, is

not only a deconstructivist position that highlights the impossibility of a decision, but also a theory that can affirm the decision as an ethical act in a radically undecidable terrain. To put this differently, in focusing upon the substance of the decision, a deconstructivist stance risks ignoring the ethicality of deciding as such. Thus to move beyond deconstructivism, it is necessary not focus too narrowly on the impossible attempt to establish the fact of ethicality of decision, but on affirming the decision itself as an ethical act, whose authenticity is conditioned by going through both the traversal of undecidability and its closure. The ethical injunction concerns not the substance of the decision, but the responsibility for the decision as an act (Prozorov, 2004: 13). In contrast to deconstructivist thought which explicitly separates the ethical (the unconditional injunction of undecidability) from the domain of politics (the domain of practical interventions which always fail to live up to this ethical injunction), the move towards desecuritisation as an act requires that we accept the inherently political character of every ethical act.

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* AT: MUST ACT *

THE COMPULSION TO ACT AND INTOLERANCE OF ANYTHING BUT FRANTIC PARTICIPATION IS SYMPTOMATIC OF A FORM OF POLITCAL ACTIVIY THAT IS DOOMED TO DO NOTHING BUT PERPETUATE THE STATUS QUO AND PREVENT THE EMERGENCE OF ANY GENUINELY NEW POLITICS.

IEK, INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, 2004 [SLAVOJ, APPENDIX I: CANIS A NON CANENDO, IRAQ THE BORROWED KETTLE PG.71-2 ]
one should ask the obvious difficult question: what, in fact, was the alternative? If today's 'post-politics' is opportunistic pragmatism with no principles, then the predominant leftist reaction to it can be aptly characterized as 'principled opportunism': one simply sticks to old formulae (defence of the welfare state, and so on) and calls them 'principles', dispensing with the detailed analysis of how the situation has changed and thus retaining one's position of Beautiful Soul. The inherent stupidity of the 'principled' Left is clearly discernible in its standard criticism of any analysis which proposes a more complex picture of the situation, renouncing any simple prescriptions on how to act: 'there is no clear political stance involved in your theory' and this from people with no stance but their 'principled opportunism'. Against such a stance, one should have the courage to affirm that, in a situation like today's, the only way really to remain open to a revolutionary opportunity is to renounce facile calls to direct action, which necessarily involve us in an activity where things change so that the totality remains the same. Today's predicament is that, if we succumb to the urge of directly 'doing something' (engaging in the anti-globalist struggle, helping the poor . . .), we will certainly and undoubtedly contribute to the reproduction of the existing order. The only way to lay the foundations for a true, radical change is to withdraw from the compulsion to act, to 'do nothing' thus opening up the space for a different kind of activity.
The stance of simply condemning the postmodern Left for its accommodation, however, is also false, since

WORKING WITHIN EXISTING IDEOLOGICAL COORDINATES GUARANTEES THE PERPETUATION OF STATUS QUO POWER RELATIONS. SLAVOJ ZIZEK, ELVIS OF CULTURAL THEORY. REPEATING LENIN. HTTP://WWW.LACAN.COM/REPLENIN.HTM 2001.
One is therefore tempted to turn around Marx's thesis 11: the first task today is precisely NOT to succumb to the temptation to act, to directly intervene and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul de sac of debilitating impossibility: "what can one do against the global capital?"), but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates. If, today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space - it will be an act WITHIN the hegemonic ideological coordinates: those who "really want to do something to help people" get involved in (undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins sans frontiere, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated, but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly enter the economic territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions or which use child labor) - they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity2: of doing things not to achieve something, but to PREVENT from something really happening, really changing. All the frenetic humanitarian, politically correct, etc., activity fits the formula of "Let's go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!"

YOU SHOULD REFUSE THIS FEAR MONGERING WHICH IS ONLY A TACTIC OF THE SYSTEM. SLAVOJ ZIZEK, REPEATING LENIN. HTTP://WWW.LACAN.COM/REPLENIN.HTM 2001.
It is true that, today, it is the radical populist Right which is usually breaking the (still) predominant liberal-democratic consensus, gradually rendering acceptable the hitherto excluded topics (the partial justification of Fascism, the need to constrain abstract citizenship on behalf of ethnic identity, etc.). However, the hegemonic liberal democracy is using this fact to blackmail the Left radicals: "we shouldn't play with fire: against the new Rightist onslaught, one should more than ever insist on the democratic consensus - any criticism of it willingly or unwillingly helps the new Right!" This is the key line of separation: one should reject this blackmail, taking the risk of disturbing the liberal consensus, up to questioning the very notion of democracy.

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AT: (K) IS APOLITICAL

PSYCHOANALYSIS AUTHORIZES RADICAL POLITICAL ACTS WHICH FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORM SYMBOLIC ORDER. THIS CREATES RESPONSIBILITY AND PROVIDES THE CONDITIONS FOR REAL POLITICS.
THE

GLYN DALY. FACULTY OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES. UNIVERSITY COLLEGE NORTHAMPTON. SLAVOJ ZIZEK: RISKING THE IMPOSSIBLE. HTTP://WWW.LACAN.COM/ZIZEK-PRIMER.HTM 2004
the miracle is that which coincides with trauma in the sense that it involves a fundamental moment of symbolic disintegration (2001b: 86). This is the mark of the act: a basic rupture in the weave of reality that opens up new possibilities and creates the space for a reconfiguration of reality itself. Like the miracle, the act is ultimately unsustainable - it cannot be reduced to, or incorporated directly within, the symbolic order. Yet it is through the act that we touch (and are touched by) the Real in such a way that the bonds of our symbolic universe are broken and that an alternative construction is enabled; reality is transformed in a Real sense. The Real is not simply a force of negation against which we are helpless. In contrast to standard criticisms, what psychoanalysis demonstrates is that we are not victims of either unconscious motives or an infrastructural logic of the Real. If reality is a constitutive distortion then the ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis is that we are responsible for its reproduction. Miracles can and do happen. We are capable of Real acts that give reality a new texture and direction; acts that reflect this gap in the order of Being, this abyss of freedom. If Freud - in his theory of the unconscious - affirms an essential autonomization of the signifier, then what Zizek emphasises is an essential autonomization of the act: a basic capacity to break out of existing structures/cycles of signification. Far from being constrained by the notion of impossibility, Zizek's perspective is sustained and energised by the ontological potential for achieving the "impossible" through Real intervention. In this sense, Zizek's conception of the Real may be said to constitute both an inherent limit and an inherent opening/beginning: the radically negative dimension that is the condition of creatio ex nihilo and the political itself.
Zizek's thought is concerned crucially to reactivate the dimension of the miraculous in political endeavour. For Zizek

AT: KRISHNA
THEIR NOTION OF CONSENSUS PREVENTS POLITICIZATION OF SYSTEMATIC VIOLENCE.
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DEAN,

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POLITICAL THEORY @ HOBART

AND

WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGE,

2005.

ZIZEK AGAINST DEMOCRACY.

HTTP://JDEANICITE.TYPEPAD.COM/I_CITE/FILES/ZIZEK_AGAINST_DEMOCRACY_NEW_VERSION.DOC )
Finally, Zizeks third argument against is that it Zizek uses the example of the animated film series about dinosaurs, The Land Before Time, produced by Steven Spielberg.xix The clearest articulation of the hegemonic liberal multiculturalist ideology, The Land Before Time iterates the basic message that everyone is different and all should learn to live with these differencesbig and small, strong and weak, carnivore and herbivore. In the films, the dinosaurs sing songs about how one shouldnt really worry about being eaten because underneath those big teeth are real fears and anxieties that everyone shares. But this image of cooperative dinosaurs is a profoundly false picture. As Zizek asks,

multiculturalism

precludes politicization.

what does really mean to say that it takes all kinds? Does that mean nice and brutal, poor and rich, victims and torturers?xx The vision of a plurality of horizontal differences precludes the notion of a vertical antagonism that cuts through the social body. Some are more powerful. Some do want to killand denying this in an acceptance of differences prevents the politicization of this inequality. To say that in our difference we are really all alike, underneath it all, prevents us from calling into question and emphasizing specific differences as elements in larger, systematic patterns of violence.

AT: METAPHORIC CONDENSATION

YOUR DEMAND CANNOT METAPHORICALLY CONDENSE IF WE WIN A LINK. APPEALS TO IDENTITY STRUGGLE PRECLUDE A UNIVERSAL DIMENSION AND CONTRIBUTE TO A SUGAR-COATED APARTHEID.

IEK, SENIOR RESEARCHER DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, 11/16/99 [SLAVOJ, HTTP://WWW.EGS.EDU/FACULTY/ZIZEK/ZIZEK-HUMAN-RIGHTS-AND-ITS-DISCONTENTS.HTML]
what I'm radically opposed to is this, at least a certain version of so-called identity politics which goes into the direction of a) only we-the we you can then replace some ethnic minorities, some sexual orientation, whatever only we can really speak for ourselves. I think this is a modern form of barbarism. I think it's complete catastrophe. We should absolutely speak to universality. The other aspect of this same attitude, of this same paradox for me is that I categorically reject this would be the practical lesson any assertion of particular political subjectivities which legitimize their specific claims on some of their specific properties, like, for example, at least if not herself, certain followers of Luce Irigaray. When you justify your demands in some of your specific properties, I claim that the moment you accept this game of identity politics where the point is to assert your specific identity, you are in a way lost. You are playing the game of apartheid. And paradoxical as it may sound, I claim that I tend to be surprised again and again to what extent so-called progressives today play the game of a renewed version of apartheid.
SZ: I think I can give you at least one hint, which is the following one. Again, maybe this will make me some enemies, but

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AT: FRAMEWORKINTERPASSIVITY
SEEING DEBATE AS A WORLD WHERE WE CAN HELP SHAPE POLICY AND PRETEND TO BE GOOD PRODUCTIVE CITIZENS PRECLUDES A FOCUS ON THE PRODUCT OF OUR DISCOURSE, AND INSTEADS FORCES A FOCUS ON THE PROCEDURALS OF POLITICS. THE LOGIC OF THEIR FRAMEWORK ONLY ENDS UP UNDERMINING ITSELF,
REDUCING POLITICS TO A BANAL FOCUS ON THE POLITICAL PROCESS INSTEAD OF THE ACTUALITY OF POLITICS INSIDE SPACES LIKE DEBATE.

VAN OENEN, PROFESSOR OF ETHICS, LEGAL PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AT THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY OF ERASMUS UNIVERSITY, ROTTERDAM. 2006 [GIJS A MACHINE THAT WOULD GO OF ITSELF: INTERPASSIVITY AND ITS IMPACT ON POLITICAL LIFE THEORY AND EVENT]
The most important force driving the development towards interactive policy or politics, the third 'mode' in my series, is that of emancipation. The emancipation movement started in the sixties as a protest against traditional forms of authority in both the public and the private sphere. Many (although not all) of the old structures of authority indeed gave way to new ones that were more conscious of, and responsive to, the diverse composition of the citizenry, taking note of the needs and preferences of women and minority groups. Citizens were to be 'treated as equals.' But just as importantly, citizens were no longer satisfied with the passive 'being treated'; they started to demand an active part in government and in policy making. At first, this demand was fuelled to a relatively large extent by the quasi-anarchist, activist progressivism of the protest movements of the sixties and seventies; later

on, however, the attitude of critical resistance to authority became ever more translated into a liberal self-conception as citizen. That is to say, the critical involvement with government became less focused on collective deliberation concerning the common good than on the facilitation of individual preferences and conceptions of the good.
As a consequence of these developments, policy as a mode of governance became interactive. Interactivity was both the problem and the solution to the twofold development sketched above: the attempt of government to intervene in social life under conditions of 'equal treatment' of all citizens on the one hand, and the desire of citizens to actively interfere in government to pursue and safeguard their own interests on the other hand. These developments effected a drastic change in the structure of political authority: government and policy-making became 'horizontal'. This metaphor signifies of course that the hierarchical relation between government and citizens is being replaced by one of 'equal standing' conjunctive instead of subjunctive, we might say. But it also symbolizes how the 'interest' in politics itself is changing. The 'locus' of involvement with politics shifts from the

'product', or social praxis that it aims to realize, towards the earlier phases of preparation, consultation and policy-formation. This shift implicit in the growth of 'interactivity' serves the interests of both parties involved in political life. In the official rhetoric, interactivity strengthens the
involvement of citizens in politics, by committing them not only to the results of the political process but also to that process itself. In this way they become 'coproducers of policy', dedicated citizens so to speak. In turn, government is able to 'fine tune' its policies and in general stay in close contact with its citizens, enabling it to reach its objectives in a more precise and secure way.
More realistically, citizens become interactive because they see this as a better option to safeguard their (partial) interests than the traditional options of party membership or voting behavior. They feel that interactivity will let their voice more forcefully be heard. Or even more straightforwardly, their attitude towards politics in general is one of 'what is in it for me?' In such a self-centered view,. politics appears primarily as an institution that may facilitate one's own plans and preferences, rather than as a process of collective will formation furthering socially desirable practices Government, in turn, sees interactivity as an effective way of 'polling' views and interests, which are usually better accommodated in an early stage of policy formation than in later stages, that may involve troublesome renegotiations, or protracted litigation.

the official view or 'ideology' underwriting interactivity denies that a shift in political interest is taking place. It suggests that the interest of both citizens and government in what politics 'produces' some form of collective good is enhanced and supplemented by an increased interest in the process of policy formation. Against this 'win-win' view, I want to suggest that the increase in involvement in the political process, the sphere of policy formation, goes along with a loss of involvement in the 'product' of the process. The point here is not merely that people lack sufficient time or means to be involved in both process and result. Rather it seems that people nowadays feel more attached to the process than to its eventual product. Being actively involved in the process has acquired a sense and meaning of its own, that may compete with, or actually override, the interest in what the process aimed to realize. In other words, what the process now mainly realizes, its main 'product', is involvement with itself.
But more importantly,

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AT: FRAMEWORKINTERPASSIVITY
THEIR
FRAMEWORK WILL NOT INCREASE EDUCAITON NOR USHER IN SOME ANGEL PERFECT ROLE PLAYING ARENA. THE ONLY THING GARUNTEED BY THEIR FRAMEWORK IS A STEADY DEPOLITIZATION OF THE DEBATE SPHERE AND THE REMOVAL OF ALL PRODUCTIVE CRITICISM WITHIN DEBATE.

VAN OENEN, PROFESSOR OF ETHICS, LEGAL PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AT THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY OF ERASMUS UNIVERSITY, ROTTERDAM. 2006 [GIJS A MACHINE THAT WOULD GO OF ITSELF: INTERPASSIVITY AND ITS IMPACT ON POLITICAL LIFE THEORY AND EVENT]
Slavoj Zizek once explained the difference between Verstand and Vernunft in Hegel by saying that Vernunft is the state in which we realize that Verstand suffices.
Vernunft is Verstand minus the illusion that there is something beyond it. Interactivity and interpassivity, the third and the fourth mode of the political process we are studying, are related to each other in much the same way. Interpassivity constitutes a radicalization of interactivity, in the following sense: it expresses the view, or rather the habitus, that interactivity in fact suffices.

The loss of the product of politics, or rather the loss of the sense that this product is what matters primarily, characterizes the condition of political interpassivity. The main interest, or perhaps we should say obsession, lies with the process, not with its eventual product. We may also recall here Jean Baudrillard's account of 'the end of production'. Baudrillard argues that 'there is no longer any production' and, consequently, we cannot be liberated, or regain authenticity, through revolution (that is to say, through the socialization of the means of production). Especially relevant here is his analysis of the relation of 'the sign' to reality, represented as a four-stage sequence. From being a 'reflection of a basic reality', the sign evolves into a 'mask' of this reality, and later into a mask of the absence of a basic reality; finally, the sign no longer bears a relation to any reality whatsoever. Baudrillard's four stages may well be viewed as the (postmodernist) philosophical equivalent of the stages of politics I have
distinguished. Of course, the difference between the philosophical and the political case I discuss is that in the latter, the 'detachment' from the end-product is not necessarily reflective either at the individual or at the collective level. We do not consciously realize that we have lost our interest to move beyond the state of policy-making, preparation and planning. But neither does it seem correct to say that we believe, even more resolutely than before, that we are strongly interested in politics. Somehow we suspect that our continuous 'access' to politics does not provide us with what we want or need, but we

feel powerless to change our condition, or even uninterested in doing so. In other words, we feel ambiguous. On the one hand, we indulge in unwarranted optimism concerning the possible benefits of a hyperinteractive political process. The political system tries to enhance its legitimacy by promising to be in ever-closer contact with its citizens. The fine-tuning of the political process by interactive means promises an unprecedented capacity to accommodate the plural and diverging demands of individuals and groups. The unrealistic nature of these promises is of course itself a source of disappointment. In an attempt to win back our flagging interest, politics redoubles its promises, only to fail again to deliver on them, etc. But this sustained failure does not yet sufficiently explain the sense of discontentment with politics that constitutes the other pole of our ambiguous state. Politics fails us, or we fail politics, in a deeper sense. This deeper sense, of course, is that we do not really care anymore about what politics actually delivers. We do not 'really' believe that politics may deliver everything it promises, but neither do we 'really' feel interested in whatever it is that politics does produce. Our 'monitoring' of the product of politics constitutes the obverse of politics' monitoring of our behavior. Like people who converse in a room while a television set is turned on although no one is watching, we witness everything that politics delivers, without really noticing.
Apparently, both television ignorers and citizens assume that somehow someone else does, or might, take notice. In that sense, we have here a case of 'the illusions of others' as analyzed by Robert Pfaller: an illusion owned or claimed by no one, yet shared by everyone. Certainly we do not 'confess' ourselves to be political beings, in Aristotle's sense, nowadays. Citizenship in the traditional sense of being committed to the formulation and realization of collective goals increasingly constitutes a threatened spieces. Nevertheless, as noticed, we do feel an intense connection to the political process and we do expect it to 'deliver'. We do not know why we still believe in politics, yet we do.

Chronic interactivity has not brought us closer to politics. To the contrary, it has fostered an instrumental attitude. Rather than being engaged in politics, nowadays we perceive it as an object for use. This attitude has in fact been encouraged by currently fashionable approaches to (the art of) government, particularly that of outsourcing. Just as in the industrial sphere, in government many activities and branches have been outsourced, in the eighties and nineties. It was
We do, because in some sense we realize that we would be lost without it. On the other hand, we strongly feel that we have 'outgrown' it.
claimed that such activities could just as well, or better, be performed by external organizations. Regardless of the merit of these claims, the trend of outsourcement has damaged government by undermining its credibility and authority. Citizens concluded that perhaps there is nothing that government does especially well, compared to market actors. And worse, there is nothing that essentially needs to be done by the state, and by the state alone. It seems that, under the right conditions, any government function could be outsourced. Thus there is nothing intrinsically political worth committing to. And in reverse, nothing worth committing to is intrinsically political.
Although it is perhaps true that almost all government activities can be outsourced, even up to warfare, the attempt to undertake such a large-scale outsourcing undermines the authority of all government. In fact here we have the 'negative' of the claim that government can actually make good on all its promises: either in the sense of itself being able to deliver every 'product' that citizens interactively put on the agenda, or in the sense of being able to perfectly monitor and control all the outsourced activities that now take care of the actual delivery. Both claims entail that government can, and should, be made fully 'transparent'. Every process, every function needs to be assessed, evaluated, and accounted for. Yet, somehow we realize that this cannot really be true. We need both less and more from government. We need less, because 'transparency' is a fantasy, an empty place that can (and should) never be filled. And we need more, something that is hard to grasp yet essential for the authority of government. We need to believe in government, and this belief is exactly what gets lost when we outsource politics, or ask for transparency. Government or politics is necessarily more than the sum of its parts. Government is also the shared illusion of government, so to speak the mutual suspension of disbelief in its possibility.

Thus the shared illusion of government exists, but it is no longer claimed by anyone. Moreover, this uncomfortable sense of politics is associated not with the products or results of politics, but primarily with the political process. Thus this process increasingly acquires the character of a fetish. We are very much

attached to it, although we do not really care about its possible real effects. Or again, the process has itself become the product.

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AT: FIAT
CONTINUAL APPEALS TO FIAT AND POLICY MAKING ARE THE ULTIMATE JUSTIFICATION FOR DOMINATION. WE HAVE AN OBLIGATION AS STUDENTS AND INTELLECTUALS TO DISCUSS THE HIDDEN ASSUMPTIONS BEHIND POWER STRUCTURES.

IEK,

SENIOR RESEARCHER DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, THE GUARDIAN, P. L/N]

2/9/2005 [SLAVOJ,

From my communist youth, I still remember the formula, endlessly repeated in official proclamations to mark the "unity of all progressive forces": "workers, peasants and honest intellectuals" - as if intellectuals are, by their very nature, suspicious, all too freefloating, lacking a solid social and professional identity, so that they can only be accepted at the price of a special qualification. This distrust is alive and well today, in our post-ideological societies. The lines are clearly drawn. On the "honest" side, there are the no-nonsense experts, sociologists, economists, psychologists, trying to cope with the real-life problems engendered by our "risk society", aware that old ideological solutions are useless. Beyond, there are the "prattling classes", academics and journalists with no solid professional education, usually working in humanities with some vague French postmodern leanings, specialists in everything, prone to verbal radicalism, in love with paradoxical formulations that flatly contradict the obvious. When faced with fundamental liberal-democratic tenets, they display a breathtaking talent to unearth hidden traps of domination. When faced with an attack on these tenets, they display a no less breathtaking ability to discover emancipatory potential in it. This cliche is not without truth - recall the numerous fiascos of the 20th-century radical intellectuals, perhaps best encapsulated by the French poet Paul Eluard's refusal to demonstrate support for the victims of Stalinist show trials: "I spend enough time defending the innocent who proclaim their innocence, to have any time left to defend the guilty who proclaim their guilt." But hysterical overreaction against"free-floating" intellectual renders such a critique suspicious: distrust of intellectuals is ultimately distrust of philosophy itself. In March 2003, Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophising: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the "unknown knowns", things we don't know that we know - which is precisely the Freudian unconscious. If Rumsfeld thought that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the "unknown unknowns", the threats from Saddam we did not even suspect, the Abu Ghraib scandal shows where the main dangers actually are in the "unknown knowns", the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values. To unearth these "unknown knowns" is the task of an intellectual.

AT: LACAN IS POST-MODERN AND POST-MODERNISM IS BAD

INSTEAD OF STOPPING SYMBOLIZATION LACAN ENCOURAGES THE INCORPORATING THE RECOGNITION OF FAILURE INTO THE SYMBOLIC ITSELF. STAVRAKAKIS, DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, DIRECTOR OF IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS PROGRAM 1999 [YANNIS, LACAN AND THE POLITICAL, P.88-89]
In opposition to such a .regressive. attitude, Lacanian theory promotes a return to the founding moment of modernity. Recognising the irreducible character of impossibility, the constitutivity of the real as expressed primarily in the failure of our discursive world and its continuous rearticulation through acts of identification, far from being a postmodern move, reveals the truly modern character of the Lacanian project; instead of a postmodern mysticism it leads to a reorientation of science and knowledge. Recognising the constitutivity of the real does not entail that we stop symbolising; it means that we start trying to incorporate this recognition within the symbolic itself, in fact it means that since the symbolic entails lack as such, we abstain from covering it over with fantasmatic constructs.or, if one accepts that we are always trapped within the field of fantasy, that we never stop traversing it. The guiding principle in this kind of approach is to move beyond fantasy towards a self-critical symbolic gesture recognising the contingent and transient character of every symbolic construct. This is a scientific discourse

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AT: CASE OUTWEIGHS

TAKE THE RISK OF THEIR IMPACT. SOME THINGS ARE WORTH DYING FOR. ZIZEK, PROF. OF SOCIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF L 2003 (SLAVOJ, THE PUPPET AND THE DWARF)
Insofar as "death" and "life" designate for Saint Paul two existential subjective positions, not "objective" facts, we are fully justified in raising the old Pauline question: who is really alive today'?' What if we are "really alive" only if and when we engage ourselves with an excessive intensity which puts us beyond "mere life"? What if, when we focus on mere survival even if it is qualified as "having a good time," what we ultimately lose is life itself? What if the Palestinian suicide bomber on the point of blowing himself (and others) up is, in an emphatic sense, "more alive" than the American soldier engaged in a war in front of a computer screen hundreds of miles away from the enemy, or a New York yuppie jogging along the Hudson river in order to keep his body in shape? Or, in terms of the psychoanalytic clinic, what if
a hysteric is truly alive in her permanent, excessive, provoking questioning of her existence, while an obsessional is the very model of choosing a "life in death"? That is to say, is not the ultimate aim of his compulsive rituals to prevent the "thing" from happening- this "thing" being the excess of life itself? Is not the catastrophe he fears the fact that, finally something will really happen to him? Or, in terms of the revolutionary process, what if the difference that separates Lenin's era from Stalinism is, again, the difference between life and death? There is an apparently marginal feature which clearly illustrates this point: the basic attitude of a Stalinist Communist is that of following the correct Party line against "Rightist" or "Leftist" deviation-in short, to steer a safe middle course; for authentic Leninism, in clear contrast, there is ultimately only one deviation, the Centrist onethat of "playing it safe," of opportunistically avoiding the risk of clearly and excessively "taking sides." There was no "deeper historical necessity," for example, in the sudden shift of Soviet policy from "War Communism" to the "New Economic Policy" in 1921it was just a desperate strategic zigzag between the Leftist and the Rightist line, or, as Lenin himself put it in 1922, the Bolsheviks made "all the possible mistakes." This excessive "taking sides," this permanent imbalance of zigzag, is ultimately (the revolutionary political) life itself-for a Leninist, the ultimate name of the counterrevolutionary Right is "Center" itself, the fear of introducing a radical unbalance into the social edifice. It is a properly Nietzschean paradox that the greatest loser in this apparent assertion of Life against all transcendent Causes is actual life itself

What makes life "worth living" is the very excess of life: the awareness that there is something for which we are ready to risk our life (we may call this excess 'freedom," honor,' dignity, autonomy, etc.). Only when we are ready to take this risk are we really alive. So
when Holderlin wrote: To live is to defend a form," this form is not simply a Lebensform, but the form of the excess-of-life, the way this excess violently inscribes itself into the life-texture. Chesterton makes this point apropos of the paradox of courage:

A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.

