Reading Comments for Week 7 Zizek
Please post your comments for Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and Zizek here.
Thanks!
SHH
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Please post your comments for Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and Zizek here.
Thanks!
SHH
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March 1st, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Posted by Ananya:
I really hope I’m entering this in the right place…
Zizek gives three reason for going to war: the 1st – “a sincere ideological belief that the USA was bringing democracy and prosperity to another nation” – doesn’t seem compatible with the other two – 2) “the urge brutally to assert and demonstrate unconditional US hegemony and 3) control of Iraq’s oil reserves.”
If the 2nd and 3rd our true then the 1st cannot be a sincere belief.
Is this Zizek speaking about this in the way he proposes we talk about Judaism/ Zionism and “good” Islam/ “bad” Islam? – where he suggests that we should “…transpose the gap, the tension, into the very core of Judaism [Islam, and for the purposes of my question -the reasons behind invading Iraq).” That we should “conceive of this resistance as an open chance, as “undecidable”…the task is how to work out how to use this ambiguous fact politically.”
What I understand best from what I’ve quoted above, is through this next quote: “transpose the site of antagonism and inconsistency into the very core of the religious edifice, not to dismiss it as pertaining only to the secondary fundamentalist misuse.” And while appreciating this thought, I’m having a hard time applying it to the three reasons he gives for going to war – and I think that is because this reading has challenged the way I conceive of “responsibility.” Who should be held responsible for the war? Who is accountable? One of the main players that comes to my mind is the State (the U.S State) – and I realize that while I critique, discourage and work against “esentialzing” subjects, I esentialize the State. And I’m not sure if that’s something I want to “work against” Can we/ should we apply our ideas of “de-centering,” ideas about the “floating signifier” to the State?
And by asking this question, I’m not saying that Zizek is suggesting that we apply these ideas to the State…because he goes on to talk about “concrete universality,” which sounds like the antithesis of “de-centering,” “pluralities”…
So my last question is - what is “concrete universality”? I can’t seem to put together an understanding of this Hegelian concept through what I found on the internet (and there is no Wiki site for this!! ☺)
March 2nd, 2008 at 1:44 pm
I’m getting stuck on the idea of “excess” in Zizek, and in relation to some of the other thinkers whom we read last week. On page 280 of the course reader, Zizek points to a number of examples of the US fighting its own excess: Bin Laden and the Taliban were once supported by the CIA as anti-Soviet guerilla fighters; Noriega (in Panama) was an ex-CIA agent; Fascism was an excessive outgrowth of the liberal West. The first two examples are situations that the US created for their own purposes, but that came back to haunt them when they evolved into something out of the control of the US. The US, in effect, set the ball rolling on the development of its future “enemy”. This lines up nicely with Derrida’s “Cold War” moment in autoimmunity that led to 9/11 (237 in the reader). I’m not as clear with the Fascism example. Was the US directly involved in promoting key players/events that led to the rise of Fascism? Or is it simply that Fascism can be seen as a more natural/logical next step in the liberal West’s ideology? Excess, in this example, being someone taking and twisting America’s ideology into something new, unrecognizable – a more organic overgrowth, than the first two examples, perhaps, and therefore a different category of “excess”. Maybe that’s a stretch, but hey…
Also on page 280 of the course reader, Zizek talks about how “power generates its own excess that it has to annihilate in an operation, which has to imitate what it fights”. He then defines an “authentic revolutionary process” as one that is not reliant on the “superego” excess generated and then fought by a system. In other words, the excess that we’ve seen come out of the West, say in the form of Fascism (the West’s excess for which the West joined forces with Communism to destroy) is not authentically revolutionary. I think Derrida and Zizek both suggest that Islamic Fundamentalism (and therefore 9/11), comes from an excess of the West. Clearly this “excess” is the first one mentioned above – the US actually helped train Bin Laden and the Taliban. Does it also fit the second definition of excess – a natural evolution or outgrowth of Western ideology – or is it simply a reaction *against* Western ideology? Putting those nuances aside, if we accept that it *is* somehow a result of Western excess, this would mean, in Zizek’s eyes, that is it not authentically revolutionary, because its roots are still within the system it opposes. This rubs up against Baudrillard, whose _Spirit of Terrorism_ suggests that by using their own death as a weapon against a system that excludes death (the West), the terrorists are working outside of that system in a revolutionary way (and this is the “spirit of terrorism” in his mind). So was 9/11 revolutionary or not?