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AT: DOESNT APPLY/ONLY CLINICAL

LACANIAN THEORY DISMANTLES THE DIVISION BETWEEN THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY, INTRODUCING A NEW, MORE DYNAMIC CONCEPTION OF THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN SUBJECTIVITY AND THE SOCIALTHATS CRITICAL TO ANY MEANINGFUL ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL LIFE. STAVRAKAKIS, DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, DIRECTOR OF IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS PROGRAM 1999 [YANNIS, LACAN AND THE POLITICAL, P.5]
One should combine this approach, the movement from the individual to the social, with the more socio-centric statements included in Lacans doctoral thesis (1932) and elsewhere indicating an opposite movement from the social to the individual: .We have admitted as explicative of
the facts of psychosis the dynamic notion of social tensions, whose state of equilibrium or disequilibrium normally defines the personality in the individual. (Lacan in Borch-Jacobsen, 1991:22). The implication is that, from the very beginning, Lacan was aware of a two-way movement between the individual and the social level. As his work evolved and his approach radicalised, he was led to deconstruct the whole essentialist division between the two. As we shall see, he does so by introducing a novel conception of subjectivity, a .socio-political conception of subjectivity not reduced to individuality, a subjectivity opening a new road to the understanding of the .objective. That is why most contemporary attempts to articulate a Lacanian approach to the level of the collective or the socio-political, the objective level, are based on the premise of the Lacanian subject. But, as we shall argue, Lacans importance for a consideration of the political does not stop there. The Lacanian subject can only be a starting point. In this context, what is most important in Lacanian theory is that it permits a true implication or inter-implication and not a mere

application between psychoanalysis and socio-political analysis; it does not remain trapped within a traditional framework that .applies psychoanalysis to socio-political issues by simply adding a theory of subjectivity to the field of political analysis. As Ernesto Laclau has put it, Lacanian theory permits the confluence between these two fields neither as the addition of a supplement to the former by the latter, nor as the introduction of a new causal element the unconscious instead of the economy but as the confluence of the two, around
the logic of the signifier as a logic of [real] dislocation.. The logic which presides over the possibility/impossibility of the construction of any identity. (Laclau, 1990:96) Beyond his socio-political conception of subjectivity Lacan articulates a whole new view of the objective level, of the level of social reality, as a level whose construction (the construction of social objectivity and political identity as a closed, self-contained structure) is ultimately impossible but, nevertheless, necessary (we are necessarily engaged all the time in identity construction exactly because it is impossible to construct a full identity). In this regard, Lacanian theory is

indispensable in showing that understanding social reality is not equivalent to understanding what society is, but what prevents it from being (Laclau, 1990:44). It is in the moment of this prevention which is simultaneously generatingor causing new attempts to construct this impossible object society that the moment of the political is surfacing and resurfacing again and again.

PSYCHOANALYSIS OUGHT NOT BE FOCUSED ON MERELY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE BUT MUST ENGAGE STATE APPARATUSES. THIS IS WHERE THE UNCONSCIOUS IS LOCATED. SLAVOJ ZIZEK, PROF. OF SOCIOLOGY @ LJUBLJANA UNIVERSITY, 2001. INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTOPHER HANLON. NEW LITERARY HISTORY, 32) (ZIZEK AND THE POSTPOLITICAL, AN

No, because I think that such criticism misses the point of Freudian subjectivity. I think that the very term intrapsychic is misleading; I think that, at least for Lacan, who emphasizes this again and again, the proper dimension of the unconscious is not deep inside. The proper dimension is outside, materialized in the state apparatuses. The model of split subjectivity, as later echoed by Louis Althusser, is not that there is something deep in me which is repressed; its not this internal psychic conflict. What subverts my conscious attitudes are the implicit ideological beliefs externalized, embodied in my activity. For instance, Im interested in this new fashion of
Hollywood Holocaust comedy. Have you noticed how, starting with Life Is Beautiful, we have a new genre, repeated in Jakob the Liar, and so on? Apropos of this, I ask, Why do Holocaust tragedies fail? For me, Speilberg is at his lowest during a scene from Schindlers List, when the concentration-camp commander faces the Jewish girl and we have this internal monologue, where he is split between his attraction to the girl and his racist tract: you know, Are you a rat? Are you a human being? and so on. I think this split is false.I take here quite literally Lacans dictum that psychoanalysis is not psychology, that the ultimate lesson of

psychoanalysis is that when you analyze phenomena like Nazis or Stalinism, it is totally wrong to think that you will arrive at any pertinent result through so-called in-depth profiles of figures like Stalin or Hitler. Here there is a lesson to belearned from Hannah Arendtthough at a different level I disagreewith herabout the banality of evil. The banality of evil means for me that the key is not, for example, the personality of Eichmann; there is a gap separating the acts of Eichmann from Eichmanns self-experience. But
what I would add is that this doesnt mean that Eichmann was simply innocent in the sense that he was possessed by some kind of brutally objective logic. My idea is more and more that we are dealing withto reference my eternal idea about canned laughterwhat I am tempted to call a kind of canned hatred. In the same way that the TV set laughs for you, relieves you of the obligation to really laugh, Eichmann himself didnt really have to hate the Jews; he was able to be just an ordinary person. Its the objective ideological machinery that did the hating; the hatred was imported, it was out there.CH: He even reported that he admired the Jews, that he used to literally vomitwith disgust at the efficiency of the extermination . . .SZ+: Yes! So again, I would say that this reproach misses the point in the sense that the fundamental lesson of psychoanalysis is that the unconscious is outside, crystallized in institutional practices. This is why, for me, commodity fetishism is a nice example of thisnot collective, Im not speaking of course about some Jungian collective unconscious unconscious in the sense of the set of presuppositions, beliefs. The subject is not aware of these beliefs, but the beliefs are materialized in the social practices, rituals, institutions in which the subject participates. So in this sense, I claim that this idea that when you analyze in

psychoanalytic terms what are ideological phenomena, you translate them into intrapsychic phenomena, definitely does not hold for Lacan.

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AT: OVERLY DETERMINIST

WE ARENT DETERMINISTON THE CONTRARY, LACANIAN THEORY PROVIDES A CATALYST FOR POLITICAL LIBERATION FROM RIGID UTOPIAN POLITICS AND A BASIS FOR AN ETHICAL CHALLENGE TO ALL MANNER OF VIOLENT CHAUVANISMS. STAVRAKAKIS, DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, DIRECTOR OF IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS PROGRAM 1999 [YANNIS, LACAN AND THE POLITICAL, P.5]
If the first three chapters aim at extracting the importance of the Lacanian conceptual and theoretical apparatus for political analysis and the theory of politics, the two chapters that follow are designed to demonstrate some of the ways in which this conceptual apparatus can lead to new challenging approaches to areas which are crucial for contemporary political theory and political praxis, namely the crisis of utopian politics and the ethical foundation of a radical democratic project. Here again, we shall argue that both a historical and theoretical analysis reveals that the politics of utopia which has for long dominated our political horizon lead to a set of dangers that no rigorous political analysis and political praxis should neglect. Its current crisis, instead of being the source of disappointment and political pessimism, creates the opportunity of .liberating. our political imagination from the strait-jacket imposed by a fantasmatic ethics of harmony, and of developing further the democratic potential of this imagination in an age in which all sorts of xenophobic, neofascist and nationalist particularisms and fundamentalisms show again their ugly face. Lacanian theory can be one of the catalysts for these political .liberations, simultaneously offering a non-foundational ethical grounding for their articulation.

AT: WE ARE DEMOCRACY

DISCOURSE SHOULD NOT BE BASED ON A VISION OF UTOPIA IT SHOULD INSTEAD AIM TO ESTABLISH UNITY WITHIN AN ENVIRONMENT OF CONFLICT AND DIVERSITY - IT SHOULD CREATE A DOUBTFUL SOCIETY THAT TRAVERSES ITS UTOPIAN MIRROR BY IDENTIFYING WITH ITS SUPPOSED ENEMY

DEMOCRATIC

STAVRAKAKIS, DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, DIRECTOR OF IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS PROGRAM 1999 [YANNIS, LACAN AND THE POLITICAL, P.111-112]
Is it then possible to retain this element of hope without incorporating it into a utopian vision? Can we have passion in politics without holocausts? Furthermore, is it possible to have a politics of hope, a politics of change without utopia? The experience of the democratic revolution permits a certain optimism. Democratisation is certainly a political project of hope. But democratic discourse is not (or should not be) based on the vision of a utopian harmonious society. It is based on the recognition of the impossibility and the catastrophic consequences of such a dream. What differentiates democracy from other political forms of society is the legitimisation of conflict and the refusal to eliminate it through the establishment of an authoritarian harmonious order. Within this framework the antagonistic diversity between different conceptions of the good is not seen as something negative that should be eliminated, but as something to be valued and celebrated. This requires the presence of institutions that establish a specific dynamic between consensus and dissent.this is why democratic politics cannot aim towards harmony and reconciliation. To believe that a final resolution of conflict is eventually possible, even when it is envisaged as asymptotic approaching to the regulative idea of a free unconstrained communication, as in Habermas, is to put the pluralist democratic project at risk. (Mouffe, 1996b:8) 14 Democratic politics.and politics in general.can never eliminate conflict and dislocation, antagonism and division. The aim is rather to establish unity within an environment of conflict and diversity; to create a thoroughly doubtful society, beset by productive self-doubt, a society that traverses its utopian mirror image by identifying with its supposed enemy (Beck, 1997:169). In that sense, understanding and accepting the nature of democratic politics requires accepting the anti-utopian dimension of antagonism and dislocation, the constitutivity of the political qua encounter with the real. Today, the hegemonic appeal of this democratic anti-utopian hope depends on the creation of a democratic ethos: .the real issue is not to find arguments to justify the rationality and universality of liberal democracy.what is needed is the creation of a democratic ethos.. 15 The emergence and maintenance of democratic forms of identity is a matter of identification with this democratic ethos, an ethos associated with the mobilisation of passions and sentiments, the multiplication of practices, institutions and language games providing the conditions of possibility for the radicalisation of democracy (Mouffe, 1996b:5-8). 16 But this is not an identification with a utopian image, it is an identification entailing the acceptance of the impossibility of attaining such a goal, it is an identification with the symptom in the Lacanian sense of the word. Isn.t it something worth fighting for? Yet, before answering this question, before developing our argument for this psychoanalytic grounding of modern democracy, we have to deal with the argumentation put forward against this kind of confluence between Lacan and the political (democracy being an order based on the recognition and institutionalisation of the political par excellence).

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AT: VIOLENT REVOLUTION

THE VIOLENCE INHRENT IN OUR REVOLUTION IS ONLY PROOF OF ITS AUTHENTICITY. THE REFUSAL TO ACT BECAUSE OF FEAR OF VIOLENCE MASKS THE FACT THAT VIOLENCE IS INHERENT TO OUR EXISTENCE. THE
FEAR OF VIOELNCE IS PRECISELY ONLY A TOOL TO PREVENT REAL CHANGE

SLAVOJ ZIZEK, NO DATE GIVEN (POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER AND CULTURAL CRITIC) THE OBSCENITY HUMAN RIGHTS: VIOLENCE AS SYMPTOM HTTP://WWW.LACAN.COM/ZIZVIOL.HTM

OF

Hannah Arendt's insights are also crucial here: she emphasized the distinction between political power and the mere exercise of (social) violence: organizations run by direct non-political authority - by an order of command that is not politically grounded authority (Army, Church, school) - represent examples of violence (Gewalt), not of political Power in the strict sense of the term. Here, however, it would be productive to introduce the distinction between the public symbolic Law and its obscene supplement: the notion of the obscene superego double-supplement of Power implies that there is no Power without violence. Power always has to rely on an obscene stain of violence, political space is never "pure" but always involves some kind of reliance on "pre-political" violence. Of course, the relationship between political power and pre-political violence is one of mutual implication: not only is violence the necessary supplement of power, (political) power itself is always-already at the roots of every apparently "non-political" relationship of violence. The accepted violence and direct relationship of subordination in the Army, Church, family and other "non-political" social forms is in itself the "reification" of a certain ethico-political struggle and decision - what a critical analysis should do is to discern the hidden political process that sustains all these "non-" or "pre-political" relationships. In human society, the political is the encompassing structuring principle, so that every neutralization of some partial content as "non-political" is a political gesture par excellence. This acceptance of violence, this "political suspension of the ethical," is the limit of that which even the most "tolerant" liberal stance is unable to trespass - witness the uneasiness of "radical" post-colonialist Afro-American studies apropos of Frantz Fanon's fundamental insight into the unavoidability of violence in the process of effective decolonization. One should recall here Fredric Jameson's idea that violence plays in a revolutionary process the same role as worldly wealth in the Calvinist logic of predestination: although it has no intrinsic value, it is a sign of the authenticity of the revolutionary process, of the fact that this process is effectively disturbing the existing power relations. In other words, the dream of the revolution without violence is precisely the dream of a "revolution without revolution"(Robespierre). On the other hand, the role of the Fascist spectacle of violence is exactly opposite: it is a violence whose aim is to PREVENT the true change - something spectacular should happen all the time so that, precisely, nothing would really happen.

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AT: IEK = CONSERVATISM

SLAVOJ ZIZEK COULD NOT BE ANY FARTHER FROM CONSERVATISM.
JODI

DEAN,

PROF.

OF

POLITICAL THEORY @ HOBART

AND

WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGE,

NO DATE.

ZIZEK AGAINST DEMOCRACY.

HTTP://JDEANICITE.TYPEPAD.COM/I_CITE/FILES/ZIZEK_AGAINST_DEMOCRACY_NEW_VERSION.DOC )

I approach this theme by way of what might appear as a detour: the political right in the United States. Given Zizeks emphasis on exclusion, violence and violence, not to mention his critique of multiculturalism and general skepticism toward democracy, one might think that the

Republican party demonstrates precisely that political will Zizek admires [CONTINUES] Not surprisingly, this superficial description is too quick and too, well, superficial. Zizeks point is not that any political position that comes from conviction is objectively correct or true. Rather, he argues that Truth is radically subjective. Truth, or fidelity to the TruthEvent (he takes this language from Badiou) propels political engagement. The wrongness of Bush (or racism, or capitalism) is not an ontological given; it is a political claim. Adhering to a notion of universal partisan truth, Zizek asserts unequivocally the need to exclude right wing populists and extremists, the need to reject them out of hand rather than to debate with them, hear them out, look for opportunities to compromise. From the position of this partisan truth it is clearly the case that Bushs politics are profoundly inauthentic, post-political, and anti-universal. Bushs politics (like Nazism) are inauthentic because they rely on the fantasy of a social Whole. Rather than beginning from a universality posited from the point of exclusion, from the antagonism rupturing society, as does Zizek, right wing politics attempts to restore a ruptured society to its original unity. In fact, in direct opposition to Zizeks emphasis on those outcast from the social order, Bushs politics (like, unfortunately, nearly all mainstream party politics in the U.S.) are rooted in the most privileged members of society. Any endorsement of the obscene underpinnings of the lawand who can forget Bushs horrifying grin as he insinuated that the U.S. had tortured people arrested as terrorists in his televised speeches before the attack in Iraqis done to support the given order, to deny its inconsistency. This is why Bushs politics are actually post-political: they are designed to make sure that nothing changes, that corporations remain powerful, say, or that nothing threatens the interests of oil and energy companies. Although motivated from a fidelity to the event of his conversion, Bushs politics dont politicizethey do the opposite. Not only did the early months of his presidency emphasize bipartisanship and consensus (and emphasis that became an assumption as politics was foreclosed after September 11th) but the primary institutions of his rule are the Army and the Churchexamples of the disavowal of the proper political dimension. The American religious right is powerful today because of the way it links together irreconcilable opposites: a rejection of government and an increase in state power, an endorsement of the market and the imaginary resolution of its antagonisms in religion, an emphasis on the global, on a world-wide war against terror and a rejection of global governing bodies. The Left has accepted this matrix when what it should do is explode it. It follows, then, that Bushs politics, for all their faith-based rhetoric, are global rather than universal. This contrast is crucial to Zizek, who emphasizes that the universal is opposed to globalism: the universal shines through the symptomatic displaced element which belongs to the Whole without being properly its part.xxi Bush wants to destroy the displaced element.

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AT: PSYCHOANALYSIS

COLONIALISM

YOUR WRONG, NOT ONLY HAS PSCYHOANALYSIS CHANGED TO FIT A POST COLONIAL CRITICM BUT PSYCHOANALYSIS IS INDESPINSIBLE FOR POSTCOLONIAL THEORY CHRISTOPHER LANE 2003 (PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND COLONIALISM REDUX: WHY MANNONI'S "PROSPERO COMPLEX" STILL HAUNTS US, JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE) P. 127-128
Although psychoanalysis and colonialism share a long and fraught history, the 1986 reprinting of Frantz Fanon's treatise Black Skin, White Masks doubtless altered the course of their relationship, promoting in some academic circles even the possibility of a lasting truce. While for years critics had disparaged Freud's notorious description of femininity as a "dark continent," using this analogy to tarnish psychoanalysis with fin-de-sicle imperial fantasies, a sea change occurred in the 1980s. Scholars began representing psychoanalysis not as complicit with colonialism, but as indispensable to its critique. Emily Apter credits some of this transformation to the "return of Fanon" that began in 1986 when Pluto Press reissued Fanon's best-known work. 3 Homi K. Bhabha's introduction renewed interest in Fanon's clinical role as a psychiatrist and his shared [End Page 127] intellectual history with Jacques Lacan. 4 Although Bhabha downplayed Fanon's 1960s status as a revolutionary icon, he insisted that Fanon's "psychoanalytic framework illuminates the 'madness' of racism, the pleasure of pain, the agonistic fantasy of political power," so making psychoanalytic vocabulary an ally for postcolonial theory. 5

PSYCHOANALYSIS MAY BE TIED UP IN COLONIAL HISTORY AND OPRESSION BUT IT IS FOR THAT REASON THAT IT IS A KEY STONE TO ANY POST CONOLIAL CRITICISM. CHRISTOPHER LANE 2003 (PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND COLONIALISM REDUX: WHY MANNONI'S "PROSPERO COMPLEX" STILL HAUNTS US, JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE) P.129-130
Viewing psychic conflicts as politically determined, Fanon sought explanations for suffering in the patient's cultural world. His 1952 account of the "North African syndrome" and late essay "Colonial War and Mental Disorders" are but two examples of his emphasis on cultural symptomatology. 13 In a similar vein (and despite his temporary rejection of Jean-Paul Sartre's critical analysis of ngritude), Fanon adopted Sartre's ontological account of racial tension. But despite its emphasis on dialectical conflict, this perspective is more rigid than Mannoni's, for it locks Europeans in a category of sameness and fixes the colonized as Europe's "Other." As Fanon declared, in these now-famous words, "the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man. And conversely [le vritable Autrui du Blanc est et demeure le Noir. Et inversement]." 14 By the mid 1950s, by contrast, Mannoni tended to de-ontologize racial conflict, thereby distinguishing between prejudice and persons. He began offering a more nuanced psychoanalytic critique of colonialism, in which otherness in the broadest sense is a determinant of conflict, rather than a guise that the colonized seem to represent to those who would subject them. For Mannoni, the origins of violence need not be external, but can obtain from the power of a person's racial [End Page 129] imagos. By stressing the influence of fantasies bearing no logical or even practical influence on external reality, Mannoni alters our conception of colonial reciprocity and relationality. This is something Apter almost concedes when summarizing this debate and explaining why Fanon's wrangle with Mannoni still haunts us: Fanon's famous attack on Mannoni . . . exemplifies many of the pitfalls and virtues of conjugating race and psychoanalysis. It shows, on the one hand, how suppressed colonial histories have been embedded within the conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis, and on the other, how vital psychoanalysis remains to a nuanced understanding of dependency; whether at the micro level (colon facing off against colonis), or the global level (the politics of "dependent" nations within transnational capital flows of debt, technical know-how, and actuarial projection). 15

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AT: PSYCHOANALYSIS

COLONIALISM

PSYCHOANALYSIS IS KEY TO BREAKING DOWN SMALLER, HIDDEN HISTORIES OF COLONIALISM THAT MANIFEST THEMSELVES WITHIN OUR UNCONSCIOUS DESRIRE WHILE PREVENTING RESURGENCES OF COLONIAL THOUGHT. CHRISTOPHER LANE 2003 (PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND COLONIALISM REDUX: WHY MANNONI'S "PROSPERO COMPLEX" STILL HAUNTS US, JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE) P.133-134
Nous nous quittons complicates political causality by failing to attribute violence conclusively to either the French or the Malagasy. Additionally, the book's language is highly allusive, partly capturing through puns the surreal landscape of dreams and the unconscious. For instance, Mannoni records a dream dated 6 August 1947, five months after the French authorities brutally suppressed the anti-colonial revolt during which his feet sink slowly into the muddy streets of Tananarive in Madagascar. Torn between a sense of paralysis and fear that he is "perhaps making too much fuss," he "ask[s] for aid and stretch[es] out [his] hand," only to discover that "Malagasy women, small and young, pass by in the rain, blurred. I stretch out my hand to them, they look at me and pass." When in the dream Mannoni comes across an excavation and barrier, he "reads" the latter quite literally as a color bar. Indeed, since the sign on this barrier apparently is the word "propaganda" written in English (as is this section of Nous nous quittons), Mannoni believes that the sign is meant to inform the Malagasy and to dupe the French, an idea that in the dream makes him feel "almost indignation" (p. 373). 32 Although the dream's symbolism seems over determined, one might best approach it by invoking the famous opening words of L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, published six years afterwards: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." 33 Often taken as a sign of evasion because it seems to eclipse reality, this oneiric emphasis in fact betrays the idea that all aspects of colonialism are epistemologically certain. Such emphasis also complicates any simple depiction of European sameness, including the idea that European fantasies, dreams, and policies cohere in a single aim. In passages from the book that are not marked as dream sequences, Mannoni insists on "treating philosophy like delirium," the better to uncover "its profound roots in consciousness, the unconscious, and the social." Treating philosophy as a kind of "madness" helps expose what, of colonialism, doesn't add up or make sense. "The right to psychoanalyze metaphysics," he adds, "stems from a certain dissatisfaction in the physical realm. It's an evasion. A successful psychoanalysis ought to help us return to this [doit nous permettre d'en revenir]" (p. 290). But to ask, to what are we returned, and is this equivalent to what we feel compelled to revisit seems in this context especially vexing and difficult to answer. As Mannoni later realized, psychoanalysis defeats rather than enables reparative approaches to colonialism. A successful psychoanalysis could neither return the French and the Malagasy to life as it had been, nor reconcile them to [End Page 133] life as they imagined it to be; this explains why Hartley's sentence in this context is so haunting and relevant, highlighting aspirations that are both anachronistic and residually powerful. During analysis, a type of "dislocation" occurs that permanently alters the "relation between the organism and its reality," Mannoni provocatively likening the result to decolonization. 34 Although some critics might balk at this metaphor, deeming it opportunistic, arguably it shows that psychoanalysis, strictly conceived, is integral to postcolonial critique. As Mannoni explains, the enigmas fueling the interpretive path of psychoanalysis transform even "decolonize" external reality, because "it's undoubtedly the unconscious that pushes [us] on toward rupture [originally: l'inconscient qui me pousse vers la rupture]" (p. 145). Shattering many of colonialism's psychic and political structures, such crises of meaning are essential to any lasting transformation of society since they break up colonial patterns, including the fantasies that invest them with meaning.

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PSYCHOANALYSIS SOLVES COLONIALISM

PSYCHOANALYSIS MAKES COLONIAL POLITICS IMPOSSBLE BECAUSE IT SHOWS THE LIBIDNAL EMPTYNESS OF SUCH POLICIES. OBTUSE AND NAVE CRITICISMS OF PSCYHOANALYSIS, LIKE THE AFFIRMATIVES FAIL TO ENGAGE THIS FACT. CHRISTOPHER LANE 2003 (PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND COLONIALISM REDUX: WHY MANNONI'S "PROSPERO COMPLEX" STILL HAUNTS US, JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE) P 134
One might fault Mannoni's purportedly "objective" studies, including Prospero and Caliban, for representing politics as if it were an extension of psychic turmoil for "relying," as Bloch puts it, "on psychoanalytic theories that supply facile motivational explanations for actions that at first sight are meaningless to the foreign observer" (p. vi) but doing so would misrepresent Mannoni's claims and ignore almost all of his other work. Moreover, Bloch's assessment is itself ambiguous: If such "motivational explanations" are meaningless "at first sight," are they any clearer belatedly, retrospectively? Although Mannoni certainly thought so, he insisted that psychoanalysis could not resolve political crises not because it is apolitical, but because it engages with conflicts that frustrate strategy. Such an approach, in his words, "cannot help us formulate a colonial policy [ne permet pas de mieux dessiner un plan de politique coloniale]" (pp. 167; 161); if anything, psychoanalysis pushes us in the opposite direction, where policies fail and become unworkable, because they are shown to lack meaning.

PSYCHOANALYSISS UNIVERSAILITY AND UNIQUE ABILITY TO UNDERMINE THE IMPACTS OF COLONIAL DESIRE
MAKE IT A COMPARTIVELY BETTER VECHICLE FOR COMBATING RACISM

CHRISTOPHER LANE 2003 (PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND COLONIALISM REDUX: WHY MANNONI'S "PROSPERO COMPLEX" STILL HAUNTS US, JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE) P 135
whereas Mannoni initially tried to interpret the ontology of colonial structures, suggesting radically that "the negro . . . is the white man's fear of himself [le Ngre, alors, c'est la peur que le Blanc a de lui-mme]" (Prospero, pp. 200; 191), Fanon offered a more blanket assessment of racial violence, insisting "It is the racist who creates his inferior [c'est le raciste qui cre l'infrioris]" (Black Skin, pp. 93; 77). Fanon's and Bloch's perspectives represent psychic conflict as largely an effect of colonialism; Mannoni's is close to inverting this claim, viewing psychic and "extrasocial" concerns as not only paramount, but also a possible explanation for colonial aspirations. More important, Mannoni underscores that there's "no watertight barrier [aucune barrire tanche] between the psychology of the colonized and that of the European," because both constituencies are "only too similar" in their apprehension of hostile thoughts and drives. 38
An impasse arises here concerning the motivation for ethnic violence, which corresponds roughly to Mannoni's and Fanon's competing emphases. But

YOUR AUTHORS ARE SHORT SIGHTED, EVEN IF A FEW FINITE PARTS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS ARE NOT PERFECT. ITS THOSE IMPERFECTIONS THAT ALLOW FOR A MORE COMPLETE CRITICISM OF COLONIALISM CHRISTOPHER LANE 2003 (PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND COLONIALISM REDUX: WHY MANNONI'S "PROSPERO COMPLEX" STILL HAUNTS US, JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE) P137
refused to "draw a hard-and-fast demarcation line between the civilized and the non-civilized" (Prospero, p. 19), he ended up formulating two accounts of dependency. We could call these "the evidential," based on materialist perspectives on colonialism, and "the counterintuitive," which highlights the unconscious satisfactions that become attached to colonial structures. When Mannoni's study comes closest to the latter approach, the symmetry binding "Prospero" to "Caliban" breaks down, exposing the commitment of Europeans to unfair social arrangements, including those resulting in personal and collective harm. 42 At such moments, Mannoni destroys suggestions of interpersonal and interracial complementarity, arguing that unconscious aggression and resistances mediate both. To many critics, this conclusion blocks transformation and discredits psychoanalytic perspectives on colonialism. 43 But the point is better put the other way: the failure of Mannoni's Adlerian claims about complementarity in fact made room for his more sophisticated perspectives on enmity and relationality, including ones based on culturally- and psychically-contingent traits.
Since Mannoni

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PSYCHOANALYSIS SOLVES COLONIALISM

PSYCHOANALYSIS
IS A PRE-REQUISTE FOR A RADICAL POSTCOLONIAL POLITICS. COLONIALISM IN TERMS OF DEIRE IS CRUCIAL TO BREAKING IT DOWN.

UNDERSTANDING

CHRISTOPHER LANE 2003 (PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND COLONIALISM REDUX: WHY MANNONI'S "PROSPERO COMPLEX" STILL HAUNTS US, JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE) P. 148
In this formulation, the African is the sole source of hostility the European apparently devoid of aggression, acting as a neutral interpreter of African self-directed hatred. The extent of Mannoni's political intervention becomes clear when we watch him invert this argument, metaphorically substituting the term European for African. Imagine Gordon, Laubscher, Carothers, and Ritchie hearing the equivalent of "The European tries to keep at a distance his sense of badness or inferiority and he does succeed in keeping it out of consciousness most of the time . . ."! This is not very distant from Mannoni's actual claims. In Prospero and related essays, roughly seven years later, Mannoni insisted that Europeans alone exhibit such neuroses. He ascribed the perception of "inferiority" to colonizers, deeming this a cause, rather than merely an effect, of colonial violence and discrimination. After bringing Europe into the picture, however, Mannoni also found his argument wanting, agreeing to reprint Prospero unaltered in 1956 because its "obvious weaknesses" might shed light on a situation that "is now perhaps disappearing" (p. 6). Ten years later, in "The Decolonisation of Myself," he revised this claim once more, admitting that he "should undoubtedly write a very different book now." He also anticipated Ngig) wa Thiong'o in "envisag[ing] . . . a study of the psychology of decolonisation" "a difficult undertaking, but one of great intrinsic interest" (p. 327) an undertaking, moreover, that Lacanian psychoanalysis helped make possible by its stress on individuals' complex relationship to their and others' self-strangeness. 86

FOCUSING ON OUR HISTORY IN COLONIALISM INSTEAD OF ENGAING IN ITS PRESENT MAINFESTATIONS WITHIN OUR PSYCHE GARUNTEES FUTURE ATROCITIES. WE CAN LIVE IN A WORLD ABSENT OF VIOLENT COLONIALISM BUT ONLY THROUGH THE USE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS. CHRISTOPHER LANE 2003 (PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND COLONIALISM REDUX: WHY MANNONI'S "PROSPERO COMPLEX" STILL HAUNTS US, JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE) P.149-150
Instead of "deluding" himself with the fantasy of society's and his own complete transformation, then, Mannoni returned to claims made more rigidly in Prospero, including his suggestion that an irrevocable self-strangeness determines our relationship colonial or otherwise to other people. While continuing to advance theories of racism "beyond the imaginary level" (qtd. in Lacan, Seminar II, p. 78), he also used the principle of "dislocation" to highlight forms of identification and fantasy that escape Sartre's crude "Manichean allegory" of self and Other. This accent on impersonal otherness is crucial to understanding racial enmity, for it not only rids colonial critique of all remaining vestiges of essentialism but also compels us to redefine what we take to be postcolonial reciprocity and relationality, which inadvertently or perhaps even deliberately may replicate colonial hierarchies and fantasies. While refusing to equate the colonized with otherness, in other words, Mannoni's later arguments shatter the notion that Europeans are locked in the category of sameness and the colonized in a position of otherness. Yet by avoiding the poststructuralist and new historicist fallacy that the psychic is largely an effect of cultural-political forces, he exposes aspects of the colonial scene to which we are all unconsciously attached. Additionally, Mannoni strengthens the need for and the difficulty of attaining a fuller realization of emancipation, as underscored by his epigraphic comment, "Dislocation can do the job of analysis [Le dpaysement fait office d'analyse]." 87 "Dislocation" makes clear, that is, where colonial and psychic structures prove unsustainable; it helps us "decathect" these attachments and indicates how we might live without them. The Martinican philosopher-poet Ren Mnil summed up the complexity of this transition in his recent fragment "Psychanalyse de l'histoire" when claiming eloquently that "the mystery of our impossible history lies not in the absurdity of the past but in the incoherence and inconsistency of our current social conscience." 88 If our current beliefs are bound to an "impossible history," in the sense that it is traumatic and unrecoverable, then ignoring these beliefs almost guarantees that past atrocities will be repeated. We recall Mannoni's similar point about our failure to understand the past and each other, "as though the meeting between black and white . . . were a distillation of the difference between them a difference devoid of any intrinsic meaning which becomes the [End Page 149] symbol, at once obvious and absurd, of what goes wrong in human relations, and . . . of what goes wrong in the white world" ("Decolonisation," p. 333).

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AT: PSYCHOANALYSIS

RACISMSOLVES RACISM

PSYCHOANALYSIS COMBATS RACISM AT THE LIBIDNAL LEVEL. TRACEY SEDINGER 2002(ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN COLORADO AND COORDINATOR OF THE WOMEN'S STUDIES PROGRAM, NATION AND IDENTIFICATION PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE, CULTURAL CRITIQUE ) P. 44-45
Certainly, Walton's rereading of Riviere's analysis is both important and salutary. But I am uncomfortable with viewing the phallus, in its Lacanian mode, as a signifier of "white male privilege." If, as in Riviere's original essay, possession of the penis results from identification and implies the imaginary castration of the other with whom the subject identifies, the penis becomes an extremely scarce commodity, while identification is reduced to its most aggressive and assimilationist aspects. Despite her move to a more sophisticated Lacanian reading (in which the penis is replaced by the phallus), Walton's essay continues this trend. Kaja Silverman and Daniel Boyarin produce, I think, similar readings of the phallus and its relation to racialization. Silverman argues that racist discourses repeatedly define black masculinity as a "surplus" in relation to white masculinity (e.g., the myth of the black rapist, the giant black phallus, etc.) that "threatens to erase the distinction between him [the black man] and the white woman" (Silverman 1996, 31). Boyarin argues that both racial (in this case, Jewish) and sexual identity derive from a castration analogous to circumcision, which makes the sign of racial identity, the Jew's circumcised penis, almost identical to the sign of sexual difference, the woman's lack of a penis (Boyarin 1995, 216-17). These efforts confront me with two problems. First, if the phallus is the signifier of some prior material reality (the distribution of political and economic power), not having the phallus becomes the common term that defines a variety of subject positionsgender and race in this case. Gender is implicitly treated as if it were conceptually analogous to race, as if it were one in a series of subject positions or various identities (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) as mapped onto axes of power and oppression, including the oppressive systems of racism, capitalism, patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, etc. (de Lauretis, 2). Reading the relations between man and woman, black and white, colonizer and colonized as a series of binary oppositions denoted by possession of the phallus or the lack thereof promotes an understanding of the disparate social relations that make up the social field as organized around a center (white male privilege) and series of hegemonized others ("whose relation[s] to the phallus . . . [are] as tenuous as her own" [Walton, 229]). As a consequence, sexual difference's difference from racial difference is erased. Moreover, Walton, Pellegrini, et al. short-circuit the distance and difference between the psychic [End Page 44] and the social, and end up foregrounding the imaginary. The phallus no longer marks sexual difference in the psychoanalytic field, but rather social identities that reflect the distribution and circulation of power in some prior Real. Gender and race therefore become something acquired through the process of identification and are assigned positive content, which too often means that subjectivity is reduced to its material, cultural, or social determinants (e.g., Butler 1990, 60-65; Fuss 1995, 10). But is identification really the motor behind gender and race acquisition? If the phallus is the privileged term in the psychoanalytic paradigm, does it enable the construction of identifications such that both gendered and racial/ethnic collectives are formed? Race, Culture, and Identification Contemporary discussions of race and the difference it makes usually begin with the by now standard assertion that racial identities are made, not born; that race is a function of culture, as opposed to nature (Frankenberg, 191-234). Of course, what this would actually imply for the analysis of racial identities is a subject of considerable controversy. Many scholars have concluded that if race is a function of culture, then race can and should be reduced to a culturally based ethnicity; anything else would suggest a biological essentialism that is in itself a racist dogma (Appiah 1992, 13-14). 3 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, on the other hand, have objected to subsuming race under ethnicity because, within the United States, white ethnicity has mandated an assimilationist model that the experience of various "racial" groups (including African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics) has called into question (14-23). In their view, replacing race with ethnicity is all too often complicit with traditional liberal ideals of racelessness that perpetuate white privilege.

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AT: ESSENTIALISM
PSYCHOANALYSIS DOES NOT ESSENTIALIZE ALL CULTURES, IT TAKES A DIFFERENCE. THE ALTERNATIVE IS JUST AS MUCH INVESTED IN UNIVERSALISM.
UNIVERSAL APPROACH TO

ANDREAS BERTOLDI, DEPT. OF COMP LIT., UNIV. OF JOHANNESBURG. OEDIPUS PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE. AMERICAN IMAGO 55.1 (1998)

IN

(SOUTH) AFRICA?:

However it does lead to the question, what is at stake in the universality of Oedipus? My response would be, not just the veracity or applicability of psychoanalysis, but an ethical stance. An ethical stance as matter of choice and politics, rather than as an inherent feature of universalism. Thus the current post-colonial argument is rather paradoxical. On the one hand psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically inclined critics are attacked for their ethnocentrism and even racist assumptions, while on the other hand these post-colonial critics wish to see an acknowledgment of difference--and claim this recognition in the name of a "right"--a right that I suggest can only be a universal if it is to have any meaning. Yet before I proceed with the ethical and political issues, I think that the overall attack on psychoanalysis is misguided and in fact relies on a straw-man of psychoanalysis. What can be shown is that psychoanalysis, at least in its Freudian variety, is fully aware that all cultures are not identical. However psychoanalysis does not posit these based on a hypostatization of "culture," "race," etc., but rather seeks to reduce them to their universal ontogenetic origins--primarily I would argue the differential resolution of Oedipus. It is in Oedipus rather than anywhere else that we can in fact see this at work.
IS NOT EXCLUSIVE WITH RESPECT FOR DIFFERENCE. PSYCHOANALYSIS HIGHLIGHTS THE UNIVERSAL FEATURES OF THE HUMAN MIND WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY ACCOUNTING FOR CULTURAL VARIATIONS. THE ALTERNATIVE IS ERECTS A UNIVERSAL OUT OF RELATIVISM, WHICH IS CONTRADICTORY AND MAKES ETHICAL POLITICS IMPOSSIBLE.

UNIVERSALISM

ANDREAS BERTOLDI, DEPT. OF COMP LIT., UNIV. OF JOHANNESBURG. OEDIPUS PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE. AMERICAN IMAGO 55.1 (1998)

IN

(SOUTH) AFRICA?:

Tambiah (1990) raises some interesting questions concerning the question of relativism regarding the psychic unity or diversity of mankind (human universals) and the unity or diversity of cultures and societies. He argues that the "doctrine of the psychic unity of mankind or human universals and the doctrine of diversity of cultures/societies are not contradictory dogmas" (112). Tambiah lists a range of basic human capacities and operations that should be considered universal: sensory and motor skills, cognitive structures and processes associated with learning, and memory and language. These human universals, he suggests, are entirely consistent with the fact that there exist a diversity of cultures/societies. The diversity of cultures, he argues, can be accounted for as a result of adaptation to environmental conditions and what he terms the capacity for "meta-learning" (113). Tambiah goes on to argue against strong cultural relativism, a position that he claims contains a logical contradiction in "that it makes a non-relativistic general claim about a relativistic assertion" (128). In other words it is an attempt to extract a universal principle out of the facts of difference/relativism. Furthermore as Tambiah argues, few would want to endorse the ethical implications of such a position, which would in essence negate any international universal human rights programme or opposition to injustice. This does not however entail a vulgar universalist (anti-relativist) position. What has happened in post-colonial criticism is that ethical and political claims have been tied to essentialist identities. However universalism must necessarily entail a critical stance in regard to these essentialist notions (especially from a psychoanalytic perspective). In addition what is often forgotten is that a claim to difference, usually based on a human rights discourse, rests precisely on an abstract universalism. As such the very recognition of the particular rests on the assumption of a universal. Although it may seem absurd to some, I would argue that Oedipus is precisely a mechanism which is at once universal [End Page 125] and particular, in that on the one hand it sets out universally applicable ontogenetic features which reveal the "unity of humankind," while at the same time accounting for particular social/cultural difference.

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AT: ROBINSON (K IS NOT CONSERVATIVE)

THIS IS A FUNDAMENTAL MISUNDERSTANDING OF OUR ARGUMENT REALIZING THAT SOCIAL ANTAGONISM IS INEVITABLE OPENS THE SPACE FOR POLITICAL ALTERNATIVES THAT MINIMIZE IT. THE TRULY CONSERVATIVE POSITION IS ONE THAT REFUSES TO ACKNOWLEDGE THIS INEVITABILITY THOMASSEN 2004 [LASSE, LACANIAN POLITICAL THEORY: A REPLY TO ROBINSON THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 6 (4), 558561, WWW.BLACKWELL-SYNERGY.COM/DOI/ ABS/10.1111/J.1467-856X.2004.00157.X]
According to Robinson, Lacanian political theory is inherently conservative. 'Lacanians', Robinson writes, 'urge that one reconcile oneself to the inevitability of lack.
Lacanian politics is therefore about coming to terms with violence, exclusion and antagonism, not about resolving or removing these' (p. 260). And, about Mouffe, he writes that, 'as a Lacanian, Mouffe cannot reject

Such assertions are only possible if we believe in the possibility of opposing exclusion to a situation of non-exclusion, which is exactly what post-structuralists have challenged. Moreover, the post-structuralist (and Lacanian) view does not necessarily preclude the removal of any concrete exclusion. On the contrary, the acknowledgement of the constitutivity of exclusion shifts the focus from exclusion versus non-exclusion to the question of which exclusions we can and want to live with. Nothing in the post-structuralist (and Lacanian) view thus precludes a progressive politics. Of course, this is not to say that a progressive politics is guaranteedif one wants
exclusion; it is, on a certain level, necessary according to such a theory' (p. 263). guarantees, post-structuralist political theory is not the place to look.

There are similar problems with Robinson's characterisation of iek's 'nihilistic variety of Lacanianism': 'the basic structure of existence is unchangeable ... [iek's] Lacanian revolutionism must stop short of the claim that a better world can be constructed' (p. 267). This, according to Robinson, 'reflects an underlying conservatism apparent in even the most radical-seeming versions of Lacanianism' (p. 268). Again, the constitutivity of exclusion and violence does not necessarily mean that 'the new world cannot be better than the old' (p. 268). The alternative to guaranteed progress is not necessarily conservatism or nihilism, and the impossibility of a perfect society does not exclude attempts at improvementwith the proviso that what counts as improvement cannot be established according to some transcendental yardstick.
Thus, while Robinson raises many interesting points, there are also some problems with his position. Here, I have focused on some misunderstandings of the status of the claims made by post-structuralist political theorists,

when dealing with Mouffe's view that antagonism is ineradicable, Robinson links this to a Hobbesian statism: 'the exclusionary and violent operations of coercive state apparatuses must be accepted as an absolute necessity for any kind of social life. This is Hobbesian statism updated for a post-modern era' (p. 261). How Robinson is able to move from the ineradicability of antagonism and exclusion to 'the exclusionary and violent operations of coercive state apparatuses ... as an absolute necessity' and 'Hobbesian statism' is beyond comprehension. There is certainly nothing to suggest such an interpretation in the pages referred to by Robinson (Mouffe 2000, 43, 105, 129132).
but there are also some simple misreadings of the texts under review. For instance,

AT: ROBINSON (HE LINKS TO THE K)

TURN - ROBINSON IS NIHILISTIC AND CONSERVATIVE BECAUSE HE ASSUMES NO POLITICAL MOVEMENTS CAN OCCUR OUTSIDE OUR CURRENT BOUNDARIES THOMASSEN 2004 [LASSE, LACANIAN POLITICAL THEORY: A REPLY TO ROBINSON THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 6 (4), 558561, WWW.BLACKWELL-SYNERGY.COM/DOI/ ABS/10.1111/J.1467-856X.2004.00157.X]
The first issue I would like to raise in this regard concerns the relation between ontology and politics. Robinson writes: 'The books discussed here thus tend to suggest that it is not possible to derive an original, distinct and attractive political agenda from Lacanian politics' (p. 268, emphasis added). And: 'since Lacan's work deals with politics only very occasionally, the entire project of using Lacan politically is fraught with hazards' (p. 261).

in the way that Robinson thinks. What would be the condition of possibility of deriving a political agenda from a political theory or ontology? Such derivation would Ontology, theory and political agenda would have to be part of the same homogeneous whole comprising ontological, theoretical and political elements linked by necessity. Clearly, if one subscribes to a post-structuralist viewpoint, there can be no such homogeneity, whether between ontological, theoretical and political elements or whether within a particular political agenda, for instance. This is a recurring theme in post-structuralism. The impossibility of this sort of derivation may be a 'hazard', but one that we will just have to live with. Robinson believes that, since Lacan did not provide a specific theory of politics, but only a more abstract ontology, all the political appropriations of Lacan can do is to subsume politics to pregiven Lacanian categories (p. 261). This is obviously a potential danger, and one that must be avoided. One must insist that analytical categories are always rearticulated when applied; as Wittgenstein has shown, there is no application that leaves intact the rule being applied. But this does not preclude the theorisation of politics through categories that were not originally thought to apply (directly or indirectly) to politics. This would assume a regional conception of politics: politics as determined as a particular region with particular (essential) limits and requiring a theory only applicable to this region. This, in turn, would require a theory transcending all regions and thus capable of delimiting the specifically political regionagain not a feasible alternative from a post-structuralist viewpoint. It is the merit of, among others, the theorists considered by Robinson, that they have introduced a distinction between, on the one hand, politics as the region of practices usually referred to as politics and, on the other hand, the political as the moment of the contingent institution of politics and the social. The political cannot be reduced to a specific region, but instead refers to a logic permeating society in its entirety, even if in some places more than others. Since the political understood as contingency permeates politics, we can use the political as a principle of analysing politics. This is one of the contributions of post-structuralist (including Lacanian) political theory.
Hazards indeed, but not quite presuppose that one could move in a necessary fashion from a set of theoretical or ontological assumptions to a set of political conclusions applicable to a concrete context.

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AT: BUTLER
BUTLER TOTALLY IGNORES LACANS CONCEPTION OF THE REAL. HER POLITICAL INTERVENTIONS ONLY AMOUNT TO PROFITEERING AND SUSTAIN SYMBOLIC HEGEMONY. ONLY AN ETHICS OF THE REAL SITUATES RESPONSIBILITY AND STANDS A CHANCE AT AFFECTING CHANGE. TUHKANEN,CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CULTURE, SUNY/BUFFALO.
BY

MIKKO

BETWEEN

LIFE AND DEATH (2003): 140-144

JUDITH BUTLER. IN UMBR(A): A JOURNAL

OF THE

UNCONSCIOUS,

SPECIAL ISSUE

REVIEW: ANTIGONES CLAIM: KINSHIP IGNORANCE OF THE LAW, 1

What has always troubled Butlers reading of Lacan is her strange neglect or misunderstanding of the role of the real, a term never
mentioned in Antigones Claim.[4] This is particularly significant in the context of the Ethics seminar, where Lacans focus shifted from the symbolic and imaginary registers to that of the real, an emphasis that became increasingly marked in his subsequent work. While one might assume that, with her description of Antigone as the limit without which the symbolic cannot be thought or the unthinkable within the symbolic, Butler is pointing to the real, she goes on to identify Antigones position as possibly embodying an alternative symbolic or imaginary (40). In this context, her subsequent turn to Lacans second seminar to criticize what she considers his totalizing theory of the symbolic law is symptomatic: such a conflation of different stages in the Lacanian oeuvre allows her to overlook the role of the real in later Lacan. This elision is familiar from her earlier work. In The Psychic Life of Power, for example, she refers to the unspeakable, the unsignifiable of the symbolic order in Lacan,[5] but rather than properly naming this limit as the real, she moves on to consider the imaginary, as she does in Antigones Claim. Comparing Althusserian interpellation to Lacanian subject formation, she locates the only possibility for resistance in the subjects misrecognizing the name with which the law hails her. While such misrecognition pries open a gap between the law and its actualization, allowing for inaccurate repetitions of symbolic injunctions, such resistance is unable to radically recast the terms of symbolic subjection. What Butler fails to recognize is that

the only way to approach the questions of symbolic change would be to direct our attention from the question of the imaginary to that of the real. Her idiosyncratic rendering of Lacan may be necessitated by what Butler would identify as her political concerns. She is, of course, correct in doubting the viability of a symbolic suicide as a political gesture. In Lacan, she writes, [t]he law that mandates [Antigones] unlivability is not one that might profitably be broken (40). Indeed, a real act can never be undertaken for profit: symbolic change through the real must remain incalculable. Yet such unforeseeability of its effects necessitates it as an ethical gesture. While it seems that Butlers concept of futurity at times courts such an ethics of incalculable change, she clearly does not want to relinquish performativitys potential for strategic, profitable symbolic intervention, a feature that points to her theorys origin in Hegelian dialectics. Given her thorough research of Antigone scholarship, what is remarkable about Antigones Claim is Butlers own stubborn refusal to engage a number of recent critics who have elaborated on Lacans ethics of the real through the Sophoclean heroine.[6] Most notably, for these writers Antigones ethical act is more often than not radically inassimilable to Butlers theory of performativity, which in their view makes symbolic change inconceivable, dooming subjects to the imaginary repetition of symbolic edicts. Of course, the primary value of Antigones Claim is not in its contribution to psychoanalytic scholarship, but in whatever political work it may inspire. What remains inexplicable in Butlers recent work, however, is her continued insistence on taking on Lacanian theory when this engagement amounts to, in effect, a non-engagement. In her many references to Lacan, she repeats the misreadings that other critics have pointed to in her earlier work, most notably concerning the category of the real.

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AT: BUTLER (PARADOX OF LANGUAGE)

WHATEVER WE CAN SHOW ABOUT THAT WHICH ESCAPES LANGUAGE HAS TO BE SHOWN THROUGH LANGUAGE - PSYCHOANALYSIS REPRESENTS THE LIMITS OF THE SYMBOLIC IN ORDER TO LOCATE THE EXACT POINTS
WITHIN LINGUISTIC OR DISCURSIVE REPRESENTATION IN WHICH THE REAL IS SURFACING

STAVRAKAKIS, DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, DIRECTOR OF IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS PROGRAM 1999 [YANNIS, LACAN AND THE POLITICAL, P.83-85]
It was Foucault who posed this crucial question back in the early 1960s, in The Order of Things, by formulating the following phrase: .How can one think what he does not think [and the real in Lacan is something beyond whatever we can think about it], inhabit as though by a mute occupation something that eludes him, animate with a kind of frozen movement that figure of himself that takes the form of a stubborn exteriority?. (Foucault, 1989:323). And although his position was altered later in his work, his answer at that time was that psychoanalysis, instead of turning its back to this dark continent of the unthought, points directly to it, to the limits of representation, unmaking the positivity of man created by the human sciences (Foucault, 1989:374-9). Psychoanalysis belongs to a form of reflection which involves .for the first time, man.s being in that dimension where thought addresses the unthought and articulates itself upon it. (Foucault, 1989:325). This attitude is inscribed in the Freudian notion of the unconscious. The unconscious is a psychical agency whose existence .we are obliged to assume., to infer it from its effects, .but of which we know nothing. (Freud in Roazen, 1969:49). Freud affirms that the unconscious. and this is the real dimension of the unconscious.is unknowable as such and thus unsymbolisable in itself. Psychoanalysis aims at formulating a logic of relations and connections that .attempt to encircle this unknowability., to represent the limit of the symbolic (of language and knowledge) and traverse the closure of fantasy, a move which becomes possible exactly because this limit is surfacing within the symbolic order of language and knowledge; this limit is an internal limit, an internal exteriority (Samuels, 1993:144). In this light, if the question is .How do we know that the real resists symbolisation in the first place?. the answer must be .Exactly because this resistance, this limit of symbolisation, is shown within the level of representation.. Psychoanalysis is based on the idea that the real is shown in certain effects persisting in discourse 9 .although it lacks representation per se.and that it is possible to enact the symbolic gestures which can encircle these moments of .showing.; .something true can still be said [and .we have to show. how this can be done] about what cannot be demonstrated. (XX: 119). The question which remains open is what is the nature of these symbolic gestures. It is not so much a question of .if. but a question of .how.: .How can we know the real, if everything that can be categorised and explained within the framework of a scientific theory belongs to reality? How can any discourse reflect an authentic knowledge of the real?. (Lee, 1990:137). Thurston is asking a similar question: .How can an instance of language escape the semiotic conditions of representation?. (Thurston, 1998:158); a question posed in the following terms by Badiou: .How can a truth come to knowledge, whose own being, or relationship to being, is not able to be known?. (Badiou, 1996:24). First of all it is impossible to do it by articulating some kind of pure meta-language; for Lacan, there is no metalanguage except for a failed one, precisely because every meta-linguistic function has to be articulated in language (XX:122). Whatever we can show about that which escapes language has to be shown in and through language, especially through the points where meaning is disrupted. The meta-linguistic aspiration to articulate an impossible knowledge of the real has to work between the words, between the lines. We have to expose the kind of real to which it grants us access. We have to show where the shaping (mise en forme) of that metalanguage.which is not, and which I make ex-sist.is going. (XX:119) One then has to locate the exact points within linguistic or discursive representation in which the real is surfacing. What is at stake here is our ability to inscribe, without neutralising it, to recognise using a symbolic strategy, the ultimate impossibility of the real as it is revealed in our traumatic encounters with it (traumatic in the sense that they disrupt the ordinary forms of symbolisation); what is at stake is our .memory. of the political beyond the .forgetting. orchestrated by political reality. It is clear that Lacan believes that it is possible to escape from the illusion of closure and approach the real by means of a study of paradox and bizarre representational structures such as topology (the Borromean knot, for example, is capable of showing a certain real; it .represents. the real.XX: 133). In his 1972-3 seminar Encore, he makes it clear that the real can only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse of formalisation (XX:93). It is through the failures of symbolisation.the play of paradox, the areas of inconsistency and incompleteness.that it becomes possible to grasp .the limits, the points of impasse, of deadend, which show the real yielding to the symbolic. (Lacan in Lee, 1990:171). It is no coincidence that these moments are usually accompanied by anxiety.

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AT: BUTLER (LACAN TABOOS THE REAL)

BUTLERS OBJECTION ASSUMES AN ELEVATION OF THE STATUS OF THE REAL, LACANS POINT IS RATHER THAT IN THE FACE OF THE IRREDUCIBILITY OF THE REAL WE HAVE NO OTHER OPTION BUT TO SYMBOLIZE. STAVRAKAKIS, DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, DIRECTOR OF IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS PROGRAM 1999 [YANNIS, LACAN AND THE POLITICAL, P.85-87]
However, Butler.s point entails one more misunderstanding. It seems to imply that Lacanian discourse elevates the real to the status of a Taboo. Here .Zizekss following formulation propos of historical analysis is very important: Lacan is as far as it is possible to be from any .tabooing. of the real, from elevating it into an untouchable entity exempted from historical analysis.his point, rather, is that the only true ethical stance is to assume fully the impossible task of symbolising the real, inclusive of its necessary failure. (.i.ek, 1994a:199-200) In the face of the irreducibility of the real we have no other option but to symbolise; but such a symbolisation can take at least two forms: first, a fantasmatic one which will attempt to repress the real and to eliminate once and for all its structural causality. Psychoanalysis favours the second and more complex one: the articulation of symbolic constructs that will include a recognition of the real limits of the symbolic and will attempt to symbolically .institutionalise. real lack. Let me illustrate this point by returning to one of the examples I used earlier, that of nature. The crucial question regarding our access to the natural world becomes now: how can we then, if in fact we can, approach nature before it becomes Nature, the real before it becomes reality, before its symbolisation? This is the question posed by Evernden: how can we return to things .before they were captured and explained, in which transaction they ceased to be themselves and became instead functionaries in the world of social discourse [?]. (Evernden, 1992:110). How can we encounter the pre-symbolic Other in its radical otherness, an otherness escaping all our representations, if he is always .beyond.? (ibid.: 118). Well, in fact we can.t; what we can do, however, is acknowledge this failure, this constitutive impossibility, within our symbolisations. Trapped as we are within the world of social meaning, all our representations of reality are doomed to fail due to their symbolic character. Every attempt to construct what is impossible to be constructed fails due to our entrapment within the world of construction. The only moment in which we come face to face with the irreducible real beyond representation is when our constructions are dislocated. It is only when Nature, our construction of external reality, meets a stumbling block, something which cannot be symbolically integrated, that we come close to the real of nature. Nature, constructed Nature, is nothing but .a mode of concealment, a cloak of abstractions which obscures that discomforting wildness that defies our paranoid urge to delineate the boundaries of Being. (Evernden, 1992:132). Only when these boundaries collapse, in that minute intermission before we draw new ones, can we sense the unheimlich of real nature. It is in that sense that.as argued in Chapter 2.Lacanian theory opens the road to a realist constructionism or a constructionist realism; it does so by accepting the priority of a real which is, however, unrepresentable, but, nevertheless, can be encountered in the failure of every construction. One final point before concluding this section: when applied to our own discourse isn.t this recognition introducing a certain ethical principle? Recognising at the same time the impossibility of mastering the real and our obligation to recognise this impossibility through the failure of our attempts to symbolise it, indeed seems to introduce a certain principle which cannot be by-passed. Of necessity this is a principle affecting the structure of knowledge and science in late modern societies.

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AT: DERRIDA (RESPONSIBILITY TO THE OTHER)

IN
ORDER TO HAVE A NON-TOTALIZABLE RELATION TO THE OTHER WE MUST RELATE IDENTITY WITH THE LACK IN THE OTHER AND NOT WITH THE OTHER PER SE.

STAVRAKAKIS, DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, DIRECTOR OF IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS PROGRAM 1999 [YANNIS, LACAN AND THE POLITICAL, P.139]
First, it is certain that this text shares with both Connolly and Critchley the aspiration to articulate an ethics of .disharmony. in order to enhance the prospects of democracy. Our difference is that they both think that an ethics founded on a recognition of Otherness and difference is enough. Connolly.s argumentation is developed along the polarity identity/difference with the ethical sting being a recognition of Otherness. For Critchley also, what seems to be at stake in deconstruction is the relation with .The Other.. although this Other is not understood in exactly the same terms as the Lacanian Other (Critchley, 1992:197). Drawing on Levinasian ethics where the ethical is related to the disruption of totalising politics, he contends that: .any attempt to bring closure to the social is continually denied by the non-totalisable relation to the Other. (Critchley, 1992:238). Thus, the possibility of democracy rests on the recognition of the Other: .The community remains an open community in so far as it is based on the recognition of difference, of the difference of the Other. (Critchley, 1992:219). Moreover, political responsibility in democracy has .its horizon in responsibility for the Other. (ibid.: 239). This is also Touraine.s position: democracy entails the .recognition of the other. (Touraine, 1997:192). The problem with such an analysis is that it presupposes the Other as a unified totality or, even if this is not always the case, it seems to be offering a positive point of identification remaining thus within the limits of traditional ethical strategies or, in any case, not undermining them in a radical way. What has to be highlighted is that it is precisely this relation.the identification with the Other.that attempts to bring closure to the social. In order to have a non-totalisable relation to the Other we must relate.identify.with the lack in the Other and not with the Other per se. This is the radical innovation of Lacanian ethics. And this is what democracy needs today.

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AT: STAVRAKAKIS (K) OF ZIZEK

STAVRAKAKIS
LEVELS THE FIELD OF POLITICS TO CALCULATIVE TIPTOEING, DISMISSING ALL RADICAL ATTEMPTS TO BREAK WITH THE VIOLENCE OF THE STATUS QUO. REJECT THEIR BLACKMAIL AND TAKE THE RISK OF THE AFFIRMATIVE.

ZIZEK, PROF. OF SOC. @ LJUBLJANA, 2004. (SLAVOJ, FROM POLITICS TO BIOPOLITICSAND BACK, THE SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY, 103: 2/3 SPRING/SUMMER)
Within this horizon, the concept of radical, irrepresentable Evil, be it holocaust or gulag, plays the central role, that of the constitutive limit and point of reference of todays predominant notion of democracy: democracy means avoiding the totalitarian extreme; it is defined as a permanent struggle against the totalitarian temptation to close the gap, to (pretend to) act on behalf of the Thing Itself. Ironically, it is thus as if one should turn around the well-known Augustinian notion of Evil as having no positive substance or force of its own, but being just the absence of Good: Good itself is the absence of Evil, the distance toward the Evil Thing. It is this liberal blackmail of dismissing every radical political act as evil that one should thoroughly rejecteven when it is coated in Lacanian colors, as is the case in Ioannis Stavrakakiss recent critical reply to my reading of Antigone, which focuses on the danger of what he calls the absolutization of the event, which then leads to a totalitarian desastre. When Stavrakakis writes that fidelity to an event can flourish and avoid absolutization only as an infidel fidelity, only within the framework of another fidelity, fidelity to the openness of the political space and to the awareness of the constitutive impossibility of a final suture of the social, he thereby surreptitiously introduces a difference, which can be given different names, between the unconditional-ethical and the pragmaticopolitical: the original fact is the lack, opening, which pertains to human finitude, and all positive acts always fall short of this primordial lack; we have thus what Derrida calls the unconditional ethical injunction, impossible to fulfill, and positive acts, interventions, which remain strategic interventions. One should evoke two arguments against this position: First, Acts in Lacans sense precisely suspend this gapthey are impossible not in the sense of impossible to happen, but in the sense of impossible that happened. This is why Antigone was of interest to me: her act is not a strategic intervention that maintains the gap toward the impossible Voidit rather tends to absolutely enact the Impossible. I am well aware of the lure of such an act, but I claim that, in Lacans later versions of the act, this moment of madness beyond strategic intervention remains. In this precise sense, the notion of act not only does not contradict the lack in the Other, which, according to Stavrakakis, I neglect; it directly presupposes it: it is only through an act that I effectively assume the big Others inexistence, that is, I enact the impossible, namely what appears as impossible within the coordinates of the existing sociosymbolic order. Second, there are (also) political acts: politics cannot be reduced to the level of strategic-pragmatic interventions. In a radical political act, the opposition between a crazy destructive gesture and a strategic political decision momentarily breaks downwhich is why it is theoretically and politically wrong to oppose strategic political acts, as risky as they can be, to radical suicidal gestures la Antigone, gestures of pure self-destructive ethical insistence with, apparently, no political goal. The point is not simply that, once we are thoroughly engaged in a political project, we are ready to put everything at stake for it, inclusive of our lives, but, more precisely, that only such an impossible gesture of pure expenditure can change the very coordinates of what is strategically possible within a historical constellation. This is the key point: an act is neither a strategic intervention into the existing order, nor its crazy destructive negation; an act is an excessive, transstrategic, intervention that redefines the rules and contours of the existing order.

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AT: NO UNCONSCIOUS (OBRIEN & JUREIDINI)

REJECTION OF THE DYNAMIC UNCONSCIOUS IS WRONGIT FAILS TO EXPLAIN BASIC PSYCHIC PHENOMENA AND INEVITABLY REINTRODUCES THE SAME CONCEPTS KROLL, PROFESSOR OF PSYCHIATRY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA MEDICAL SCHOOL, 2003 [JEROME, THE NINE LIVES OF THE DYNAMIC UNCONSCIOUS, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHIATRY, & PSYCHOLOGY 9.2 (2002) 159-160, PROJECT MUSE]
IN THEIR PROVOCATIVE ARTICLE "Dispensing with the Dynamic Unconscious," O'Brien and Jureidini offer two basic arguments against the existence or, more accurately, because we are dealing here with constructs, the plausibility, of the dynamic unconscious. First, they assert, in contradistinction to the psychoanalytic claim that evidence of a cognitive unconscious supports the claim for a dynamic unconscious, that the notion of a cognitive unconscious is incompatible with that of a dynamic unconscious. Second, they argue on the grounds of parsimony that the phenomena explained by a dynamic unconscious can be better explained (accounted for) by other mechanisms. I would argue that neither of their contentions is correct. O'Brien and Jureidini have essentially taken data and evidence from cognitive science, issued a new vocabulary, and then asserted that their vocabulary is superior and constitutes better explanations for the phenomena and observations under question. They have failed to show any incompatibility between the two explanatory constructs. O'Brien and Jureidini agree with the basic Freudian tenet that most mental activity is unconscious, that is, out of consciousness, and that much of what is out of consciousness can be brought into consciousness with proper cueing. No problem so far. The problem with the dynamic unconscious, as O'Brien and Jureidini see it, is that the cognitive unconscious is modular, best described as a series of subpersonal systems akin to a set of narrowly focused computational

What O'Brien and Jureidini have now given us are multiple homunculi rather than just one CEO or executive homunculus. How literally do we want to take these subpersons? Are subpersonal mental states more satisfactory scientifically than personal-level mental states? Second, O'Brien and Jureidini unfairly attribute to the psychoanalytic position the claim that the dynamic unconscious "is presumed to contain fully formed repressed memories." With the compelling evidence from psychology and neuroscience that all memory is a reconstruction, I do not think that any contemporary psychodynamicist makes a case for fully formed repressed memories, nor is this notion essential to a theory of a dynamic unconscious. O'Brien and Jureidini invoke Occam's razor by invoking a straw horse argument. Their description of the action of subpersonal parts doing sufficient specific cuing sounds suspiciously like the work done in the dynamic unconscious. In the next section, an emotional response is described as pushing images out of mind before they can be reported on (assumedly, before they become conscious). What is doing the pushing here? Upon what principles or priorities are images pushed out of mind? The authors explain that mental "representations are inaccessible to consciousness by virtue [End Page 159] of architectural constraints rather than the operation of a repressive force." But architectural constraints sounds like another way of describing neural facilitation and inhibition. Certainly most neural activity, perhaps all, involves facilitation and inhibition of signals at multiple synapses. Repression is just a psychological construct to describe what the processes of facilitation and inhibition bring about in terms of meaningful mental activity. While we are on the topic of choice of words, the repeated description of the dynamic unconscious as subterranean is an inflammatory locution designed to rally opposition to the notion. The cognitive unconscious is equally subterranean. To look further into the supposed superiority of explanation via the cognitive unconscious, we see that O'Brien and Jureidini attribute the following processes to the cognitive unconscious: evaluation, decision making, editing out, filling in, reconstruction, and reconfiguration. But what are the bases of these processes? What guides or influences the way ideas, images, and emotions are reconstructed and reconfigured? It does not appear to be done randomly. When the reconstructive narrative becomes "significantly distorted" because the memory to be retrieved is fraught with distress, what accounts for the shape of the distortion and what (dare we say who?) recognizes that a memory is about to be distressing? We may all be unhappy with the notion of a dynamic unconscious, but invoking subpersonal unconscious influences seems like obfuscation to me.
specialists, whereas the dynamic unconscious contains fully formed repressed memories. As introduction to my last point, O'Brien and Jureidini's characterization of hypnosis is one sided and reveals the direction in which they will take their argument. The question of what type of state is a hypnotic state is far from settled, and citing Spanos, a very respectable worker whose critical and skeptical position on hypnosis is well known, without presenting the other side of the argument by citing, for example, Ernest Hilgard, is to argue unfairly. Although wide-awake subjects can reenact hypnotic-like behavior, including claims of amnesia, this is not the amnesia that hypnotized subjects claim to experience. What we are left with is the fall-back argument that there is pretending going on.

O'Brien and Jureidini are kind (or astute) enough to avoid the claim that there is deliberate deception, lying, and faking going on in hysteria and hypnosis, but pretending seems a very close substitute. This ad hominem or character assassination argument harks back to Szasz and is a poor way to win a debate. The alternative suggestion O'Brien and Jureidini offer is that people do not want to face certain judgments about themselves. In either event, phenomena that have heretofore been explained by the dynamic unconsciousness are now explained by willful, intentional, and conscious motivations. I am sure that this happens sometimes, but it is a pretty puny argument with which to dispense with the richness of human behavior. Back to the drawing board for the cognitive theorists. The essential argument here seems to be the ongoing attempt to explain the messiness of human motivation and behavior in terms of neural mechanisms and, more recently, computer and information processing models. The enterprise is laudable, but the sticking point always seems to be the problem in moving from biological process to meaning and semantics. I continue to see no incompatibility between the two different levels of operation: the biological processes and the psychodynamic explanation. Psychodynamic explanations may be wrong (however defined) in detail or even in large part, but psychodynamic theory engages thought, emotion, and action at the symbolic and personal level, and until a process explanation can make that leap to the world of worry, desire, and affection, it will fall short in its attempts to render psychodynamics superfluous.

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DONT READ THE AFFIRMATIVE AS A SIMPLE AND PRAGMATIC INTERVENTION INTO EXISTING POLITICS, IT IS ALSO A RADICAL GESTURE TOWARD REDEFINING THE EXISTING SOCIO-POLITICAL COORDINATES. ZIZEK, PROF. OF SOC. @ LJUBLJANA, 2004. (SLAVOJ, FROM POLITICS TO BIOPOLITICSAND BACK, THE SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY, 103: 2/3 SPRING/SUMMER)
Second, there are (also) political acts: politics cannot be reduced to the level of strategic-pragmatic interventions. In a radical political act, the opposition between a crazy destructive gesture and a strategic political decision momentarily breaks downwhich is why it is theoretically and politically wrong to oppose strategic political acts, as risky as they can be, to radical suicidal gestures la Antigone, gestures of pure self-destructive ethical insistence with, apparently, no political goal. The point is not simply that, once we are thoroughly engaged in a political project, we are ready to put everything at stake for it, inclusive of our lives, but, more precisely, that only such an impossible gesture of pure expenditure can change the very coordinates of what is strategically possible within a historical constellation.This is the key point: an act is neither a strategic intervention into the existing order, nor its crazy destructive negation; an act is an excessive, transstrategic, intervention that redefines the rules and contours of the existing order.

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YOUR DUDES WOULD HAVE BEEN ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE BARRICARES DURING THE REVOLUTION FRENCH

ROBINSON, PHD IN POLITICAL THEORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM, 2005. [ANDREW, THE POLITICAL THEORY OF CONSTITUTIVE LACK: A CRITIQUE THEORY & EVENT, 8:1]
There is more than an accidental relationship between the mythical operation of the concept of "constitutive lack" and Lacanians' conservative and pragmatist politics. Myth is a way of reducing thought to the present: the isolated signs which are included in the mythical gesture are thereby attached to extra-historical abstractions. On an analytical level, Lacanian theory can be very "radical", unscrupulously exposing the underlying relations and assumptions concealed beneath officially-sanctioned discourse. This radicalism, however, never translates into political conclusions: as shown above, a radical rejection of anti-"crime" rhetoric turns into an endorsement of punishment, and a radical critique of neo-liberalism turns into a pragmatist endorsement of structural adjustment. It is as if there is a magical barrier between theory and politics which insulates the latter from the former. One should recall a remark once made by Wilhelm Reich: 'You plead for happiness in life, but security means more to you'. Lacanians have a "radical" theory oriented towards happiness, but politically, their primary concern is security. As long as they are engaged in politically ineffectual critique, Lacanians will denounce and criticize the social system, but once it comes to practical problems, the "order not to think" becomes operative. This "magic" barrier is the alibi function of myth. The short-circuit between specific instances and high-level abstractions is politically consequential. A present evil can be denounced and overthrown if located in an analysis with a "middle level", but Lacanian theory tends in practice to add an "always" which prevents change. At the very most, such change cannot affect the basic matrix posited by Lacanian theory, because this is assumed to operate above history. In this way, Lacanian theory operates as an alibi: it offers a little bit of theoretical radicalism to inoculate the system against the threat posed by a lot of politicized radicalism. In Laclau and Mouffe's
version, this takes the classic Barthesian form: "yes, liberal democracy involves violent exclusions, but what is this compared to the desert of the real outside it?" The Zizekian version is more complex: "yes, there can be a revolution, but after the revolution, one must return to the pragmatic tasks of the present". A good example is provided in one of Zizek's texts. The author presents an excellent analysis of a Kafkaesque incident in the former Yugoslavia where the state gives a soldier a direct, compulsory order to take a voluntary oath - in other words, attempts to compel consent. He then ruins the impact of this example by insisting that there is always such a moment of "forced choice", and that one should not attempt to escape it lest one end up in psychosis or totalitarianism. The political function of

Lacanian theory is to preclude critique by encoding the present as myth. There is a danger of a stultifying conservatism arising from within Lacanian political theory, echoing the 'terrifying conservatism' Deleuze suggests is active in any reduction of history to negativity. The addition of an "always" to contemporary evils amounts to a "pessimism of the will", or a "repressive reduction of thought to the present". Stavrakakis, for instance, claims that attempts to find causes and thereby to solve problems are always fantasmatic, while Zizek states that an object which is perceived as blocking something does nothing but materialize the already-operative constitutive lack. While this does not strictly entail the necessity of a conservative
attitude to the possibility of any specific reform, it creates a danger of discursive slippage and hostility to "utopianism" which could have conservative consequences.

Even if Lacanians believe in surplus/contingent as well as constitutive lack, there are no standards for distinguishing the two. If one cannot tell which social blockages result from constitutive lack and which are contingent, how can one know they are not all of the latter type? And even if constitutive lack exists, Lacanian theory runs a risk of "misdiagnoses" which have a neophobe or even reactionary effect. To take an imagined example, a Lacanian living in France in 1788 would probably conclude that democracy is a utopian fantasmatic ideal and would settle for a pragmatic reinterpretation of the ancien regime. Laclau and Mouffe's hostility to workers' councils and Zizek's insistence on the need for a state and a Party exemplify this neophobe tendency. The pervasive negativity and cynicism of Lacanian theory offers little basis for constructive activity. Instead of radical transformation, one is left with a pragmatics of "containment" which involves a conservative de-problematization of the worst aspects of the status quo. The inactivity it counsels would make its claims a self-fulfilling prophecy by acting as a barrier to transformative activity.
To conclude, the political theory of "constitutive lack" does not hold together as an analytical project and falls short of its radical claims as a theoretical and political one. It relies on central concepts which are constructed through the operation of a mythical discourse in the Barthesian sense, with the result that it is unable to offer sufficient openness to engage with complex issues. If political theory is to make use of poststructuralist conceptions of contingency, it would do better to look to the examples provided by Deleuze and Guattari, whose conception of contingency is active and affirmative. In contrast, the idea of "constitutive lack" turns

Lacanian theory into something its most vocal proponent, Zizek, claims to attack: a "plague of fantasies".

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MODEL OF POLITICS BASED ON AN ONTOLOGY OF LACK OFFERS NO WAY OUT - THE ALTERNATIVE REPRODUCES VIOLENCE AND CONSERVATIVE RULE THROUGH ITS FOCUS ON THE INEVITABILITY OF LACK AND ITS DISAVOWAL OF ANY LEFTIST POLITICAL STRATEGY. NOT ONLY THAT, IT RESULTS IN FRAGMENTATION BY PREVENTING THE ORGANIZING POTENTIAL OF UTOPIAN POLITICS.

ROBINSON AND TORMEY 2004 [ANDREW AND SIMON, UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM ZIZEK IS NOT A RADICAL, ELEVEN, HOMEPAGE.NTLWORLD.COM/SIMON.TORMEY/ARTICLES/ZIZEKNOTRADICAL.PDF, EVANS]
Zizeks politics are not merely impossible, but potentially despotic, and also (between support for a Master, acceptance of pain and alienation, militarism and the restoration of order) tendentially conservative. They serve only to discredit the left and further alienate those it seeks to mobilise. Instead, a transformative politics should be a process of transformation, an alinear, rhizomatic, multiform plurality of resistances, initiatives, and, indeed, acts, which are sometimes spectacular and carnivalesque, sometimes prefigurative, sometimes subterranean, sometimes rooted in institutional change and reform, sometimes directly revolutionary. Zizeks model of the pledged group, bound together by the One who Acts, is entirely irrelevant to the contemporary world and would be a step backwards from the decentred character of current left radical politics. Nor need this decentering be seen as a weakness as Zizek insists. It can be a strength, protecting radical politics from self-appointed elites, transformism, infiltration, defeat through the neutralisation of leaders, and the threat of a repeat of the Stalinist betrayal. In contrast with Zizeks stress on subordination, exclusivity, hierarchy and violence, the tendency of anti-capitalists and others to adopt anti-authoritarian, heterogeneous, inclusive and multiform types of activity offer a better chance of effectively overcoming the homogenising logic of capitalism and of winning support among wider circles of those dissatisfied with it. Similarly, the emphasis on direct action - which can include ludic, carnivalesque and non-violent actions as well as more overtly confrontational ones - generates the possibility of empowerment through involvement in and support for the myriad causes which make up the anti-capitalist resistance. This resistance stands in stark contrast to the desert of heroic isolation advocated by Zizek, which, as Laclau puts it, is a prescription for political quietism and sterility.154 Zizek is right that we should aim to overcome the impossibilities of capitalism, but this overcoming should involve the active prefiguration and construction in actuality of alternative social forms, not a simple (and actually impossible) break with everything which exists of the kind imagined by Zizek. It is important that radicals invoke utopias, but in an active way, in the forms of organisation, disorganisation, and activity we adopt, in the spaces we create for resistance, and in the prefiguration of alternative economic, political and social forms. Utopian imaginaries express what is at stake in left radicalism: that what exists does not exist of necessity, and that the contingency of social institutions and practices makes possible the overthrow of existing institutions and the construction or creation of different practices, social relations, and conceptions of the world. The most Zizek allows to radicals is the ability to glimpse utopia while enacting the reconstruction of oppression. Radicals should go further, and bring this imagined other place into actual existence. Through enacting utopia, we have the ability to bring the no-where into the now-here.

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LACANIAN POLITICS PREVENTS TRULY RADICAL ACTION BECAUSE IT NEVER QUESTIONS THE NECESSITY OF ORDER THE LACK SIMPLY BECOMES THE NEW MASTER SIGNIFIER IN A POLITICS THAT IS, AT ITS CORE, THE SAME. ROBINSON, PHD IN POLITICAL THEORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM, 2005. [ANDREW, THE POLITICAL THEORY OF CONSTITUTIVE LACK: A CRITIQUE THEORY & EVENT, 8:1]
The gap between the two kinds of contingency is also suggested by the Lacanian insistence on the "need" for a master-signifier (or "nodal point"), i.e. a particular signifier which fills the position of universality, a 'symbolic injunction which relies only on its own act of enunciation'116. It is through such a gesture that one establishes a logic of sameness, and such a logic seems to be desired by Lacanians. Butler remarks that Zizek's text is a 'project of mastery' and a discourse

of the law in which 'the "contingency" of language is mastered in and by a textual practice which speaks as the law'. He demands a '"New Harmony", sustained by a newly emerged Master-Signifier'117. This insistence on a master-signifier is an anti-contingent gesture, especially in its rejection of the multiordinality of language. It is, after all, this multiordinality (the possibility of making a statement about any other statement) which renders language an open rather than a closed system. The "need" for a master-signifier seems to be a "need" to restore an illusion of closure, the "need" for metacommunication to operate in a repressive rather than an open way. This "need" arises because the mythical concept of "constitutive lack" is located in an entire mythical narrative in which it relates to other abstractions. In the work of Laclau and Mouffe, this expresses itself in the demand for a "hegemonic" agent who contingently expresses the idea of social order "as such". One should recall that such an order is impossible, since antagonism is constitutive of social relations, and that the hegemonic gesture therefore requires an exclusion. Thus, the establishment of a hegemonic master-signifier is merely a useful illusion. The alternative to demanding a master-signifier - an illusion of order where there is none - would be to reject the pursuit of the ordering function itself, and to embrace a "rhizomatic" politics which goes beyond this pursuit. In Laclau and Mouffe's work, however, the "need" for a social order, and a state to embody it, is never questioned, and, even in Zizek's texts, the "Act" which smashes the social order is to be followed by a necessary restoration of order118. This necessity is derived ontologically: people are, says Zizek, 'in
need of firm roots'119. The tautological gesture of establishing a master-signifier by restrospectively positing conditions of an object as its components, thereby 'blocking any further inquiry into the social meaning' of what it quilts (i.e. repressive metacommunication), is a structural necessity120. This is because

'discourse itself is in its fundamental structure "authoritarian"'. The role of the analyst is not to challenge the place of the master, but to occupy it in such a way as to expose its underlying contingency121. The master-signifier, also termed the One, demonstrates the centrality of a logic of place in
Lacanian theory. Lacanians assume that constitutive lack necessitates the construction of a positive space which a particular agent can fill (albeit contingently), which embodies the emptiness/negativity as such. Therefore, the commitment to master-signifiers and the state involves a continuation of an essentialist image of positivity, with "lack" operating structurally as the master-signifier of Lacanian theory itself (not as a subversion of positivity, but as a particular positive element). The idea of "constitutive lack" is supposed to entail a rejection of neutral and universal

standpoints, and it is this rejection which constructs it as an "anti-essentialist" position. In practice, however, Lacanians restore the idea of a universal framework through the backdoor. Beneath the idea that "there is no neutral universality" lurks a claim to know precisely such a "neutral
universality" and to claim a privileged position on this basis. A consistent belief in contingency and "anti-essentialism" entails scepticism about the idea of constitutive lack. After all, how does one know that the appearance that 'experience' shows lack to be constitutive reflects an underlying universality, as opposed to the contingent or even simulated effects of a particular discourse or episteme? Alongside its opponents, shouldn't Lacanian theory also be haunted by its own fallibility

and incompletion? There is a paradox in the idea of radical choice, for it is unclear whether Lacanians believe this should be applied reflexively. Is the choice of Lacanian theory itself an ungrounded Decision? If so, the theory loses the universalist status it implicitly claims. If not, it would seem to be the kind of structural theory it attacks. A complete structural theory would seem to assume an extra-contingent standpoint, even if the structure includes a reference to constitutive lack. Such a theory would seem to be a radical negation of the incompletion of "I don't know". The myth of constitutive lack, like all myths, has a closing role: it limits what can be said through an "order not to think". On the other hand, the idea that creativity is motivated by a stance that "I-don't-know" has an opening effect. As Callinicos puts it, 'what
Badiou and Zizek calls the "void" in a situation is rather the set of determinate possibilities it contains, including that of transformation'122. If there is no irreducible "Real" beneath each blockage or lack, these can be overcome by creative action, as with the creative role of anomalies in paradigm-change in the sciences, and the creative role of "psychotic" philosophies such as those of Deleuze and Nietzsche. The imperative in Lacanian theory is to "accept" lack, whereas the logic of a nonmythical idea of contingency is to use opportunities for openness as a basis for creativity. Furthermore, Lacanian theories involve a strong commitment to slave morality, as exemplified by Laclau's insistence that every chain of equivalence involve a unity against an external threat123, Norval's advocacy of the use of "apartheid" as a bogeyman in South African politics124 and Mouffe's demand for submission to rules125, and also in Zizek 's "revolutionary" insistence on the need for masochistic self-degradation, 'subjective destitution' and identification with a Master and a Cause126, not to mention his directly reactive insistence that self-awareness amounts to awareness of the negative, of death

and trauma, prior to any active identification or articulation127. This is a reterritorializing "contingency" which fits closely with the operation of capitalist ideology, where 'under conditions we recognize as desperate, we are told to alter ourselves', not the conditions,
because the self is conceived as a decisionist founder128. The alternative is a difference which is not reified into a "positive" negativity. According to Deleuze, there are two models of contingency: the creative power of the poet, and the politician's denial of difference so as to prolong an established order. It is for the latter that negation (lack) is primary, 'as if it were necessary to pass through the misfortunes of rift and division in order to be able to say yes'. For the poet, on the other hand, difference is 'light, aerial and affirmative'. 'There is a false profundity in conflict, but underneath conflict, the play of differences', differences

which should be affirmed as positive and not overcoded by negativity129.

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THE STATE CAN ALWAYS BE CHALLENGED THROUGH ATTEMPTS TO RECOGNIZE THE SOCIAL FANTASY AND ASSUME THE ROLE OF BARE LIFE. EDKINS, PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WALES, 2003 [JENNY, TRAUMA AND THE MEMORY OF POLITICS, 216]
At the point at which changes in the political ordering of the state are demanded, protests move to the sites that are central to the current structure. The protests reclaim memory and rewrite it as a form of resistance. The story is never finished: the scripting of memory by those in power can always be challenged, and such challenges are found at moments and in places where the very foundations of the imagined community have been laid out. They play on, and demand a recognition of, the contingency of political community and its structure as social fantasy. For the most part, these protests are insistently non-violent. As such they have a particular effectiveness in their appeal against the structures of sovereign power put into place by the treatment of life as bare life that was discussed in the previous chapter. In a sense that I shall explore in this chapter, they assume, or take on, bare life. The protesters, in refusing violent means, expose the violence of the state. This exposure is particularly poignant and powerful when it takes place in the face of the memorials to state violence.

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PSYCHOANALYSIS
CANNOT AND SHOULD NOT BE TRANSFERRED TO THE LEVEL OF CULTURETHEIR TREATMENT OF SOCIETY AS A SICK ORGANISM IN NEED OF THE PROPER CURE DEVOLVES INTO TOTALITARIANISM AND VIOLENCE

HUTCHENS, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT JAMES MADISON UNIVERSITY, 2004 [BENJAMIN, THE SENSELESSNESS OF A CURABLE WORLD: JEAN-LUC NANCY ON FREUDIAN MASSENPSYCHOLOGIE, THEORY @ BUFFALO 9, HTTP://WINGS.BUFFALO.EDU/THEORY/ARCHIVE/ARCHIVE.HTML, 105-108]
Refreshingly for many, Jean-Luc Nancys critique of psychoanalysis does not represent an effort to valorize Lacanian cultural theory or reprise the reputation of Freud. I argue that it is valuable inasmuch as it challenges the confidence that psychoanalysis in general can offer a theory of culture that (a) might serve as an antidote to some grievous flaws of contemporary ontology (especially in respect of personal and communal identity) and (b) could conceivably provide a praxis resistant to prevailing political paradigms. Generally speaking, Nancy addresses the manner in which psychoanalysis presumes the authority to identify the symptoms of a seemingly incurable world, and ultimately to reveal the conceptual protocols that provide its cure. Specifically, a psycho-analytics of culture lacks any social reality other than cultural expressions of unconscious mechanisms, and therefore renders inaccessible the world that, for Nancy, is coextensive with sense itself. Moreover, in adhering to the model of a plurality of narcissistic egos whose social relations are enabled through the mediation of the Law, Freudian Massenpsychologie abrogates any viable view of the reality of open, insubstantial community and politics. Nancy filters such difficulties through his own concern with an alternative view of the sense of community. He offers a thorough, but often abstruse, critique of substantialist metaphysics and its corollary immanentism. By substantialism I understand the predetermination of individuality on the basis of the presumption of a preestablished existence. Community,on this view, is composed of individuals whose determination precedes participation in community, a participation whose form is already anticipated by this predetermination. By immanentism I glean that Nancy understands any individual or communal identity resulting from mimetic reflection mediated by a symbolic order. In other words, once defined as pre-existent, the individuals that compose the group project symbolic modalities which then reflect back on the community, providing it with a mediated identity. Against these communal tendencies Nancy poses a daunting challenge. He reads in psychoanalysis a substantialist presupposition of a fragmented body of individual selves viewed through the immanentist lens of the symbolic order of a curable world. Nancy discloses a view of an insubstantial community consisting of singular beings whose identities are always expropriated from the space of immanentist projection and reflection. Such singular lives are incessantly different in every social encounter as a result of sharing in exposure to existence itself. In this respect, the sense of community is neither predetermined nor preestablished by virtue of the mediation of the symbolic order. Instead, it is in the intersections of social relations that singular beings in contact with one another share in a sense that defies precisely the requirements of substantialist and immanentist metaphysics. Nancy finds much that is objectionable in both Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis. In many respects, Nancy insinuates that the cultural presumption of a distinction between the individual and community is inspired by the preconception of social reality as one that is social diseased or otherwise disordered in a curable fashion. Psychoanalysis itself makes sense, simply by making it possible to designate the sickness of sense, though what it does not intuit is the madness inherent in the behavior of sense itself. Alternatively, Nancy insists that the world is neither curable nor incurable, but rather the space through which sense circulates madly (The Sense of the World 47-49). Nancy reads psychoanalysis as if it were based on the presumptions that the human condition is socially diseased and that a viable psycho-analytics of culture can provide effective antidotes for such a condition. One might tend to surmise that, if a criticism is to be leveled at this reading, it could focus on the problem of psychoanalysis as political praxis. On the one hand, Nancy insists that psychoanalysis is insufficiently practical in the sense that it cannot address social disorders because it lacks a profound view of the sense of community. On the other hand, Nancy himself offers no patently more satisfactory view of how his own understanding of insubstantialist community could serve as motivational of a political praxis. The notions of sharing and the circulation of sense are sufficiently abstruse as to pose obstacles to an alternative praxis. In the main, Nancys critique is useful as such, but not as an alternative purview of the problem of the sense of community and its political praxis. Nancys rebuke of any possible psycho-analytics of culture takes place on two intercalated registers of critique found in La panique politique and Le sens du monde. In the former (co-authored with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe), Nancy demands a questioning of the conjunction of psychoanalysis and politics. There he explores the regression of psychoanalytic thought into a wider, more primitive scene of culture in the sweeping movement from the individual psychology of Freuds early work to the more general cultural analysis in the later. For Nancy, something happened in Freuds Massenpsychologie und Ich-analyse that provided the necessary condition of supplanting the commitments of individual psychology with a more general concern for the social body, the composition of masses, and the laws (the Law) by which such political subjects hypostasize.

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Alternatively, the perimeter of such a group psychology implies ontological trajectories sustained by a contortion in psychoanalytic strategies themselves. Roughly speaking, Nancy notes in Freud an incessant complication of the condition of subjectivity: it is simultaneously implied and constituted, presupposed and effaced. On one level, perhaps, Freud was implementing and enacting psychoanalytic strategies in the more general social domain, hypothesizing and testing the articulations of his individual psychology. But on another level, the convolutions of reasoning about subjectivity that allegedly determine the success of the Ich-analyse demand resolution in a metaphysical egology in which the other and the subject network. In simpler terms, one might say that the subject/other and ego/alter ego relations were predetermined and superimposed upon multifaceted domains of social inquiry: the origin of myth, death and sacrifice etc. But one might suggest with equal acuity of insight that, in his later works, Freud was seeking solutions for problems promulgated by the predetermination of such relations on the wider stage of cultural theory, yet found his progress in the implementation of a psychoanalytic theory forestalled by precisely such predetermination. Even so, Nancys question is whether Freuds problems in creating a theory of subjectivity and the social body continue to bar psychoanalysis from providing tenable grounds for the exploration of culture and politics; and, by extension, from resisting the totalitarian logic latent in the very thought of community and politics today. In Le sens du monde, Nancy produces the intriguing thought that the law is not the Other, but the other is the withdrawal of the love that such a law purportedly guarantees. In other words, Nancy is captivated by the prospect of securing the sense of the Law from the appropriations of both psychoanalysis and totalitarian logic. Above all, Freudian cultural theory lacks what Nancy calls world, a single sense that circulates through the intersections and interstices of an open community consisting of singular ones (not subject/object relations). For Nancy, Freudian psychoanalysis and its Lacanian derivative are testaments to the vitality of a substantialist metaphysics that cannot relinquish a fascinations with the ontology of the same and the other and obstructs any possible inquiry into community and politics.
ALTERNATIVE CANNOT FUNCTION ON THE LEVEL OF SOCIETY, ONLY THE INDIVIDUAL. THE WORLD IS NOT CURABLE, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS CANNOT UNDERSTAND THE SOCIAL LEVEL AS OPPOSED TO THE INDIVIDUAL

THE

HUTCHENS, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT JAMES MADISON UNIVERSITY, 2004 [BENJAMIN, THE SENSELESSNESS OF A CURABLE WORLD: JEAN-LUC NANCY ON FREUDIAN MASSENPSYCHOLOGIE, THEORY @ BUFFALO 9, HTTP://WINGS.BUFFALO.EDU/THEORY/ARCHIVE/ARCHIVE.HTML, 115-116]
Yet Nancy does have a viable objection that the very distinction between curable and incurable already implies the linkages that enable socialization amongst narcissistic egos. In other words, this vacillation of commitment is the result of indebtedness to biological and metaphysical presumptions concerning the ego. Insofar as the egos of this scheme neither compose nor have access to social reality, they lack the very world which singular beings, someones, must compose. There is thus a lacuna of sense in the play of signifyingness around narcissistic egos. Psychoanalytic theory offers only a severe punctuation of truth, that is, a pure privation of sense that might ultimately demand an excessive sense. The inaugural thought of psychoanalysis merely dissolves all sense, renders it destitute by reducing it to a mere demand of sense and by exposing truth as the disappointment of that demand (The Sense of the World 46). It lacks world and access to the sense with which the world is coextensive. It therefore offers only a description of an unrequited demand for sense that is confused with sense itself. It is precisely this disappointment of the psychoanalytics of culture that provides it with the mission to cure a world; yet, paradoxically, the analyst would never settle for such a disappointment if it were not already striving to endow itself with authority over a curable world it feared might prove incurable. I concur with Nancy that psychoanalysis endeavors to lead politics to its truth, yet achieves only the annihilation of the political truth it needs for the purpose of resolving the difficulties engendered by the espousal of the metaphysical egology. Scanning political truth in a lapidary fashion, without arche, possessing no end or ground by which its success could be determined, psychoanalysis fails either to resolve the political deficiencies it identifies or to offer a purview of its own conceptual capacity to do so. In more general terms, one might propose that the effort to appropriate political truth into a tenable psychoanalysis of culture serves only to depropriate the very subject of culture. Perhaps there is a sickness, a collective neurosis that leaves all non-relating narcissistic egos in a state of panic. Yet, psychoanalysis has neither devolved its actual sense nor provided therapeutic means by which to address it. Sense, anterior to sanity and insanity, is not indicative of the sickness that psychoanalysis construes. In its infinite reticulations of singularity, sense is mad and thus cannot be produced by any theory whose intended praxis is therapy (The Sense of the World 49) Psychoanalysis composes its own neurotic fantasy of social illusion. It does not confront the manner in which there might be sickness in the very groundless insubstantiality of social relations, or perhaps no such sickness of that kind at all.

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AFF: PSYCHOANALYSIS IS FACTUALLY INACCURATE

PSYCHOANALYSIS IS FACTUALLY INACCURATETHE MODEL OF THE DYNAMIC UNCONSCIOUS IT IS MODELED ON IS FACTUALLY INACCURATE OBRIEN & JUREIDINI, 2OO2 [GERARD & JON, SENIOR LECTURER IN THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE & PHD (FLINDERS) IS A CHILD PSYCHIATRIST WHO HAS COMPLETED A DOCTORATE IN PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, DISPENSING WITH THE DYNAMIC UNCONSCIOUS, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHIATRY, & PSYCHOLOGY 9.2, PROJECT MUSE] IT IS THE PRIMARY TENET of psychoanalysis that there is a subterranean region of our minds inhabited by mental entitiessuch as thoughts, feelings, and motivesthat are actively prevented from entering consciousness because of their painful or otherwise unacceptable content. These mental entities, in spite of being consciously inaccessible, are assumed to have a profound impact on our conscious mental life and behavior, and in so doing are thought to be responsible for many of the
psychopathologies, both major and minor, to which we are subject.

This conjectured subterranean region of our minds is nowadays known as the dynamic unconscious, and there is no more important explanatory concept in all of psychoanalytic theory. Yet, despite its importance to psychoanalytic thought and practice, and despite almost a century of research effort since its first systematic articulation, the dynamic unconscious is in deep trouble. The methodologic difficulties associated with theorizing about this putative mental underworld are legion (Grunbaum 1984), and recent years have seen a growing skepticism about the very notion of a dynamic unconscious and with it the whole
apparatus of psychoanalysis (see, for example, Crews 1996). In the face of these difficulties, a number of proponents of psychoanalysis have turned to contemporary cognitive science for assistance (see, for example, Epstein 1994; Erdelyi 1985; Shevrin 1992; and Westen 1998). Their aim has been to show that psychoanalytic conjectures about the dynamic unconscious receive a great deal of support from the empirical evidence in favor of the cognitive unconscious. By variously integrating the dynamic unconscious with the cognitive unconscious (Epstein 1994) or extending the cognitive unconscious to cover psychical entities and processes traditionally associated with the dynamic [End Page 141] unconscious (Westen 1998), the hope is that the struggling psychoanalytic concept will be buttressed by its healthier counterpart in cognitive science. It is our contention, however, that this

hope is misplaced. Far from supporting the dynamic unconscious, recent work in the cognitive science suggests that the time has come to dispense with this concept altogether. We will defend this claim in two ways. First, we will argue that any attempt to shore up the dynamic unconscious with the cognitive unconscious is bound to fail, simply because the latter, as it is understood in contemporary cognitive science, is incompatible with the former as it is traditionally conceived by psychoanalytic theory. Second, we will show how psychological phenomena traditionally cited as evidence for the operation of a dynamic unconscious can be accommodated more parsimoniously by other means. But before we do either of these things, and to set the scene for our subsequent discussion, we will offer a very brief

recapitulation of the dynamic unconscious, especially as it was originally conceived by Sigmund Freud.

NO EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT CLAIMS OF ADYNAMIC UNCONCIOUS OBRIEN & JUREIDINI, 2OO2 [GERARD & JON, SENIOR LECTURER IN THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE & PHD (FLINDERS) IS A CHILD PSYCHIATRIST WHO HAS COMPLETED A DOCTORATE IN PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, DISPENSING WITH THE DYNAMIC UNCONSCIOUS, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHIATRY, & PSYCHOLOGY 9.2, PROJECT MUSE] the empirical work in cognitive science that leads to the postulation of the cognitive unconscious fails to support the existence of the dynamic unconscious, at least as it has traditionally been conceived by psychoanalytic theory. This claim is not novel (see, for example, Marcel 1988, 172), with even theorists sympathetic to psychoanalysis prepared to concede it (e.g., Woody and Phillips 1995, 127). Now, however, we will go a little further. It is only in recent times that
Thus far we have argued that proponents of psychoanalytic theory have turned to empirical work in cognitive science to find support for their conjectures about the nature and operation of the unconscious. In this final substantive section of the paper, we examine some of the psychological phenomena that over the years have been cited as evidence for the dynamic unconscious. Our aim is to show that these phenomena can be better and more parsimoniously explained as either effects of subpersonal unconscious influences or conscious conflicts in the normal process of construction of verbal reports.

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AFF: PSYCHOANALYTIC REPRESSION INACCURATE

AND, YOUR NOTION OF REPRESSION IS PART OF THIS MYTH OBRIEN & JUREIDINI, 2OO2 [GERARD & JON, SENIOR LECTURER IN THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE & PHD (FLINDERS) IS A CHILD PSYCHIATRIST WHO HAS COMPLETED A DOCTORATE IN PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, DISPENSING WITH THE DYNAMIC UNCONSCIOUS, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHIATRY, & PSYCHOLOGY 9.2, PROJECT MUSE]
The answer constitutes the third of Freud's propositions about the unconscious: unconscious mental ideas are prevented from reaching consciousness by the force of repression. It is one of the cornerstone hypotheses of psychoanalytic theory that a censorship mechanism operates on the boundary between the unconscious and the preconscious/conscious. This mechanism acts to prevent unconscious mental entities whose contents are either painful or otherwise unacceptable to the person from entering consciousness. Once repressed, these mental entities remain in the unconscious where their continuing causal activity may lead to various degrees of psychopathology. Repression is an active force in the mind, one that provides the unconscious of psychoanalytic theory with its dynamic flavor: unconscious ideas are consciously inaccessible because they are actively prevented from reaching consciousness.

THEORIES OF REPRESSION ARE WRONG OBRIEN & JUREIDINI, 2OO2 [GERARD & JON, SENIOR LECTURER IN THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE & PHD (FLINDERS) IS A CHILD PSYCHIATRIST WHO HAS COMPLETED A DOCTORATE IN PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, DISPENSING WITH THE DYNAMIC UNCONSCIOUS, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHIATRY, & PSYCHOLOGY 9.2, PROJECT MUSE]
One of the important characteristics of the dynamic unconscious is that it is presumed to contain fully formed repressed memories. There is no doubt that we can be cued to produce rich and vivid memories that we had forgotten and would not have been able to produce spontaneously. However, this observation does not imply that the memories were operating within the dynamic unconscious until retrieved to consciousness. There are other ways in which unreported memories might be active in mental life. Aspects of the memory could be functioning at a subpersonal level to influence the reconstruction of other memories and/or motivations,
beliefs, and desires. You might have witnessed a primal scene, but not been able to produce any autobiographical memory of the event. Nevertheless, you might have retained the capacity to remember that scene given sufficient specific cuing. In the absence of that cuing, the "repressed memory" might still have an impact on you at a subpersonal level. Let us oversimplify and assume that the three essential elements of the "memory" are parent, sex, and fear. All three of these elements will occur frequently throughout your life and therefore the nodes associated with them will develop a rich pattern of associations with other nodes. As a result, stimulation of any one of the three nodes will not result in a noticeable response from either of the other two. However, the simultaneous stimulation of parent and sex will be a less frequent event that might still elicit fear without any conscious memory occurring and more importantly without any unconscious event implicating personal level memory representations. A memory might be available to conscious awareness but be more or less systematically avoided. For example people report that they "cannot imagine their parents having sex." An equally plausible explanation would be that they can imagine their parents having sex, but do not want to. Whenever encouraged to do so, there will be an emotional response to the material that begins to emerge, a response that occurs much more rapidly than we can render anything into words. If the emotional response is powerful, it might push any images out of mind before they can be reported on. Such an experience might very well be reported by the subject as a cannot rather than a will not experience. The memory might be present and readily available to consciousness but not remarked upon because its importance is not recognized. The cases of both Miss Lucy R. and Katharina, from Breuer and Freud's Studies in Hysteria (1955), are consistent with the avoidance or minimization of the importance of memories rather than their consignment to unconsciousness. Freud was struck by Lucy's claim that the knowledge that she loved her employer, which he had apparently uncovered in his brief treatment and which had helped her to make sense of her predicament, was something that she had in fact known all along. Freud asked her why, if she knew, she did not tell him. Lucy replied, "I didn't knowor rather, I didn't want to know. I wanted to drive it out of my head and not think of it again; and I believe latterly that I have succeeded" (1955, 117)

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AFF: NO UNCONSCIOUS & ANTHRO TURN

THE DYNAMIC UNCONSCIOUS MODEL IS FACTUALLY INACCURATE AND CANNOT EXPLAIN PSYCHIC PROCESSESAND ITS ANTHROPOCENTRIC WOODY, PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, 2002 [MELVIN, DISPENSING WITH THE DYNAMIC CONSCIOUS, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHIATRY, & PSYCHOLOGY 9.2 (2002) 155-157, PROJECT MUSE]
O'Brien and Jureidini rightly focus attention on the limitations of that conception and argue that it is time to dispense with the resultant conception of the unconscious. Of course, scientists often give narrower, technical meanings to ordinary words like matter and space, but in the midst of all the recently revived psychological and philosophical debates about the nature and existence of consciousness, the persistence of Freud's way of distinguishing the two can only breed confusion. Attempts to shore up or defend the dynamic unconscious of psychoanalytic theory by appeal to discussions of unconscious rules and processes in cognitive psychology attests to the potential for confusion thus spawned. In an early issue of this journal, James Phillips and I charted the differences between the neurophysiologic, cognitive, and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious (1995). Like O'Brien and Jureidini, we concluded that

FREUD'S THEORY OF UNCONSCIOUS mental processes depends upon an extremely narrow conception of consciousness.

arguing that the two are incompatible. Elsewhere, I have argued that

the evidence of a cognitive unconscious does not support the postulation of a dynamic unconscious. O'Brien and Jureidini go further in the Freudian unconscious is a hermeneutic myth, the result of a misunderstanding of the nature of interpretation (2003). Because I am in substantial agreement with them and already on record with arguments convergent with theirs on both these fronts, I will focus here on the source of confusion

in the dynamic conception of consciousness and on their illuminating exploration of its limitations. Toward the end of his 1915 essay, "The Unconscious," Freud explains that the difference between conscious and unconscious thought hinges on the role of language: What we could permissibly call the conscious idea of the object can now be split up into the idea of the word (verbal idea) and the idea of the thing (concrete idea) . . . It strikes us all at once that now we know what is the difference between a conscious and an unconscious idea. The two are not, as we supposed, different records of the same content situate in different parts of the mind, nor yet different functional states of cathexis in the same part; but the conscious idea comprises the concrete idea plus the verbal idea corresponding to it, whilst the unconscious idea is that of the thing alone. . . . Now too, we are in a position to state precisely what it is that repression denies to the rejected idea in the transference neurosesnamely, translation of the idea into words which are to remain attached to the object. The idea which is not put into words or the mental act which has not received hyper-cathexis then remains in the unconscious in a state of repression. (pp. 201-202)

This restriction of consciousness to verbal thought processes is not simply an innocent stipulative definition. It has perniciously misleading implications. For one thing, as Antonio Damasio points out in The Feeling of What Happens, it means that all other animals are unconscious for want of any language. Damasio recalls that when he asked what produces consciousness while he was a medical student, [End Page 155]
Curiously, I always got the same answer; language did it. I was told that creatures without language were limited to their uncognizant existence but not we fortunate humans because language made us know . . . The answer sounded too easy, far too simple for something which I then imagined unconquerably complex, and also quite implausible, given what I saw when I went to the zoo. (Damasio 1999, 107) As Damasio notes,

the trouble with explaining consciousness as a function of language is not just that it denies awareness of experience to all other animals, thus perpetuating the Cartesian view of animals as automatons, but that for all its complexities, language is far too simple to encompass the full complex range of conscious experience. O'Brien and Jureidini do well to highlight how much of our conscious experience never finds linguistic expression, indeed, how much experience seems to confound our powers of verbalization. Well before Freud's work on the

interpretation of dreams, William James had called attention to this discrepancy in the Chapter on "The Stream of Thought" in his Principles of Psychology that originally appeared as an article on "Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology" in Mind in 1884: Here again, language works against our perception of the truth. We name our thoughts simply, each after its thing, as if each knew its own thing and nothing else. What each really knows is clearly the thing it is named for, with dimly perhaps a thousand other things. It ought to be named after all of them, but it never is. (James 1890, 241)

To make consciousness dependent upon language entails a drastic simplification of the stream of thought that automatically consigns much of the complexity and subtle richness of experience to the domain of the unconscious. This is especially true of the life of feeling, where our verbal resources seem especially inadequate and we most often find ourselves at a loss for words. We have far richer language for distinguishing the varieties of mosses and moths than the subtleties of
human emotions. Indeed, James complains that classical empiricism dissolved the connective tissue and musculature of experience into a mosaic of simple ideas or impressions because it failed to recognize the existence of feelings of tendency and relation and the vague halo or fringe that surrounds and accompanies every moment of experience, "the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead" (255). James warns that if we attend only to the things we can name, we will end by invoking occult intellectual processes to supply the connections we have thereby ignored, but which were nonetheless present in experience all along.

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* AFF AT: TRAVERSING THE FANTASY *

TRAVERSING THE FANTASY FAILSIT REPLICATES THE DOMINANT IDEOLOGY, HYSTERICALLY TELLING US IF WE JUST READ THE LETTER OF THE LAW AGAINST ITSELF ONE MORE TIME WE CAN ESCAPE THAT LAW; BUT THIS IS ITS OWN FANTASY, AND CANNOT HOPE TO ACHIEVE REVOLUTION, ONLY CONTINUOUS FAILURE
NICOL, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE AT CHICHESTER, 1999 [BRIAN, AS IF: TRAVERSING THE FANTASY, PARAGRAPH, V24 I2, P. ELECTRONIC]
Zizek affirms, in other words, that hysteria is both `normal' and valuable. Here we return to the question of his repetitiveness. The hysterical nature of subjectivity is something which is implied more often than it is stated in Zizek, as time and again he highlights the same process at work in culture and philosophy which exemplifies the failure of the symbolic to account adequately for the subject and its implications. His discussion of The Silence of the Lambs, for example, is followed by a demonstration that Magritte's paintings are all variations on the same process-moments when the disturbing nothingness of the real intrudes into the otherwise stable symbolic universe: `reality is never given in its totality; there is always a void gaping in its midst, filled out by monstrous apparitions' (Zizek, 1994, 57). He concludes: `It would be possible for us to continue ad infinitum with the variations generated by [this] elementary matrix' (Zizek, 1994, 57). No reader familiar with Zizek's work would doubt this statement for a minute. For the exposure of the `elementary matrix' upon which all culture and thought is founded is the interpretative strategy at the very core of Zizek's work. But the procedure is in fact so ubiquitous that it seems to exceed the uses to which it is put, taking its place in the foreground where the object of study should be, just as when we notice the extraordinary death's head in The Ambassadors (which proves beyond doubt, of course, that Holbein read The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis) we cannot look at it in the same way again. The result is that Zizek's interpretative methodology has a rhetoric all of its own. Its value is that it powerfully defamiliarizes our sense of social reality, suggesting that there is something fundamentally absurd and static about our position in society. But it also implies that culture is doomed to repeat the same processes endlessly, because it is founded upon a structure which is transcendent and unalterable. And this has serious implications for Zizek's Marxist critique of political economy, which by definition argues for change. Zizek occupies a rather paradoxical position for a Marxist. His aim to 're-hystericize' the subject, to return it to its questioning function, has an obvious correlation with his stated commitment to emancipation (in his prefaces to The Zizek Reader and The Ticklish Subject). But where Marxist `ideology critique' is, as a rule, geared towards demystifying ideology in order to achieve some kind of greater awareness which can contribute to social change, so deeply rooted in the psychic structure is Zizek's idea of the fantasy that there can be no change: we cannot deal in any other way with the void at the heart of ourselves. Ideology, in other words, is not just inevitable, but valuable, because without it we would lapse into neurosis or even psychosis. The implication of his analysis of contemporary culture is that exposing the fantasies which glue our being together might enable us to traverse them. But this is problematic, and not only because it brings us up against the familiar difficulty with psychoanalytic attempts to transpose the personal onto the collective -who would be the equivalent of the analyst? Zizek's notion of the ideological fantasy does not suggest it is a pathological symptom in the psyche of the subject: it is perfectly normal. Time and again he explains how our experience of social reality depends upon `a certain as if': `we act as if we believe in the almightiness of bureaucracy, as if the President incarnates the Will of the People, as if the Party expresses the objective interest of the working class'. But he also reminds us that if we do not act in this way `the very texture of the social field disintegrates' (Zizek, 1989, 36) -and this is an outcome of a quite different order to political revolution. Perhaps there is a note of anxiety in all the compulsive energy of Zizek's project: he brilliantly unmasks the workings of ideology as if we can overthrow them, but is only too aware that this is impossible. Alternatively, this might well be the source of a certain critical j o u i s s a n c e we can detect in his continual affirmation of the unassailable quality of the big Other. In this respect Zizek himself shifts between the hysterical and the perverse positions in his theory: exposing the fragile status of the big Other by questioning it, while also investing in its ultimate status as the Law. Zizek's very method of exposing the ideological mechanism, in other words, reinforces its inevitability. The paradox bears a strong similarity to Baudrillard's critique of Marxism in The Mirror of Production, that it depends upon precisely the same ideology (the idea of self-production) as the late-capitalist political economy it claims to deconstruct.16 Zizek's ubiquitous interpretative mechanism functions as the mirror of the transcendent processes he identifies at the heart of culture. We might even see its status in Zizek's work as the equivalent of the fundamental fantasy at the core of the individual, supporting his very identity as a theorist. Like Clarice Starling, who thinks she need only rescue one more victim and the lambs will stop crying, it is as if Zizek imagines he need give us just one more example of the traumatic encounter with the real and the dominance of the Big Other will be exposed and overthrown.17 This, as Hannibal Lecter might say, is no more than a fantasy.

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AFF AT: ZIZEKS REJECTION OF DEMOCRACY

ZIZEKS SUGGESTION OF ABOLISHING LIBERAL DEMOCRACY HAS BEEN TRIED BEFORE AND ENDED IN A FASICT REGIME. ERNESTO LACLAU, PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERISTY OF ESSEX, CONSTRUCTING UNIVERSALITY, P.291-2

2000, CONINGENCY, HEGEMONY, UIVERSALITY,

The reader must excuse me for smiling at the naive self-complacence this r-r-revolutionary passage reflects. For if Butler and I are not envisaging 'the possibility of a thoroughly different economico-political regime', ZiZek is not doing so either. In his previous essay Zizek had told us that he wanted to overthrow capitalism; now we are served notice that he also wants to do away with liberal democratic regimes - to be replaced, it is true, by a thoroughly different regime which he does not have the courtesy of letting us know anything about. One can only guess. Now, apart from capitalist society and the parallelograms of Mr Owen, Zizek does actually know a third type of sociopolitical arrangement: the Communist bureaucratic regimes of Eastern Europe under which he lived. Is that what he has in mind? Does he want to replace liberal democracy by a one-party political system, to undermine the division of powers, to impose the censorship of the press? Zizek belongs to a liberal party in Slovenia, and was its presidential candidate in the first elections after the end of communism. Did he tell the Slovenian voters that his aim was to abolish liberal democracy - a regime which was slowly and painfully established after protracted liberalization campaigns in the 1980s, in which ZiZek himself was very active? And if what he has in mind is something entirely different, he has the elementary intellectual and political duty to let us know what it is. Hitler and Mussolini also abolished liberal democratic political regimes and replaced them by 'thoroughly different' ones. Only if that explanation is made available will we be able to start talking politics, and abandon the theological terrain. Before that, I cannot even know what Zizek is talking about - and the more this exchange progresses, the more suspicious either. All this brings me dose to the conclusion - which was by no means evident to me when we started this dialogue - that Zizek's thought is not organized around a truly political reflection but is, rather, a psychoanalytic discourse which draws its examples from the politico-ideological field. In that sense, I agree with Butler when she asserts, apropos of Zizek, that in his discourse [t]he examples function in a mode of allegory that presumes the separability of the illustrative example from the content It seeks to illuminate' (]B, p, 157). It is certainly true that in the process of doing so Zizek makes a myriad of insightful remarks which throw light on the structuration of the politico-ideological field - and, a fortiori, show the fruitfulness of psychoanalysis for political thought - but this is a far cry from the elaboration of a political perspective which, if it is truly one, has to be centered in a strategic reflection. I can discuss politics with Butler because she talks about the real world, about strategic problems people encounter in their actual struggles, but with Zizek it is not possible even to start to do so. The only thing one gets from him are injunctions to overthrow capitalism or to abolish liberal democracy, which have no meaning at all. Furthermore, his way of dealing with Marxist categories consists in inscribing them in a semi-metaphysical horizon which, if it were accepted - a rather unlikely event - woul9-l\.t ut the agenda of the Left back fifty years. Let me give a few examples . ..,)
ZIZEKS ALTERNATIVE OF OVERTHROWING DEMOCRACY AND CAPITALISM RESULTS IN POLITICAL QUIETISM AND STERILITY ERNESTO LACLAU, PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERISTY OF ESSEX, CONSTRUCTING UNIVERSALITY, P.291-2

2000, CONTINGENCY, HEGEMONY, UIVERSALITY,

The imagery around the base/superstructure metaphor decisively shapes Zizek's vision of political alternatives. Thus he distinguishes between struggles to change the system and struggles within the system. I do not think that this distinction, posed in those terms, is a valid one. The crucial question is: how systematic is the system? If we conceive this systematicity as the result of endogenous laws of development - as in the case of the retroactive reversal of contingency into necessity - the only alternatives are either that those laws lead, through their operation, to the self-destruction of the system of the us remember the debate, in the Second International, on the mechanic collapse of the system) or to the system's destruction from outside. IT, on the contrary, systematicity is seen as a hegemonic' construction, historical change is conceivable as a displacement in the relations between elements - some internal and some external to what the system had been. Questions such as the following may be asked: How is it possible to maintain a market economy which is compatible with a high degree of social control of the productive process? 'What restructuration of the liberal democratic institutions is necessary so that democratic control becomes effective, and does not degenerate into regulation by an all-powerful bureaucracy? How should democratization be conceived so that it makes possible global political effects which are, however; compatible with the social and cultural pluralism existing in a given society? These questions are thinkable within the Gramscian strategy of a war of position, while in Zizek's suggestion of a direct struggle for overthrowing capitalism and abolishing liberal democracy, I can see only a prescription for political quietism and sterility.

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AFF: ALT

VIOLENCE

THE ACT LEAVES THE VIOLENCE OF THE CURRENT STRUCTURE INTACT, ONLY LEGITIMIZING IT UNDER A NEW NAME. ROBINSON AND TORMEY 2004 [ANDREW AND SIMON, UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM ZIZEK IS NOT A RADICAL, ELEVEN, HOMEPAGE.NTLWORLD.COM/SIMON.TORMEY/ARTICLES/ZIZEKNOTRADICAL.PDF]
The answer is that Zizek does not see impossibility as a barrier to action. Rather, he sees it as a sign of the purity and authenticity of a particular action, i.e. of what he identifies as an authentic Act. For Zizek, an authentic, radical Act necessarily comes from the repressed Real, and involves the return of this repressed impossibility. It necessarily, therefore, surprises not only conformist observers, but the actor; it surprises/transforms the agent itself.37 The Act therefore opens a redemptive dimension via a gesture of sublimation, of erasing the traces of ones past and beginning again from a zero-point.38 Such an Act is for Zizek a transcendental necessity for subjective action, a quasi-transcendental unhistorical condition of possibility and impossibility of historicisation.39 The Act, which for Zizek is the sole criterion of whether ones politics are radical, is a structural or formal category, defined (in principle) internally and radically separated from anything which does not meet its criteria. All alternatives - even those which share Zizeks hostility to liberal capitalism, and including some which fit particular formal requirements of an Act - which fall short of the criteria of full Acts are for Zizek necessarily complicit in capitalism. At best, they are hysterical false acts, providing a pseudo-radical pseudoresistance which actually sustains capitalism by contributing to its phantasmic supplement.40 Acts have several formal criteria which Zizek formulates differently on different occasions. Firstly, someone who Acts must identify with the symptom, thereby revealing a repressed Truth and bringing the Real to the surface. Secondly, they must suspend the existing symbolic system, including its ethics, politics, and systems of meaning and knowledge;41 an Act is nihilistic and extra-, even anti-, ethical (at least as regards any conception of the good). Since Zizek denies the existence of radical social, cultural or psychological difference, he believes that everyone is equally trapped by the dominant symbolic system, so any break with it must come from beyond meaning and positive ethics. The commitment an Act generates must be dogmatic; it cannot be refuted by any argumentation and is indifferent to the truth-status of the Event it refers to.42 An Act has its own inherent normativity, refusing all external standards;43 an Act (or Decision) is circular and tautological,44 based on a

It is a response to an ethical injunction beyond ordinary ethical norms, so that although what I am about to do will have catastrophic consequences for my well-being and for the well-being of my nearest and dearest, none the less I simply have to do it, because of the inexorable ethical injunction.47 The Act resolves all problems in a single, all-encompassing Terror which bypasses particularities and violently stops the mad dance of shifting identities, operating instead to ground a new political
shibboleth,45 and incomprehensible except from the inside.46

universality by opting for the impossible, with no taboos, no a priori norms... respect for which would prevent us from resignifying terror, the ruthless exercise of power, the spirit of sacrifice.48 An Act is symbolic death,49 creatio ex nihilo and self-grounded.50 It is the outcome of an ethics grounded

in reference to the traumatic Real which resists symbolisation, i.e. to an injunction which cannot be grounded in ontology,51 a selfreferential abyss,52 an excessive gesture irreducible to human considerations and necessarily arbitrary.53 The suspension of ethical,
epistemological and political standards is not a necessary consequence of a Zizekian Act - it is a defining feature. It is necessary so a new system can be built from nothing,54 and anything short of a full Act remains on enemy terrain.55 The choice of the term suspension is revealing, for although in Zizeks account the

surface structure of the social system is changed during such a suspension, the deep structure of the social system as set out in Lacanian theory is not (and cannot be) changed in the slightest. So an Act shatters capitalism, but it leaves intact many of its most objectionable features, including social exclusion,56 violence,57 naturalisation,58 reification and myths,59 all of which are for Zizek primordial, ever-present and necessary in any society. Further, since the Act involves submission to a Cause and a Leader, it cannot destroy the authoritarian structure of capitalism: often, one does need a leader in order to be able to do the impossible... subordination to [the leader] is the highest act of freedom.60 So, while an Act may destroy the specific articulations of oppression within the present system (e.g. the identification of the Real with illegal immigrants), it necessarily produces a system which is equally oppressive. Thirdly, an Act involves going through symbolic destitution. Through an Act, the
subject accepts the void of his [sic] nonexistence.61 It is the anti-ideological gesture par excellence by means of which I renounce the hidden treasure within myself and fully admit my dependence on the externality of symbolic apparatuses - that is, fully assume the fact that my self-experience of a subject who was already there prior to the external process of interpellation is a retrospective misrecognition brought about by the process of interpellation.62 Zizek uses an example from the film The Usual Suspects where the hero shoots his family dead to give him a pretext for chasing the gang who held them hostage. This is the crazy, impossible choice of in a way shooting at himself, at that which is most precious to himself, through which the subject gains a space of free decision by cutting himself loose from the precious object through whose possession the enemy kept him

The concept of the Act is therefore palingenetic: one destroys ones former self to go through a moment of rebirth, which, however, is not connected to any particular programme of change. Rather, it is founded on a desire for Nothingness.64 For Zizek the only legitimation of revolution is negative, the will to break with the Past, and revolutionaries should not have positive conceptions of an alternative to be realised.65 Ruthlessness is characteristic of the Act: Zizek hates soft-heartedness because it blurs the subjects pure ethical stance,66 and calls for an Act impervious to any call of the Other.67 The Act thus reproduces
in check, and clears the terrain for a new beginning.63 Through an Act, one negates ones position in the social system and destroys the person one was before.

in the socio-political field the Lacanian concept of traversing the fantasy. Traversing the fantasy involves accepting that there is no way one can be satisfied, and therefore a full acceptance of the pain ... as inherent to the excess of pleasure which is jouissance, as well as a rejection of every conception of radical difference.68 It means, contra Nietzsche, an acceptance of the fact that there is no secret treasure in me,69 and a transition from being the nothing we are today to being a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing paradoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack.70 It involves being reduced to a zero-point or ultimate level similar to that seen in the most broken concentrationcamp inmates,71 so the role of analysis is to throw out the baby... in order to confront the patient with his dirty bathwater,72

inducing, not an improvement, but a transition from Bad to Worse, which is inherently terroristic.73 It is also not freedom in the usual sense, but prostration before the call of the truth-event,74 something violently imposed on me from the Outside through a traumatic encounter that shatters the very foundation of
my being.75 In true Orwellian fashion, Zizek claims that in the Act, freedom equals slavery; the Act involves the highest freedom and also the utmost passivity with a reduction to a lifeless automaton who blindly performs its gestures.76 So the Act is a rebirth - but a rebirth as what? The parallel with Lacans concept of traversing the fantasy is crucial, because, for Lacan, there is no escape from the symbolic order or the Law of the Master. We are trapped in the existing world, complete with its dislocation, lack, alienation and antagonism, and no transcendence can overcome the deep structure of this world, which is fixed at the level of subject-formation;

the most we can hope for is to go from incapable neurosis to mere alienated subjectivity. In Zizeks politics, therefore, a fundamental social transformation is impossible. After the break initiated by an Act, a system similar to the present one is restored; the subject undergoes identification with a Cause,77 leading to a new proper symbolic Prohibition revitalised by the process of
rebirth,78 enabling one effectively to realize the necessary pragmatic measures,79 which may be the same ones as today, e.g. structural adjustment policies.80 It is possible to start a new life by replacing one symbolic fiction with another.81 As a Lacanian, Zizek is opposed to any idea of realising utopian fullness. Any change in the basic structure of existence, whereby one may overcome dislocation and disorientation, is out of the

question. However, he also rejects practical solutions to problems as a mere displacement.82 So an Act neither solves concrete problems nor achieves drastic improvements; it merely removes blockages to existing modes of thought and action. It transforms the constellation which generates social symptoms,83 shifting exclusion from one group to another, but it does not achieve either drastic or moderate concrete changes. It means that we accept the vicious circle of revolving around the object [the Real] and find jouissance in it, renouncing the myth that jouissance is amassed somewhere else.84 It also offers those who take part in it a dimension of Otherness, that moment when the absolute appears in all its fragility, a brief apparition of a future utopian Otherness to which every authentic revolutionary stance should cling.85 This absolute, however, can only be glimpsed. The leader, Act and Cause must be betrayed so the social order can be refounded. The leader, or mediator, must erase himself [sic] from the picture,86 retreating to the horizon of the social to haunt history as spectre or phantasy.87 Every Great Man must be betrayed so he can assume his fame and thereby become compatible with the status quo;88 once one glimpses the sublime Universal, therefore, one must commit suicide - as Zizek claims the Bolshevik Party did, via the Stalinist purges (When the Party Commits Suicide).

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AFF: ALT

TOTALITARIANISM

THE ALTERNATIVE IS NOT AT ALL SUBVERSIVE, THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER PRODUCED IS CONSERVATIVE TOTALITARIANISM. ROBINSON AND TORMEY 2004 [ANDREW AND SIMON, UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM ZIZEK IS NOT RADICAL, ELEVEN, HOMEPAGE.NTLWORLD.COM/SIMON.TORMEY/ARTICLES/ZIZEKNOTRADICAL.PDF]
A

Furthermore, despite Zizeks emphasis on politics, his discussion of the Act remains resolutely individualist - as befits its clinical origins. Zizeks examples of Acts are nearly all isolated actions by individuals, such as Mary Kay Letourneaus defiance of juridical pressure to end a relationship with a youth,89 a soldier in Full Metal Jacket killing his drill sergeant and himself,90 and the acts of Stalinist bureaucrats who rewrote history knowing they would later be purged.91 This is problematic as a basis for understanding previous social transformations, and even more so as a recommendation for the future. The new subject Zizek envisages is an authoritarian leader, someone capable of the inherently terroristic action of redefining the rules of the game.92 This is a conservative, if not reactionary, position. As Donald Rooums cartoon character Wildcat so astutely puts it, I dont just want freedom from the capitalists. I also want freedom from people fit to take over.93 Regarding social structures, furthermore, Zizek consistently prefers overconformity to resistance. For him, disidentification with ones ideologically-defined role is not subversive; rather, an ideological edifice can be undermined by a too-literal identification.94 Escapism and ideas of an autonomous self are identical with ideology because they make intolerable conditions liveable;95 even petty resistance is a condition of possibility of the system,96 a supplement which sustains it. To be free of the present, one should renounce the transgressive fantasmic supplement that attaches us to it,97 and attach oneself instead to the public discourse which power officially promotes.98 How does Zizek distinguish his leftist politics from rightist alternatives which would equally meet the formal criteria of an Act? He introduces the idea of the false Act (or rightist suspension of the ethical) to deal with this problem. False acts, such as the Nazi seizure of power and the bombing of Afghanistan, have the formal structure of an Act, but are false because they involve impotent acting-out against a pseudo-enemy, and therefore do not traverse the actual social fantasy.99 Their function, rather, is to preserve the system through the actingout. 100 One can tell a true Act from a false Act by assessing whether an act is truly negative, i.e. negates all prior standards,101 and by whether it emerges from the actual void in a situation,102 which is always a single touchy nodal point which decides where one truly stands.103 This is problematic because Zizek here introduces external criteria while elsewhere stating that the Act must negate all such criteria. Furthermore, if the authenticity of an Act is dependent on an empirical assessment of where the actual social void is, then Zizeks account of the Act as the assertion of a Truth over and against the facts is undermined. Zizeks account of the Act provides a general framework for political assessments. Before assessing its validity, however, we need to examine how the concept operates when applied to a concrete political topic.

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AFF: ALT KILLS THE LEFT

THE ALTERNATIVE LEAVES THE LEFT POLITICALLY DISENABLED BY EXCLUDING MOST POLITICAL STRATEGIES, REAL CHANGE COMES FROM A PRAGMATIC POLITICS OF RESISTANCE ROBINSON AND TORMEY 2004 [ANDREW AND SIMON, UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM ZIZEK IS NOT RADICAL, ELEVEN, HOMEPAGE.NTLWORLD.COM/SIMON.TORMEY/ARTICLES/ZIZEKNOTRADICAL.PDF]
A

The significance of Zizeks work is ambiguous. In questioning the movement of left radical theory towards identity politics, multiculturalism and radical democracy, he reminds readers of the continued importance of the global economy and the extreme disparities of wealth and power which characterise capitalist globalisation. He has sought to think the impossible and reopen the debate in radical theory about social transformation. His return to Lenin is a potentially interesting development, given Lenins importance in debates on organisation, strategy and the wars of position and of movement which radical theory has regrettably eschewed in favour of abstract socio-cultural critique. He also offers a glimpse of the dilemmas and dangers of power, violence, transformism and betrayal which await those who take radical political action. Read in a certain way, Zizek points radical theory back towards radical political practice - towards an engagement with political issues, radical political movements and the transformation of social relations, an engagement it should never have lost in the first place. As useful as such a reading is, this is not the Zizek who emerges on closer examination. Regarding where radicals - especially active radicals - should proceed from here and now, Zizeks work offers little to celebrate. The relevance of a politics based on formal structural categories instead of lived historical processes, which measures radicalism, not by concrete achievements, but by how abruptly one rejects the existing symbolic order, is questionable. The concept of the Act is metaphysical, not political, and it leads to a rejection of most forms of resistance. For Zizek, objections to official ideologies which stop short of an Act are the very form of ideology,141 and the gap between complaint and Acts is insurmountable.142 So protest politics fits the existing power relations and carnivals are a false transgression which stabilizes the power edifice.143 This position misreads past revolutionary movements - including the decades-long revolutionary process in Russia - and offers nothing to the development of a left strategy to challenge the existing system. All Zizek establishes, therefore, is a radical break between his own theory and any effective left politics. The concept of the Act is a recipe for irrelevance for creating a desert around oneself while sitting in judgement on actual political movements which always fall short of ones ideal criteria. Zizek is right to advocate a transformative stance, but wrong to posit this as a radical break constituted ex nihilo. Far from being the disavowed supplement of capitalism, the space for thinking the not-real which is opened by imaginaries and petty resistances is a prerequisite to building a more active resistance and ultimately, a substantial social transformation. In practice, political revolutions emerge through the radicalisation of existing demands and resistances - not as pure Acts occurring out of nothing. Even when they are incomprehensible from the standpoint of normal, conformist bystanders, they are a product of the development of subterranean resistances and counterhegemonies among subaltern groups. As Jim Scott argues, when discontent among the subaltern strata generates moments of madness, insurrections and revolutions, it does so as an extension of, and in continuity with, existing hidden transcripts, dissenting imaginaries and petty resistances. As Scotts evidence shows, resistance requires an experimental spirit and a capacity to test and exploit all the loopholes, ambiguities, silences and lapses available... [and] setting a course for the very perimeter of what the authorities are obliged to permit or unable to prevent.144 Such petty resistance can pass over into more general insurrections. When prisoners at a Stalinist camp, expected to deliberately lose a race against their guards, spoiled the performance with a pantomime of excess effort, a small political victory had real political consequences, producing a flurry of activity.145 Filipino peasant uprisings often acted out an ideology developed through a subverted version of passion plays,146 and European carnivals often passed over into insurrection.147 Social change does not come from nothing; it requires the pre-existence of a counterculture involving nonconformist ideas and practices. You have to know how the world isnt in order to change it.148 As Gramsci puts it, before coming into existence a new society must be ideally active in the minds of those struggling for change.149 The history of resistance gives little reason to support Zizeks politics of the Act. The ability to Act in the manner described by Zizek is largely absent from the subaltern strata. Mary Kay Letourneau (let us recall) did not transform society; rather, her Act was repressed and she was jailed. In another case discussed by Zizek, a group of Siberian miners is said to accomplish an Act - by getting massacred.150 Since Acts are not socially effective, they cannot help the worst-off, let alone transform society. Zizeks assumption of the effectiveness of Acts rests on a confusion between individual and social levels of analysis. Vaneigem eerily foresees Zizeks Act when he argues against active nihilism. In a gloomy bar where everyone is bored to death, a drunken young man breaks his glass, then picks up a bottle and smashes it against the wall. Nobody gets excited; the disappointed young man lets himself be thrown out... Nobody responded to the sign which he thought was explicit. He remained alone, like the hooligan who burns down a church or kills a policeman, at one with himself, but condemned to exile for as long as other people remain exiled from their existence. He has not escaped from the magnetic field of isolation; he is suspended in a zone of zero gravity.151 The transition from this wasteland of the suicide and the solitary killer to revolutionary politics requires the repetition of negation in a different register,152 connected to a positive project to change the world and relying on the imaginaries Zizek denounces, the carnival spirit and the ability to dream.153

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AFF: NO ALTMISUNDERSTANDS PROBLEMS

THE TOTALIZING NATURE OF LACANIAN POLITICS CREATES A TENDENCY TO MISCHARACTERIZE PROBLEMS, AND CLOSES THE DOOR ON ALTERNATIVE STRATEGIES. ROBINSON, PHD IN POLITICAL THEORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM, 2005. [ANDREW, THE POLITICAL THEORY OF CONSTITUTIVE LACK: A CRITIQUE THEORY & EVENT, 8:1]
Lacanian theory, like Barthesian myths, involves a prior idea of a structural matrix which is not open to change in the light of the instances to which it is applied. Zizek writes of a 'pre-ontological dimension which precedes and eludes the construction of reality'42, while Laclau suggests there is a formal structure of any chain of equivalences which necessitates the logic of hegemony43. Specific analyses are referred back to this underlying structure as its necessary expressions, without apparently being able to alter it; for instance, 'those who triggered the process of democratization in eastern Europe... are not those who today enjoy its fruits, not because of a simple usurpation... but because of a deeper structural logic'44. In most instances, the mythical operation of the idea of "constitutive lack" is implicit, revealed only by a rhetoric of denunciation. For instance, Mouffe accuses liberalism of an 'incapacity... to grasp... the irreducible character of antagonism'45, while Zizek claims that a 'dimension' is 'lost' in Butler's work because of her failure to conceive of "trouble" as constitutive of "gender"46. This language of "denial" which is invoked to silence critics is a clear example of Barthes's "order not to think": one is not to think about the idea of "constitutive lack", one is simply to "accept" it, under pain of invalidation. If someone else disagrees, s/he can simply be told that there is something crucial missing from her/his theory. Indeed, critics are as likely to be accused of being "dangerous" as to be accused of being wrong. One of the functions of myth is to cut out what Trevor Pateman terms the "middle level" of analytical concepts, establishing a shortcircuit between high-level generalizations and ultra-specific (pseudo-)concrete instances. In Barthes's classic case of an image of a black soldier saluting the French flag, this individual action is implicitly connected to highly abstract concepts such as nationalism, without the mediation of the particularities of his situation. (These particularities, if revealed, could undermine the myth. Perhaps he enlisted for financial reasons, or due to threats of violence). Thus, while myths provide an analysis of sorts, their basic operation is anti-analytical: the analytical schema is fixed in advance, and the relationship between this schema and the instances it organizes is hierarchically ordered to the exclusive advantage of the former. This is precisely what happens in Lacanian analyses of specific political and cultural phenomena. Zizek specifically advocates 'sweeping generalisations' and short-cuts between specific instances and high-level abstractions, evading the "middle level". 'The correct dialectical procedure... can be best described as a direct jump from the singular to the universal, bypassing the mid-level of particularity'. He wants a 'direct jump from the singular to the universal', without reference to particular contexts47. He also has a concept of a 'notion' which has a reality above and beyond any referent, so that, if reality does not fit it, 'so much the worse for reality'48. The failure to see what is really going on means that one sees more, not less, because libidinal perception is not impeded by annoying facts49. Zizek insists on the necessity of the gesture of externally projecting a conception of an essence onto phenomena50, even affirming its necessity in the same case (anti-Semitism) in which Reich denounces its absurdity51. This amounts to an endorsement of myths in the Barthesian sense, as well as demonstrating the "dialectical" genius of the likes of Kelvin McKenzie. Lacanian analysis consists mainly of an exercise in projection. As a result, Lacanian "explanations" often look more propagandistic or pedagogical than explanatory. A particular case is dealt with only in order to, and to the extent that it can, confirm the alreadyformulated structural theory. Judith Butler criticizes Zizeks method on the grounds that 'theory is applied to its examples', as if 'already true, prior to its exemplification'. 'The theory is articulated on its self-sufficiency, and then shifts register only for the pedagogical purpose of illustrating an already accomplished truth'. It is therefore 'a theoretical fetish that disavows the conditions of its own emergence'52. She alleges that Lacanian psychoanalysis 'becomes a theological project' and also 'a way to avoid the rather messy psychic and social entanglement' involved in studying specific cases53. Similarly, Dominick LaCapra objects to the idea of constitutive lack because specific 'losses cannot be adequately addressed when they are enveloped in an overly generalised discourse of absence... Conversely, absence at a "foundational" level cannot simply be derived from particular historical losses'54. Attacking 'the long story of conflating absence with loss that becomes constitutive instead of historical'55, he accuses several theorists of eliding the difference between absence and loss, with 'confusing and dubious results', including a 'tendency to avoid addressing historical problems, including losses, in sufficiently specific terms', and a tendency to 'enshroud, perhaps even to etherealise, them in a generalised discourse of absence'56. Daniel Bensad draws out the political consequences of the projection of absolutes into politics. 'The fetishism of the absolute event involves... a suppression of historical intelligibility, necessary to its depoliticization'. The space from which politics is evacuated 'becomes... a suitable place for abstractions, delusions and hypostases'. Instead of actual social forces, there are 'shadows and spectres'57.

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AFF: NO ALT(K) IS AHISTORICAL

NOT ONLY ARE LACANIAN THEORIES AHISTORICAL, THEY FORECLOSE THE POSSIBILITY OF ALTERNATIVES. ROBINSON, PHD IN POLITICAL THEORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM, 2005. [ANDREW, THE POLITICAL THEORY OF CONSTITUTIVE LACK: A CRITIQUE THEORY & EVENT, 8:1]
The reason Lacanians can claim to be "anti-essentialist" is that there is a radical rupture between the form and content of Lacanian theory. The "acceptance of contingency" constructed around the idea of "constitutive lack" is a closing, not an opening, gesture, and is itself "essentialist" and non-contingent. Many Lacanian claims are not at all contingent, but are posited as ahistorical absolutes. To take an instance from Mouffe's work, 'power and antagonism' are supposed to have an 'ineradicable character' so that 'any social objectivity is constituted through acts of power' and will show traces of exclusions76. One could hardly find a clearer example anywhere of a claim about a fixed basic structure of Being. One could also note again the frequency of words such as "all" and "always" in the Lacanian vocabulary. Ludwig Wittgenstein argues that 'if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions - namely the disjunction of all their common properties" - I should reply: Now you are only playing with words'77. Lacanian theory seems, indeed, to be treating disjunction as a basis for similarity, thus simply "playing with words". The "contingency" embraced in Lacanian theory is not an openness which exceeds specifiable positivities, but a positivity posing as negativity. The relationship between contingency and "constitutive lack" is like the relationship between Germans and "Germanness", or tables and "tableness", in the work of Barthes. One could speak, therefore, of a "lack-ness" or a "contingency-ness" or an "antagonism-ness" in Lacanian political theory, and of this theory as a claim to fullness with this reified "lack-ness" as one of the positive elements within the fullness. One sometimes finds direct instances of such mythical vocabulary, as for instance when Stavrakakis demands acknowledgement of 'event-ness and negativity'78. Indeed, it is an especially closed variety of fullness, with core ideas posited as unquestionable dogmas and the entire structure virtually immune to falsification. As Butler claims, the Real 'is never subject to the same logic of contingency that it secures'79. The fixed structure of Lacanian theory is strongly operative in resultant arguments, although it is concealed to some extent by an apparent reluctance on the part of Lacanian theorists to engage in metacommunicative dialogue about their theoretical claims. This allows a smoothly-flowing rhetoric within which they can subsume contemporary events and specific subjects of analysis. However, beneath this rhetoric, the essentialist basic structure and the myth of "constitutive lack" call the shots. One even finds at times an open reference to lack as an essence. For instance, Laclau and Mouffe refer to negativity and antagonism as foundational and grounding80, Newman refers to 'the emptiness at the heart of place' and comes close to admitting his own essentialism81, Stavrakakis refers to the Real as 'inherent in human experience'82 and Laclau admits 'privileging the moment of negativity'83. iek refers explicitly to a need for 'a positive notion of lack, a "generative" absence'84. Sometimes, Lacanians imply the existence of an element in human nature which necessitates conflict. Mouffe refers to 'an element of hostility among human beings' and denounces others for rejecting the idea that violence is inherent in human nature, and Newman cites Lacan's view that constitutive lack is 'almost natural'85. Most often, one finds the essentialism of "constitutive lack" concealed beneath a simple change of words. Instead of "essential", one might say "radical", "constitutive", "primordial", "fundamental", "basic" or "indivisible", and this allows an essentialism at the level of form to be combined with an anti-essentialism at the level of content. For instance, iek takes the term 'constitutive' to mean 'the story of everyone'86, i.e. more-or-less the same as a universal essence. One way in which Lacanian theorists differentiate themselves from "essentialism" is by reference to the idea of "constitutive lack" as negativity. For instance, Laclau claims that he does not pose his theory as a full awareness of objectivity because 'antagonism is the limit of all objectivity' and has no objective meaning of its own87. Such claims are misleading. They may apply to the arguments of (say) Derrida or Korzybski, but the syntax and grammar of Lacanian theory is not such as to permit such an opening. Constitutive lack appears in Lacanian rhetoric as an entity with a positive name, such as 'the Real', and instances of lacking are frequently nominalized or "explained" by reference to it. As Butler asks, assuming sociality and conceptualization to have a limit, 'why are we compelled to give a technical name to this limit, "the Real", and to make the further claim that the subject is constituted by this foreclosure? The use of technical nomenclature opens up more problems than it solves'. Indeed, it could even be a gesture of discursive control in its own right. 'Are we using the categories to understand the phenomena, or marshalling the phenomena to shore up the categories "in the name of the father"?'88. In any case, to say that the real resists symbolization is already to symbolize it89.

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* AFF AT: EVERYTHING SYMBOLIC *

( ): TURN/: MASKING A) THE SYMBOLIC DOES NOT EXHAUST THE POSSIBILITIES OF SUBJECTIVITYREAL PRACTICES ALSO SHAPE SUBJECTS, SUCH AS THE BOTH SUBTLE AND BRUTAL POWER RELATIONS THAT MAKE PRODUCE VIOLENCE
AGAINST WOMEN

FOUCAULT, CHAIR IN THE HISTORY OF SYSTEMS OF THOUGHT AT THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE, APRIL 1983 [MICHEL, ON THE GENEALOGY OF ETHICS: AN OVERVIEW OF WORK IN PROGRESS, ESSENTIAL WORKS OF FOUCAULT, 1954-1984, VOLUME ONE: ETHICS: SUBJECTIVITY AND TRUTH, ED. PAUL RABINOW, 277]
It seems to me, that all the so-called literature of the selfprivate diaries, narratives of the self, and so oncannot be understood unless it is put into the general and very rich framework of these practices of the self. People have been writing about themselves for two thousand years, but not in the same way. I have the impressionI may be wrongthat there is a certain tendency to present the relationship between writing and the narrative of the self as a phenomenon particular to European modernity. Now, I would not deny it is modern, but it was also one of the first uses of writing.

So it is not enough to say that the subject is constituted in a symbolic system. It is not just in the play of symbols that the subject is constituted. It is constituted in real practiceshistorically analyzable practices. There is a technology of the self which cuts across symbolic systems while using them.
ON THE SYMBOLIC MASTER LOCATED IN THE LAW MASKS THE DIVERSE AND COMPLEX FUNCTIONING OF POWERTHEIR LITERAL CONFLATION OF THE FAMILY AND NATIONAL POLITICS PROVES THAT THEY CANNOT UNDERSTAND POWER IN SPECIFIC INSTANCES, THEY CAN ONLY MASK IT

B) FOCUS

FOUCAULT, CHAIR IN THE HISTORY OF SYSTEMS OF THOUGHT AT THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE, 1980 [MICHEL, POWER / KNOWLEDGE: SELECTED INTERVIEWS AND OTHER WRITINGS, 1972-1977, ED. COLIN GORDON, "POWER AND STRATEGIES," 139-141]
The notion of love of the master' poses other problems, I think. It is a certain way of not posing the problem of power, or rather of posing it in such a way that it cannot be analysed. This is due to the insubstantiality of the notion of the master, an empty form haunted only by the various phantoms of the master and his slave, the master and his disciple, the master and his work man, the master who pronounces law and speaks the truth, the master who censors and forbids. The key point is that to this reduction of power to the figure of the master there is linked another reduction, that of procedures of power to the law of prohibition. This reduction of power to law has three main roles: (i) It underwrites a' schema of 'power which is homogeneous for every level and domainfamily or State, relations of education or production. (ii) It enables power never to be thought of in other than negative terms: refusal, limitation, obstruction, censorship. Power is what says no. And the challenging of power as thus conceived can appear only as transgression. (iii) It allows the fundamental operation of power to be thought of as that of a speech-act: enunciation of law, discourse of prohibition. The manifestation of power takes on the pure form of 'Thou shalt not'. Such a conception has a certain number of epistemological advantages because of the possibility of linking it with an ethnology centred on the analysis of the great kinship-prohibitions and with a psychoanalysis centred on the mechanisms of repression. Thus one single and identical 'formula' of power (the interdict) comes to be applied to all forms of society and all levels of subjection. And so through treating power as the instance of negation one is led to a double 'subjectivisation'. In the aspect of its exercise, power is conceived as a sort of great absolute Subject which pronounces the interdict (no matter whether this Subject is taken as real, imaginary, or purely juridical): the Sovereignty of the Father, the Monarch or the general will. In the aspect of subjection to power, there is an equal tendency to `subjectivise' it by specifying the point at which the interdict is accepted, the point where one says yes or no to power. This is how, in order to account for the exercise of
Sovereignty, there is assumed either a renunciation of natural rights, a Social Contract, or a love of the master. It seems to me that the problem is always posed in the same terms, from the edifice constructed by the classical jurists down to current conceptions: an essentially negative power, presupposing on the one hand a sovereign whose role is to forbid and on the other a subject who must somehow effectively say yes to this prohibition. The contemporary analysis of power in terms of

libido is still articulated by this old juridical conception.

Why has this kind of analysis enjoyed a centuries-old privilege? Why is power so invariably interpreted in the purely negative terms of law and prohibition? Why is power immediately represented as a system of law? It will be said no doubt that law (droit) in Western societies has always served as a mask for power. This explanation does not seem wholly adequate. Law was an effective instrument for the constitution of monarchical forms of power in Europe, and political thought was ordered for centuries around the problem of Sovereignty and its rights. Moreover, law, particularly in the eighteenth century, was a weapon of the struggle against the same monarchical power which had initially made use of it to impose itself. Finally, law was the principal mode: of representation of power (and representation should not be understood here as a screen or an illusion, but as a real mode of action). Law is neither the truth of power nor its alibi. It is an instrument of power which is at once complex and partial. The form of law with its effects of prohibition needs to be resituated among a number of other, non-juridical mechanisms. Thus the penal system should not be analysed purely and simply as an apparatus' of prohibition and repression of one class by another, nor as an alibi for the lawless violence of the ruling class. The penal system makes possible a mode of political and economic management which exploits the difference between legality and illegalities. The same holds true for sexuality: prohibition is certainly not the principal form of the investment of sexuality by power.

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NOTIONS OF POWER DANGEROUSLY MASK THE DEEP AND INSIDIOUS OPERATIONS OF ITS DISCIPLINARY, PRODUCTIVE FUNCTIONS

REPRESSIVE

FOUCAULT, CHAIR IN THE HISTORY OF SYSTEMS OF THOUGHT AT THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE, 1980 [MICHEL, POWER / KNOWLEDGE: SELECTED INTERVIEWS AND OTHER WRITINGS, 1972-1977, ED. COLIN GORDON. "BODY / POWER," P. 58-59]
I would also distinguish myself from para-Marxists like Marcuse who give the notion of repression an exaggerated rolebecause power would be a fragile thing if its only function were to repress, if it worked only through the mode of censorship, exclusion, blockage and repression, in the manner of a great Superego, exercising itself only in a negative way. If, on the contrary, power is strong this is because, as we are beginning to realise, it produces effects at the level of desireand also at the level of knowledge. Far from preventing knowledge, power produces it. If it has been possible to constitute a knowledge of the body, this has been by way of an ensemble of military and educational disciplines. It was on the basis of power over the body that a physiological, organic knowledge of it became possible. The fact that power is so deeply rooted and the difficulty of eluding its embrace are effects of all these connections.. That is why the notion of repression which mechanisms of power are generally reduced to strikes me as very inadequate and possibly dangerous.

THE SYMBOLIC DOES NOT ENCOMPASS EVERY RELATIONPOWER FUNCTIONS OUTSIDE FOUCAULT, CHAIR IN THE HISTORY OF SYSTEMS OF THOUGHT AT THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE, 1982 (MICHEL, ANTI-FASCIST, POWER: ESSENTIAL WORKS OF FOUCAULT V.2, ED. COLIN GORDON, "THE SUBJECT AND POWER," P. 337)
It is necessary also to distinguish power relations from relationships of communication that transmit information by means of a language, a system of signs, or any other symbolic medium. No doubt, communicating is always a certain way of acting upon another person or persons. But the production and circulation of elements of meaning can have as their objective or as their consequence certain results in the realm of power; the latter are not simply an aspect of the former. Whether or not they pass through systems of communication, power relations have a specific nature. .

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* AFF AT: LAW/SYMBOLIC ORDER BAD *

TURN/: A POLITICS OF REJECTING THE LAW [AND ITS PLACE IN THE SYMBOLIC ORDER] NECESSITATES REJECTING THE ORDER OF THE WORLD AS SUCH. THIS PSYCHOTIC POLITICS LEADS TO AN UNBREAKABLE ATTACHMENT TO THE LAW BECAUSE WE ENJOY DESTROYING IT SO MUCH. VOTING AFFIRAMTIVE EMBRACES A POLITICS OF CONSTANT INSISTENCE OF CULTURAL AND SUBJECTIVE TRANSFORMATION CARLSON, PROFESSOR OF LAW AT THE BENJAMIN N. CARDOZO SCHOOL COLUM. L. REV. 1908, NOVEMBER, L/N]
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LAW, 1999 [DAVID GRAY, 99

IV. The Bureaucracy Schlag presents a dark vision of what he calls "the bureaucracy," which crushes us and controls us. It operates on "a field of pain and death."
n259 It deprives us of choice, speech, n260 and custom. n261 As bureaucracy cannot abide great minds, legal education must suppress greatness through mind numbing repetition. n262 In fact, legal thought is the bureaucracy and cannot be distinguished from it. n263 If legal thought tried to buck the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy would instantly crush it. n264 Schlag observes that judges have taken "oaths that require subordination of truth, understanding, and insight, to the preservation of certain bureaucratic governmental institutions and certain sacred texts." n265 Legal scholarship and lawyers generally n266 are the craven tools of bureaucracy, and those who practice law or scholarship simply serve to justify and strengthen the bureaucracy. "If there were no discipline of American law, the liberal state would have to invent it." n267 "Legal thinkers in effect serve as a kind of P.R. firm for the bureaucratic state." n268 Legal scholarship has sold out to the bureaucracy: Insofar as the expressions of the state in the form of [statutes, etc.] can be expected to endure, so can the discipline that so helpfully organizes, rationalizes, and represents these expressions as intelligent knowledge. As long as the discipline shows obeisance to the authoritative legal forms, it enjoys the backing of the state... Disciplinary knowledge of law can be true not because it is true, but because the state makes it true. n269 Scholarship produces a false "conflation between what [academics] celebrate as 'law' and the ugly bureaucratic noise that grinds daily in the [*1946] [ ] courts...." n270 Scholarship "becomes the mode of discourse by which bureaucratic institutions and practices re-present themselves as subject to the rational ethical-moral control of autonomous individuals." n271 "The United States Supreme Court and its academic groupies in the law schools have succeeded in doing what many, only a few decades ago, would have thought impossible. They have succeeded in making Kafka look naive." n272 Lacanian theory allows us to interpret the meaning of this anti-Masonic vision precisely. Schlag's bureaucracy must be seen as a "paranoid construction

according to which our universe is the work of art of unknown creators." n273 In Schlag's view, the bureaucracy is in control of law and language and uses it exclusively for its own purposes. The bureaucracy is therefore the Other of the Other, "a hidden subject who pulls the strings of the great Other (the symbolic order)." n274 The bureaucracy, in short, is the superego (i.e., absolute knowledge of the ego), n275 but
rendered visible and projected outward. The superego, the ego's stern master, condemns the ego and condemns what it does. Schlag has transferred this function to the bureaucracy. As is customary, n276 by describing Schlag's vision as a paranoid construction, I do not mean to suggest that Professor Schlag is mentally ill or unable to function.

Paranoid construction is not in fact the illness. It is an attempt at healing what the illness is - the conflation of the domains of the symbolic, imaginary, and real. n277 This conflation is what Lacan calls "psychosis." Whereas the "normal" subject is split between the three domains, the psychotic is not. He is unable to keep the domains separate. n278 The symbolic domain of language begins to lose place to the real domain. The psychotic raves incoherently, and things begin to talk to [*1947] him directly. n279 The psychotic, "immersed in
jouissance," n280 loses desire itself.

Paranoia is a strategy the subject adopts to ward off breakdown. The paranoid vision holds together the symbolic order itself and thereby prevents the subject from slipping into the psychotic state in which "the concrete 'I' loses its absolute power over the entire system of its determinations." n281 This of course means - and here is the deep irony of paraonia - that bureaucracy is the very savior of romantic metaphysics. If the romantic program were ever fulfilled - if the bureaucracy were to fold up shop and let the natural side of the subject have its way - subjectivity would soon be enveloped, smothered, and killed in the night of psychosis. n282 Paranoid ambivalence toward bureaucracy (or whatever other fantasy may be substituted for it) is very commonly observed. Most recently, conservatives "organized their enjoyment" by opposing communism. n283 By confronting and resisting an all-encompassing, sinister power, the subject confirms his existence as that which sees and resists the power. n284 As long as communism existed, conservatism could be perceived. When communism disappeared, conservatives felt "anxiety" n285 - a lack of purpose. Although they publicly opposed communism, they secretly regretted its disappearance. Within a short time, a new enemy was found to organize conservative jouissance - the cultural left. (On the left, a similar story could be told about the organizing function of racism and sexism, which, of course, have not yet disappeared.) These humble examples show that the romantic yearning for wholeness is always the opposite of [*1948] what it appears to be. n286 We paranoids need our enemies to organize our enjoyment. Paranoid construction is, in the end, a philosophical interpretation, even in the clinical cases. n287 As Schlag has perceived, the symbolic order of law is artificial. It only exists because we insist it does. We all fear that the house of cards may come crashing down. Paradoxically, it is this very "anxiety" that shores up the symbolic. The normal person knows he [OR SHE] must keep insisting that the symbolic order exists precisely because the person knows it is a fiction. n288 The paranoid, however, assigns this role to the bureaucracy (and thereby absolves [HER OR] himself from the responsibility). Thus, paranoid delusion allows for the maintenance of a "cynical" distance between the paranoid subject and the realm of mad psychosis. n289 In truth, cynicism toward bureaucracy shows nothing but the unconfronted depth to which the cynic is actually committed to what ought to be abolished.

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TURN/: OUR INTERVENTION INTO LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP IS AN INTERVENTION INTO CULTURE, NOT A DEPOLITICIZED CALL TO THE LAW. THEIR ALTERNATIVE WOULD LEAD TO A POLTIICS OF INFINITE DESTRUCTION THAT WOULD BLOCK ALL CULTURAL WORK CARLSON, PROFESSOR OF LAW AT THE BENJAMIN N. CARDOZO SCHOOL COLUM. L. REV. 1908, NOVEMBER, L/N]
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Should normative legal scholarship be abolished, as Professor Schlag suggests? Some of Professor Schlag's points about legal scholarship are undoubtedly well taken. But it doesn't follow that it should or even could be abolished. In truth, whether he admits it or not, Professor Schlag himself does legal scholarship. He does not follow his own advice about not doing it. Nor could he. If legal scholarship stands for participation in the realm of the symbolic, then legal

scholarship - i.e., culture - is the very medium that perpetuates self-consciousness.

Schlag is very hard on law professors who give advice to judges. He mocks their work as mere "pretend-law," n313 mere journalism. n314 "One need only pick up a judicial opinion, a state statute, a federal regulation, or a law review article to experience an overwhelming sense of dread and ennui." n315 Meanwhile, judges are not even paying attention to legal scholarship n316 - which, experience teaches, is disappointingly true.

Vicarious participation in litigation or legislation can nevertheless be defended as a participation in culture itself. Law professors can contribute to that culture by making law more coherent, and in this sense their project is at least as worthy as any that philosophy, history or astrophysics [*1951] could devise. Law has an objective structure that exceeds mere subjectivity. This objective structure can be altered by hard work. An altered legal world, however, is not the point. Evidence of consequential impact is gratifying, but this is simply what mere egotism requires. It is in the work itself that the value of legal scholarship can be found. Work is what reconciles the failure of the unhappy consciousness to achieve justice. Work is, in Hegel's view,
desire held in check, fleetingness staved off... work forms and shapes the thing. The negative relation to the object becomes its form and something permanent... This negative middle term or the formative activity is at the same time the individuality or pure being-for-self of consciousness which now... acquires an element of permanence. n317 Hegel, then, gives a spiritual turn to that worthy slogan "publish or perish." By working the law, lawyers, judges, private citizens, and even academics can make it more permanent, more resilient, more "existential," n318 but, more to the point, they make themselves more resilient, more "existential." n319 Work on law can increase freedom - the positive freedom that relieves the worker of "anxiety" - fear of disappearance into the Real. n320 When work is done, the legal universe swells and fills itself out - like an appetite that "grows by what it feeds on." n321 But far more important, the self gains a place in the world by the very work done. Work is the means of "subjective destitution" or "narcissistic loss" n322 - the complete externalization of the subject and the surrender of the fantasy support upon which the subject otherwise depends. In Lacanian terms, "subjective destitution" is the wages of cure at the end of analysis. n323 Or, in Hegelian terms, cure is "the ascesis that is necessary if consciousness is to reach genuine philosophic knowledge." n324 In this state, we precisely lose the suspicion that law (i.e., the big Other) does not exist. n325 In Hegel's inspirational words:
Each individual consciousness raises itself out of its allotted sphere, no longer finds its essence and its work in this particular sphere, but grasps itself as the Notion of will, grasps all spheres as [*1952] the essence of this will, and therefore can only realize itself in a work which is a work of the whole. n326 I make no special claim that legal academic work is worthy of extra-special respect. It is a craft, like any other. As such, it is at least worthy of its share of respect. If spirit unfolds and manifests itself in the phenomenal world of culture, n327 why should it not also manifest itself in the law reviews?

VI. Conclusion
I began by suggesting that Pierre Schlag assumes the position of a duellist. He thinks legal academics are either fools or knaves. But he mistakes his opponent. The villain is language itself. Language is what causes the split in the subject, and Professor Schlag has made the classic error of assuming that legal academics are deliberately withholding l'objet petit a. They hold surplus enjoyment and are to blame for the pain and the lack that always accompanies the presence of the subject in the symbolic order. If this psychoanalytic suggestion explains the angry tone of Schlag's work, it also explains the basic errors into which he falls. When one considers this work as a whole, most of these errors are obvious and patent. Indeed, most of these errors have been laid by Schlag himself at the doorstep of others. But, in surrendering to feeling or, as perhaps Schlag would put it, to context (i.e., the pre-theoretical state), Schlag cannot help but make these very same errors. Some examples: (1) Schlag's program, induced from his critiques, is that we should rely on feeling to tell us what to do. Yet Schlag denounces in others any reliance on a pre-theoretical self. n328 (2) Schlag warns that, by definition, theory abstracts from context. n329 He warns that assuming the right answer will arise from context unmediated by theory is "feeble." n330 Yet, he rigorously and repetitively denounces any departure from context, as if any such attempt is a castration - a wrenching of the subject from the natural realm. He usually implies that context alone can provide the right answer - that moral geniuses like Sophocles or Earl Warren can find the answer by consulting context. [*1953] (3) Schlag complains that common law judges are "vacuous fellows" when they erase themselves so that law can speak. n331 Yet, Schlag, a natural lawyer, likewise erases himself so that context can speak without distortion. (4) Schlag warns that merely reversing the valences of polarities only reinstates what was criticized. n332 Yet he does the same in his own work. In attacking the sovereignty of the liberal self, he merely asserts the sovereignty of the romantic self. Neither, psychoanalytically, is a valid vision. One polarity is substituted for another. n333 (5) Schlag scorns the postulation of ontological entities such as free will, but makes moral arguments to his readers that depend entirely on such postulation. (6) Schlag denounces normativity in others, but fails to see that he himself is normative when he advises his readers to stop being normative. The pretense is that Schlag is an invisible mediator between his reader and context. As such, Schlag, the anti-Kantian, is more Kantian than Kant himself. Thus, context supposedly announces, "Stop doing normative work." Yet context says nothing of the sort. It is Schlag's own normative theory that calls for the work slowdown.

Schlag urges an end to legal scholarship when he himself continues to do legal scholarship. He may wish to deny that his work is scholarship, but his denial must be overruled. We have before us a legal scholar, like any other.
(7) The legal academy refuses to duel with Pierre Schlag. But why should it? It lives well enough without defending itself from angry reproaches generated from abstract romanticism. Shall legal academics give up their jobs and their vocation at the mere invocation of deconstruction? Why should they, especially when Professor Schlag has not given up the Byron White professorship at his own university?

The legal academy declines to duel, but this is not to say that postmodernism is a failure. It is only a failure if we accept that its task is to destroy in its entirety the existing hierarchy. This is not a valid task. If we destroyed the existing hierarchy, another would spring up in its place, n334 and it too would have to be destroyed on the logic of romanticism. Destruction is a bad infinity. It never ends because desire itself does not end.

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IMPACT: NO IDENTIFICATION

GLOBAL PSYCHOSIS

THE WAR ON TERROR TURNS EVEYRONE ON EARTH INTO A POTENTIAL ENEMY. THIS LEADS TO A GLOBAL PSYCHOSIS IN WHICH OUR SEARCH FOR ENEMIES WILL CREATE VIOLENCE ON SUCH A SCALE THAT IT WILL MAKE US YEARN FOR THE FAMILIARITY OF WORLD WARS AND GENOCIDE REINHARD, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH & COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AT UCLA, 2005 [KENNETH, THE NEIGHBOR: THREE INQUIRIES IN POLITICAL THEOLOGY, 16-17, GOOGLE BOOKS]
One problem with this account of the political, where we divide the world into friends we identify with and enemies we define ourselves against, is that it is fragile, liable to break down or even to invert and oscillate in the face of complex situations. But it is precisely in its inadequacy to the world we live in that Schmitts account of the friend-enemy distinction is most useful: today, we find ourselves in a world from which the political may have already disappeared, or at least has mutated into some strange new shape. A world not anchored by the "us" and "them" oppositions that flourished as recently as the Cold War is one subject to radical instability, both subjectively and politically. The disappearance of the enemy results in something like global psychosis: since the mirroring relationship between Friend and Enemy provides a form of stability, albeit one based on projective identifications and repudiations, the loss of the enemy threatens to destroy what Lacan calls the "imaginary tripod" (trepied imaginaire) that props up the psychotic with a sort of pseudo-subjectivity, until something causes it to collapse, resulting in full-blown delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia. 12 Hence, for Schmitt, a world without enemies is much more dangerous than one where one is surrounded by enemies. As Derrida writes,

the disappearance of the enemy opens the door for "an unheard-of violence, the evil of a malice knowing neither measure nor ground, an unleashing incommensurable in its unprecedentedtherefore monstrousforms; a violence in the face of which what is called hostility, wars, conflict, enmity, cruelty, even hatred, would regain reassuring and ultimately appeasing contours because they would be identifiable." 13 America today is desperately unsure about both its enemies and its friends, and hence deeply uncertain about itself. The rhetoric of the so-called war on terror is a sign of the disappearance of the traditional, localizable enemy: the terrorist does not have the stabilizing function that Schmitt associates with the enemy, but to declare war on him [OR HER] is to attempt to resuscitate the enemy's failing animus. [GENDER MODIFIED]

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AFF AT: LAW K

THEIR READING OF THE LAW IS BOTH ESSENTIALIZING AND NAIVE. YES, WE ARE SUBJECTED TO THE LAW BUT THIS SUBJECTION IS ALSO LIBERATION FROM THE ARBITRARY WHIMS OF VIOLENT STATES OF NATURE. THE LAW PROVIDES A SPACE FOR THE SUBJECT TO PURSUE HIS/HER ENJOYMENT WITHOUT THE INCONVENIENCES OF ANARCHY. JODI DEAN. ZIZEK ON LAW. LAW AND CRITIQUE 15: 124, 2004.
Since Zizek emphasizes laws unavoidable, Real, violence, one might wonder why he thinks that belief in law is important. Why should law be law? Why not reject law altogether or at least recognize it as an inescapable ideological trap? The answer is, again, that there is more to law than violence. Law provides a degree of liberation and disalienation. Differently put, law can be understood psychoanalytically as a solution to some specific problems even as it creates new ones. Thus, Zizek provides a psychoanalytic account of our attachment to law that emphasizes how law both secures desire and is stained by enjoyment. I begin with desire. Zizek writes:
. . . the advent of Law entails a kind of disalienation: in so far as the Other itself appears submitted to the absolute condition of Law, the subject is no more at the mercy of the Others whim, its desire is no more totally alienated in the Others desire . . . In contrast to the poststructuralist notion of a law checking, canalizing, alienating, oppressing Oedipianizing some previous flux of desire, Law is here conceived as an agency of disalienation and liberation: it opens our access to desire by enabling us to disengage ourselves from the rule of the Others whim.24

Law frees us from the absolute, arbitrary demands of the Other.25 In Totem and Taboo, once the horde kill the father, they are no longer subject to his violent, obscene, monopoly of enjoyment. They have overthrown not just him, but a subjection rooted in exception the father was exempt from the demands he made. Now authority itself comes under rules: the reign of the band of brothers is a reign of law, of rules regulating access to women, power, and the use of violence. The end of the brothers subjection to the father is thus the beginning of their subjection to law. As Peter Fitzpatrick writes, They are now
free but that very freedom becomes the mode of their renewed subjection as they bring the power of the father to bear upon themselves.26 The reign of law internalises the authority of the Father; as symbolic law, the Other is brought within, as it were, a movement signified as the Name-of-theFather. Indeed, Freud emphasizes that in death the father was stronger than he had been in life: what the fathers presence had formerly prevented they themselves [the brothers] now prohibited in the psychic situation of subsequent obedience .27 What this means for the brothers, and for us, is that subjection to and liberation through law are the same thing.

We might think again of Hobbes. In the state of nature, Every man has a right to everything; even to one anothers body.28 Each is thus necessarily subject to the needs and demands of the Other.With the advent of law, there is an out, something to turn to that relieves the pressure to conform to these demands. One obeys rational rules, not arbitrary whims. Accordingly, one is no longer an instrument and object of the Other. One now has a space for ones own desire. Law liberates, then, through the production of this space for the subjects desire.

LAWS

PROHIBITION RELIEVES US OF THE BURDEN OF ATTENDING CONSTANTLY TO THE IMPOSSIBLE DEMANDS OF A MERCILESS SUPEREGO. THIS STABILITY CREATES THE HUMAN CAPACITY FOR REFLECTIVE EQUILIBRIUM NECESSARY FOR MEANINGFUL LIFE.

JODI DEAN. ZIZEK ON LAW. LAW AND CRITIQUE 15: 124, 2004.
The final twist in this initial relation between law and superego is that the external law liberates the subject from the pressure of that very superego demand always part of law. Superego is totally unrelenting, placing all sorts of contradictory, impossible demands on us. Law enables the subject to escape from its self-torture, from the plague of conscience, by providing regulations and guidelines. The external law regulates pleasures in order to deliver us from the superegotistical imposition of enjoyment which threatens to overflow our daily life.33 With this twist, Zizek reverses the typical understanding of the inner law as more reliable or as what enables a kind of reflective equilibrium through which to evaluate external social laws. For him, the inner law compels us without mercy; external law relieves us of this compulsion. In the following section, I explore this aspect of law and superego in more detail.

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PSYCHOANALYSIS IS BORN OUT COLOONIALISMIT MASKS IT.

COLONIALISM
THE
ALTERNATIVE DOESNT RESIST,

OF A HISTORT OF COLONIALISM.

TRACEY SEDINGER 2002(ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN COLORADO AND COORDINATOR OF THE WOMEN'S STUDIES PROGRAM, NATION AND IDENTIFICATION PSYCHOANALYSIS, RACE, AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE, CULTURAL CRITIQUE ) P.42-43
Given the theoretical and analytic successes of psychoanalytic explorations of subjectivity, a number of contemporary identity theorists have suggested that psychoanalysis might also offer a rigorous, nonessentialist account of how individuals become racialized social subjects. But efforts to use psychoanalytic concepts to theorize race have confronted a history of elision, ethnocentrism, and theoretical chauvinism, most evident in early efforts to apply psychoanalytic theory to non-Western cultures and therefore buttress its claims to universality (for examples, see Jones; Rheim; Mannoni). Insofar as psychoanalysis describes subjectivation, its canonical texts have tended to focus primarily on sexual difference (which most recent critics have interpreted as gender acquisition) and secondarily on sexuality, as they are constituted and problematized within a specifically European, bourgeois, and modern "family romance" (Butler 1993, 181; Abel, 185). Several scholars have suggested that the foreclosure of race has actually enabled the psychoanalytic theorization of sexual difference. 1 Consequently, many theorists have argued that psychoanalysis is too much implicated within European, racist, and colonialist institutions, that, in fact, "Oedipus (the ur-paradigm of psychoanalysis) is the figure of (universal) colonization par excellence" (Iginla, 32; see also Tate, 54-57, 59-60; Carr). Or as Mary Ann Doane has suggested, "Psychoanalysis can . . . be seen as a quite elaborate form of ethnographyas a writing of the ethnicity of the white Western psyche" (211). And efforts to overcome the traditional psychoanalytic elision of race are often marked by assumptions that implicitly relegate racialization to a secondary moment in subject formation. 2 Given the persistence of psychoanalysis's privileging of sexual difference, it is clear that race cannot be "added" to sexual difference in [End Page 42] psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivation; too often, such efforts are marred by an unexamined tendency to assign sexual difference some priority, even if only temporal.

THE PERMUTATION SHOULD BE PREFERRED OVER THE WHOLESALE PRIORITIZATION OF EITHER THE AFF OR THE ALT. ANDREAS BERTOLDI, 1998 DEPT. OF COMP LIT., UNIV. OF JOHANNESBURG. OEDIPUS IN (SOUTH) AFRICA?: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE. AMERICAN IMAGO 55.1 (1998)
This hostile reception of psychoanalysis in post-colonial criticism rests on two problematic assumptions. Firstly that Oedipus is a (racist) European invention and imposition, and secondly (which ties in with Oedipus) that psychoanalysis' claim to universalism is nothing but a ruse for (psychic) colonization. Another recent review article states the post-colonial opposition to psychoanalysis in the strongest terms: None of the structuring mechanisms of Freud's European Oedipus have been found to exist on the African continent. [ . . . ] "Oedipus is always colonization pursued by other means." [ . . . ] Although the Oedipal triangle is a highly seductive formula, we must resist the temptation to contain that which is outside our empirical knowledge. We have a responsibility, as critics, to recognize our own humility, to resist the trap of universalism and to decolonise ourselves. (Hitchcott 1993, 65) [End Page 106] To sum up, the reasons for the opposition to psychoanalysis in Africa is that it is: Euro-centric, totalitarian, universalist, does not apply/work in Africa, and finally operates in the service of colonial power. Although it will be admitted that in the colonial situation psychoanalysis does confront its own limits as an explanatory model, the post-colonial strategy of "difference" contains a number of pitfalls. What will emerge in this presentation is that far from there being a clear dividing line of opposition between positions of difference and

positions of universalism, the two "strategies" will be revealed as complexly interrelated and neither one a priori "politically progressive" as is often suggested.

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THE ALTS CELEBRATION OF DIFFERENCE IS UNIQUELY DANGEROUS IN ESSENTIAL OTHERNESS OF THE AFRICAN. AFRICA
AS IT CONFIRMS THE

ANDREAS BERTOLDI, 1998, DEPT. OF COMP LIT., UNIV. OF JOHANNESBURG. OEDIPUS IN (SOUTH) AFRICA?: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE. AMERICAN IMAGO 55.1
This brings us back to Oedipus--once more. There has been a great deal of mystification around Oedipus, attributing a variety of almost sinister motives to psychoanalysts who insist on its presence. As mentioned earlier, the "anti-oedipal" politics of postcolonialism are well rehearsed and would suggest that endeavors such as Wulf Sachs' be dismissed as yet another attempt to deny "difference" and impose an oedipal structure--"psychic colonization." However, just as there can be no nave celebration of universalism in the wake of post-enlightenment abuses, so caution is also required in any celebration of difference. What I argue is that a politics of difference as expressed in post-colonial criticism might in fact entail a denial of the very goals it strives for. This can best be illustrated in looking at Oedipus. For Wulf Sachs, Oedipus is a bond of a common humanity, as well as being the source of our cultural differences. The implication of the post-colonial position is to deny this, to argue for the fundamental "otherness" of the African. I suggest that in doing so post-colonialism in fact colludes with the very structure it seeks to undermine, especially in South Africa with its almost unique history of obessionality with the construction and legislation of difference. Norval (1995) has argued that underlying and structuring apartheid discourse was in fact a principle of difference, with its emphasis on groups and cultural difference--resulting in apartheid legislation or the policy of "separate but equal." Almost ironically the principle of difference became a universal in apartheid discourse--just as it seems to have become a universal in post-colonial discourse.

PERM IS NET BENEFICIAL TO REJECTION. ANDREAS BERTOLDI, 1998 DEPT. OF COMP LIT., UNIV. OF JOHANNESBURG. OEDIPUS IN (SOUTH) AFRICA?: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE. AMERICAN IMAGO 55.1 (1998)
Megan Vaughan commenting on colonial medical discourse, has observed a similar preoccupation with difference. Initially it was based on biological "race," but as is evident from the history of social anthropology in South Africa, it shifted to [End Page 123] categories such as "black," "white," "ethnic" groups, "tribes," "primitives," etc. (It must be admitted that this entire discussion is an indication of the "hold" that "group thinking" still has on almost every South African academic and writer.) However as Vaughan also argues, unbridled universalism is not an adequate response--firstly because it is very likely to gloss over some very real differences (cultural variation, etc.), and secondly it remains trapped in the very opposition of sameness/difference. In short, the simple and unproblematic opposition between difference and universalism cannot in fact be sustained on any basis. There is a complex interrelationship between the two, such that the valorization of one or the other is bound to be problematic.

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AFF: EUROCENTRISM IMPACT

EUROCENTRISM NATURALIZES THE FORWARD MARCH OF CAPITALISM IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRIMITIVE OTHER TO THE NORMAL GLOBAL MARKETPLACE. LANDER 2K2. (EDGARDO. EUROCENTRISM, MODERN KNOWLEDGES, GLOBAL CAPITAL. NEPLANTA: VIEWS FROM THE SOUTH. 3.2 PP 245-268)
AND THE

NATURAL ORDER

OF

Fourth, proceeding from the basic assumptions of Eurocentrism, liberal society is assumed as the natural order of things. Once former primitive or backward historical phases are overcome, the particular historical experience of liberal capitalist society and the liberal worldview are ontologized as the normal state of society. In this way, possessive individualism (Macpherson 1970), the separation of the fields of collective life (political, social, cultural, economic), and a conception of wealth and the good life unilaterally associated with the accumulation of material goods characteristic of liberal society are transformed into a universal standard for judging the deficiencies, backwardness, or poverty of the rest of the peoples and cultures of the planet. It follows from the hegemony of this articulated body of assumptions that the main transformational practices of the contemporary worldincluding the globalization of markets and of financial movement, the politics of deregulation and opening, as well as structural adjustment and the dismantling of state social policiesare simply adaptations to technological transformations, or new conditions created for globalization. These conditions are understood to be a new stage of modern or postmodern society. Given the common sense established by the hegemony of liberal thought, these practices are inevitably assumed to represent the course of natural history. In the analyses and debates surrounding these practices, the [End Page 247] players, along with their interests, strategies, contradictions, and oppositions, disappear. The most powerful effect of the naturalization of social practices is its effectiveness in clouding the power relationships underlying the hegemonic tendencies of globalization.

EUROCENTRISM LEADS TO EXTINCTION. LANDER 2K2. (EDGARDO. EUROCENTRISM, MODERN KNOWLEDGES, GLOBAL CAPITAL. NEPLANTA: VIEWS FROM THE SOUTH. 3.2 PP 245-268)
AND THE

NATURAL ORDER

OF

The perspective of Eurocentric knowledge is the central axis of a discourse that not only naturalizes but renders inevitable the increasingly intense polarization between a privileged minority and the world's excluded, oppressed majorities. Eurocentric knowledge also lies at the center of a predatory model of civilization that threatens to destroy the conditions that make life possible on Earth. For this reason, the critique of Eurocentrism and the development/recovery of alternate knowledge perspectives cannot be interpreted as merely an esoteric intellectual or academic preoccupation, or for that matter as a topic for interesting debates within a narrow community of scholars working on epistemological problems. In reality, these issues are closely related to vital political demands, both local and global, which are linked in turn to communities, organizations, and movements that (in a variety of ways) confront and resist the growing hegemony of transnational capital throughout the world.

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AFF: (K)S OF FGM (S) = GUILT

THEIR DEFENSE OF FGM IS MOTIVATED BY GUILT, NOT OURS EFUA DORKENOO FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR OF FOUNDATION FOR WOMENS HEALTH 2004 HTTP://WWW.FORWARDUK.ORG.UK/KEY-ISSUES/FGM/HUMAN-RIGHTS - FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION: HUMAN RIGHTS AND CULTURAL RELATIVITYV - 2004
A view opposing the belief that FGM constitutes a human rights abuse is that of cultural relativity. This viewpoint comes from a number of sources - nationalists, some Western cultural anthropologists, Western liberals and elite African women who advocate for a right to cultural self-determination. This viewpoint has shifted quite a lot in the last decade, as human rights arguments have gained ground. However, the relativism position is never far from the surface, as can be seen from ongoing changes in the terminology. The cultural relativity position held by different groupings is also never straightforward. There is a psychological interplay of guilt, shame, anger and fear embedded in the positions, the mix depending very much on the baggage which each defender of the practice brings to the debate. It also depends on who is raising the issue, where it is raised and the extent to which women themselves, as a coping mechanism, normalise the practice

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AFF: DONT ABANDON THE DESIRE FOR DEVELOPMENT

WE
SHOULD NOT ABANDON PROJECTS OF ASSITANCE TOWARD AFRICA WHOLESALE, FOR THAT IS JUST ANOTHER FANTASY OF FREEDOM FROM CONFLICTINSTEAD, WE SHOULD STICK IT TO ITS PROMISE AGAINST ITS FAILURES TO RADICALIZE THE ENTIRE PROCESS

DE VRIES, DEPARTMENT OF RURAL DEVELOPMENT SOCIOLOGY AT WAGENINGEN UNIVERSITY, 2007 [PIETER, DON'T COMPROMISE YOUR DESIRE FOR DEVELOPMENT! A LACANIAN/DELEUZIAN RETHINKING OF THE ANTI-POLITICS MACHINE, THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY 28 (1), 25 43, ELECTRONIC]
Although I agree to a large extent with Escobar's analysis, I differ with respect to the role of the desire for development. This also leads us to question whether his emphasis on the dissemination of other knowledges is a political programme that corresponds with the desires and dreams of the subjects of development. Let's go back to the example of Andean villagers, who, rather than 'development alternatives' or 'alternatives for development'

Is Escobar's post-structuralist programme not again a disavowal of the promises of development, and of the utopian fantasies it generates? Is there not a danger that such a programme ends up colluding in the banalisation of such promises? As argued, this 'reality' of development, is evoked by those small objects (what Andeans call obritas). In my view the challenge for a leftist critique of development is that of engaging with this constitutive lack in development, hence assuming the radical position of taking its promise seriously. Of course, post-structuralist critiques of development would argue that individuals and communities can imagine themselves in other ways and devise strategies for combating or undermining the hegemony of development. Such strategies are usually presented or formulated in terms of alternative modernities. But one could argue that this is just another way of disavowing the very fact that the subject constituted by development is a split entity, a void concealed through the ongoing promises of modernity. In other words, Foucauldian post-structuralist theory fails to interrogate the very lack in development itself, its inability to engage with the dreams and fantasies it triggers. [DE VRIES CONTINUES] But let me note that this view accords with the classic Marxist position: the issue is not that of developing forms of social justice in response to capital's drive for profits, etc, but that of surpassing or overcoming the very bourgeois notion of social justice. The issue is not that of providing development subjects with new languages for imagining (alternative) modernities, but that of interrogating how different stakeholders deal with the very void behind the stakes, ie their reduction to a simple development category by development discourse.30 The issue, then, is not that of hiding the void by imagining new subject positions (thus a proliferation of development categories and identities), but that of exposing this void as a constitutive lack in the development apparatus as much as possible. Following Slavoj iek it can be argued that the subject of development stands for the truth of our current historical situation. By this he means that the truth of contemporary forms of capitalist globalisation is the increasing exclusion and marginalisation of the majority of the world's population. The only way to understand the workings of capitalist globalisation is by identifying with this excluded abject position. As he puts it, 'the abject position stands for the lie of the existing universality' as represented by universal narratives of progress and human rights. In fact, the abject position of the subject of development embodies what is false in the existing universality by not having any positive content.31 In contradistinction to this spurious universality he posits the concrete universality of the abject position. In my view this concrete universality stands for the faculty of the subject of development to desire.
would opt for the 'real' thing since, as they themselves put it, they have learnt to desire development.
A case in point concerns the villagers in the Andes referred to above.32 In the 1980s the area was the centre stage of an uprising provoked by the Maoist guerrilla movement Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). The Peruvian military reacted in an utterly repressive way, treating villagers as potential subversives and establishing peasant vigilante groups in order to counter the threat of the Shining Path. After the end of the conflict all sorts of ngos and government organisations flooded the area with programmes aimed at introducing democratic forms of governance with the help of methodologies of participatory planning, organisational development and capacity building. Much emphasis was also placed on the need to develop new forms of accountable leadership. An underlying assumption in these programmes was the idea that poverty and lack of modern forms of social organisation had given the 'subversives' the possibility to gain a foothold among traditional indigenous people. With this line of thought new governance structures and forms of democratic participation had to fill the void created by the conflict.

There is no doubt that the new discourse of democracy and institution building provided a precious opportunity to the development apparatus to expand its field of operations, thereby legitimating new kinds of intervention that were to function in a therapeutic and precautionary mode. Arguably, such discourses establish a natural relation between
poverty, subversion and displacement, while representing Andean people as passive victims of such processes. And indeed many villagers and refugees did adopt such new identities so as to be eligible for aid.

However, not all Andeans chose to follow this path. Thus in some areas, rather than subjecting themselves to the imperatives of the development apparatus, villagers chose to organise themselves within their indigenous community organisations and thus to reinforce their own structures of leadership and accountability. At the same time they pressed government institutions to channel reconstruction money into tangible development structures (buildings, roads, markets), rather than into intangible activities such as workshops in participatory planning. The point not to be lost was that the villagers refused to compromise on their desire for development. Rather than letting the promise of development be banalised by neoliberal discourses of responsible citizenship and the latest fads in development thinking, they insisted in demanding the 'real' thing. They refused to become trapped in this perverse logic of victimisation and instead pressed claims on the state to restitute land and build the infrastructure that had been promised to them, thus persevering in their own fantasies of development.
This example raises important questions for an ethics of development, one based on people's aspirations and dreams that foregrounds their capacity to desire. This is what authors such as Zizek, Zupanic and Badiou call the Ethics of the Real, an ethics encapsulated by the Lacanian maxim 'don't compromise your desire'.33 If it is true that the development apparatus sustains its hegemony through the generation and banalisation of hope, then not compromising your desire means refusing to accept the betrayal of development by the anti-politics machine. This is an ethics of sustaining the capacity to desire, of demanding that what the development apparatus promises but is not capable of delivering. This is an ethics that demands the realisation of the impossible through its insistence on the 'real' thing, an ethics that believes in the existence of miracles. For, in the eyes of Andean villagers, there is nothing so excessive and miraculous as development itself. This I think is a good example of what iek calls an Ethics of the Real which, in opposition to a depoliticised ethics of human rights, does not assume that there is any guarantee for its existence in an external 'humanitarian

This entails a radical politicisation of ethics. An Ethics of the Real is an ethics of taking risks and making radical decisions, of not compromising a fundamental desire. For Andeans this means holding to defined images and practices of community institutions and fair access to land and
gaze', or in universal norms of victimisation.34 other natural resources, as against state programmes of land privatisation and neoliberal governance. This stance of not compromising on the desire for development runs counter to the global consensus that establishes that development is about the production of responsible and calculating individual citizens subject to forms of governmentality epitomised by depoliticised notions such as 'cost-sharing' and financial 'transparency'. Are such examples of intransigence, then, not really small miracles, in the sense that they attest to the capacity of development subjects to insist on their own utopian imaginations of development, and to act upon such desires?

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AFF: LETTER OF THE LAWSMALL DEMANDS BETTER

THIS STRATEGY OF READING THE LETTER OF THE LAW AGAINST ITSELF IS SUPERIOR TO THEIR SUBVERSIVE STRATEGYABANDONING HELP FOR THE OPPRESSED IS THE ULTIMATE TRICK OF THE SYSTEM, ENSURING
PERPETUAL MARGINALIZATION

IEK, INSTITUTE

FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, 1998 [SLAVOJ, THE LAW NEED AN OBSCENE SUPPLEMENT? LAW AND THE POSTMODERN MIND, P. ELECTRONIC]

WHY

DOES

When, in the late eighteenth century, universal human rights were proclaimed, this universality, of course, concealed the fact that they privilege white, men of property; however, this limitation was not openly admitted, it was coded in apparently tautological supplementary qualifications like "all humans have rights, insofar as they truly are. rational and free," " which then implicitly excludes the mentally ill, "savages," criminals, children, women.'. . So, if, in this situation, a poor black woman disregards this unwritten-implicit, qualification and demands human rights, also for herself, she just takes the letter of the discourse of rights "more literally than it was meant" (and thereby redefines its universality, inscribing it into a different hegemonic chain). "Fantasy" designates precisely this unwritten framework that tells us how are we to understand the letter of Law. The lesson of this is that-sometimes, at least-the truly subversive thing is not to disregard the explicit letter of Law on behalf of the underlying fantasies, but to stick to this letter against the fantasy that sustains it. Is-at a certain level,
at least-this not the outcome of the long conversation between Josepf K. and the priest that follows the priest's narrative on the Door of the Law in The Trial?-the uncanny effect of this conversation does not reside in the fact that the reader is at a loss insofar as he lacks the unwritten interpretive code or frame of reference that would enable him to discern the hidden Meaning, but, on the contrary, in that the priest's interpretation of the parable on the Door of the Law disregards all standard frames of unwritten rules and reads the text in an "absolutely literal" way. One could also approach this deadlock via. Lacan's notion of the specifically symbolic mode of deception: ideology "cheats precisely by letting us know that its propositions (say, on universal human rights)' are not to be read a la lettre, but against the background of a set of unwritten rules. Sometimes, at least, the most effective anti-ideological subversion of the official discourse of human rights consists in reading it in an excessively "literal" way, disregarding the set of underlying unwritten rules. VI The need for unwritten rules thus bears witness to, confirms, this vulnerability: the system is compelled to allow for possibilities of

choices that must never actually take place since they would disintegrate the system, and the function of the unwritten rules is precisely to prevent the actualization of these choices formally allowed by the system. One can see how unwritten rules are correlative to, the
obverse of, the empty symbolic gesture and/or the forced choice: unwritten rules prevent the subject from effectively accepting what is offered in the empty gesture, from taking the choice literally and choosing the impossible, that the choice of which destroys the system. In the Soviet Union of the 1930s and 1940s, to take the most extreme example, it was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin, it was perhaps even more prohibited to enounce publicly this prohibition, i.e., too state that one is prohibited to criticize Stalin-the system needed to maintain the appearance that one is allowed to criticize Stalin, i.e., that the absence of this criticism (and the fact that there is no opposition party or movement, that the Party got 99.99% of the votes at elections) simply demonstrates that Stalin is effectively the best and (almost) always right. In Hegelese, this appearance qua appearance was essential. This dialectical tension between the vulnerability and invulnerability of the System also enables us to denounce the ultimate racist and/or

sexist trick, that of "two birds in the bush instead of a bird in hand": when women demand' simple equality, quasi-"feminists" often pretend to offer them "much more" (the role of the warm and wise "conscience of society," elevated above the vulgar everyday competition and struggle for domination ...)-the only proper answer to this offer, of course, is "No, thanks! Better is the enemy of the Good! We do not want more, just equality!" Here, at least, the last lines in Now Voyager ("Why reach for the moon, when we can have the stars?") are wrong. It is homologous with the native American who wants to become integrated into the predominant "white" society, and a politically correct progressive liberal endeavors to convince him that, he is thereby renouncing his very unique prerogative, the authentic native culture and tradition-no thanks, simple equality is enough, I also wouldn't mind my part of consumerist alienation! ... A modest demand of the excluded group for the full participation at the society's universal rights is much more threatening for the system than the apparently much more "radical" rejection of the predominant "social values" and the assertion of the superiority of one's own culture. For a true feminist, Otto Weininger's
assertion that, although women are "ontologically false," lacking the proper ethical stature, they should be acknowledged the same rights as men in public life, is infinitely more acceptable than the false elevation of women that makes them "too good" for the banality of men's rights.

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AFF: FEAR OF COOPTION BAD

FEARING CO-OPTION GUARANTEES THE STATUS QUO, SMALL DEMANDS ARE MUCH MORE EXPLOSIVE IEK, INSTITUTE
Finally,

FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, 1998 [SLAVOJ, THE LAW NEED AN OBSCENE SUPPLEMENT? LAW AND THE POSTMODERN MIND, P. ELECTRONIC]

WHY

DOES

the point about inherent transgression is not that every opposition, every attempt at subversion, is automatically "coopted." On the contrary, the, very fear of being coopted that makes us search for more and more "radical," "pure" attitudes, is the supreme strategy of suspension or marginalization. The point is rather that true subversion is not always where it seems to be. Sometimes, a small distance is much more explosive for the system than an ineffective radical rejection. In religion, a small heresy can be more threatening than an outright atheism or passage to another religion; for a hard-line Stalinist, a Trotskyite is infinitely more threatening than a bourgeois liberal or social democrat. As le Carre put it, one true revisionist in the Central Committee is worth more than thousand dissidents outside it. It was easy to dismiss Gorbachev for aiming only at improving the system, making it more efficient-he nonetheless set in motion its disintegration. So one should also bear in mind the obverse of the inherent transgression: one is tempted to paraphrase Freud's claim from The Ego and the Id that man is not only much more immoral than he believes, but also much more moral than he knows-the System is not only infinitely more resistant and invulnerable than it may appear (it can coopt apparently subversive strategies, they can serve as its support), it is also infinitely more vulnerable (a small revision etc, can have large unforeseen catastrophic consequences). Or, to put it in
another way: the paradoxical role of the unwritten superego injunction is that, with regard to the explicit, public Law, it is simultaneously transgressive (superego suspends, violates, the explicit social rules) and more coercive (superego consists of additional rules that restrain the field of choice by way of prohibiting the possibilities allowed for, guaranteed even, by the public Law). From my personal history, I recall the moment of the referendum for the independence of Slovenia as the exemplary case of such a forced choice: the whole point, of course, was to have a truly free choice-but nonetheless, in the pro-independence euphoria, every argumentation for remaining within Yugoslavia was immediately denounced as treacherous and disloyal. This example is especially suitable since Slovenes were deciding about a matter that was literally "transgressive" (to break from Yugoslavia with its constitutional order), which is why the Belgrade authorities denounced Slovene referendum as unconstitutional-one was thus ordered to transgress the Law ... The obverse of the omnipotence of the unwritten is thus that, if one ignores them, they simply cease to exist, in contrast to the written law that exists (functions) whether one is aware of it or not-or, as the priest in Kafka's The Trial put it, law does not want anything from you, it only bothers you if you yourself acknowledge it and address yourself to it with a

demand ...

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