March 2nd, 2008 at 9:46 pm
After reading Zizek’s Holiday from History, the master-slave morality which I attempted to discuss last week has been brought to my attention once again. I wanted to clarify what I was attempting to articulate last week; in addition to examples I provided, Zizek states that the west, although seeming to be the master, is actually the slave, because of the attachment to life and its pleasures which one is unable to risk. Whereas, the “poor Muslim radicals are the masters” ready to risk their lives. Although, I do thank Slavoj for the articulation, I am unsure how he dissects the master-slave relationship. Is he doing so based on a material versus spiritual level? Which is what it seems like; the West enjoys material possessions and their material existence, therefore forgo spiritual revolutionary acts such as suicide bombing for a cause that extends past the material realm.
Another topic I want to address on the same article is on page 283/4 of the reader. Zizek discusses the 20th congress of the Soviet party and the break down of the objective illusion of the post-Stalinist regime officials, who were made to confront their crimes. He subsequently poses the question: “Was 9/11 not the 20th congress of the American Dream?” (284) I have some reservations about this question, because as Zizek himself states, the officials whose ‘illusion was broken’ experienced a breakdown to their physical being as well, either in the form of heart attacks or suicide. I do not feel that the American psyche has been broken, to the point of a physical collapse. In fact, after 9/11 nationalist spirits rose to a nostalgic high, which could possibly have a lot to do with the repression which Derrida and Zizek mention, but nonetheless, there is/was no physical breakdown. I doubt most American citizens even realize that 9/11 was a cause of their “structural excess of state power.” I realize that the American psyche is now more afraid than ever of an enemy within its structures, but these fears which are exerted only fuel the flames of nationalism, and idyllic unification. In other words, I do not think that the United States realizes the error his ways, and has decided to coexist harmoniously with the rest of the globe.
There is a lot of overlapping with the discourse produced by Zizek, and that of Baudrillard and Derrida on the topic of September 11th. He says it is the “repression of the fantasmic background responsible for the impact of the WTC collapse” (279), which is similar to what Baudrillard says in Requiem for the Twin Towers, when he discusses the symbolic nature of the towers (Global capitalism) bring about their physical collapse. It is also similar to what Derrida states as an American autoimmunitary process which he names the ‘Vicious Cycle of Repression.’ All the efforts to neutralize the effects of the trauma, one of them being to repress it, is also an autoimmunitary function, because repression, in any form is never progressive. The question I have here is that can you actually repress, and therefore escape trauma when images of the traumatic event are constantly being reenacted? Or does he mean to say that the U.S. is repressing the ‘real’ issues behind 9/11, which would subsequently lead to the revelation of flaws in its society?
There is a lot of overlapping with the discourse produced by Zizek, and that of Baudrillard and Derrida on the topic of September 11th. He says it is the “repression of the fantasmic background responsible for the impact of the WTC collapse” (279), which is similar to what Baudrillard says in Requiem for the Twin Towers, when he discusses the symbolic nature of the towers (Global capitalism) bring about their physical collapse. It is also similar to what Derrida states as an American autoimmunitary process which he names the ‘Vicious Cycle of Repression.’ All the efforts to neutralize the effects of the trauma, one of them being to repress it, is also an autoimmunitary function, because repression, in any form is never progressive. The question I have here is that can you actually repress, and therefore escape trauma when images of the traumatic event are constantly being reenacted? Or does he mean to say that the U.S. is repressing the ‘real’ issues behind 9/11, which would subsequently lead to the revelation of flaws in its society?
I realize I have only stated my grievances with the article, and would like to state that I thoroughly enjoyed Zizek’s work. A small (positive) thing worth mentioning is the fact that he is very careful as to not use the terms “September 11th” or “9/11.” He refers to the actual name of the buildings and what happened to them: “World Trade Center explosions.” This is significant in line with what Derrida states of how we define an event, and how we relate to it based on the word that is used to define it.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Regarding The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, I think all assessments of the film must make allowance for the fact that Zizek was obviously chafing under the time constraints. I’m sure he had all manner of other relevant clips to show, all sorts of nuance to add to the points he made and several completely new arguments beside, but was constrained as it was to give the film a running time somewhere close to feature length. I’m sure we’ve all seen this before with documentaries.
Some further proof of this that really struck me was that many of the points which came up in today’s discussion – problematic of identification, subjective camera rendering empathy difficult, the nightmare aspects of fantasy, and all manner of Oedipal and reverse-Oedipal neuroses regarding parent figures – were embodied in The Piano Teacher with Haneke’s usual grisliness. Zizek was clearly aware enough of this to make it one of the few non-Hollywood films he invoked, but it seems the time limits and tone Fiennes was trying to set for the film didn’t allow him to go into greater detail.
I’m sure according to our own preferences and idiosyncrasies about cinema we were all able to spot some similar examples. Overall, I loved the film — I think it took brilliant advantage of its medium to strive for a real unity with its subject texts, rather than setting up a heirarchical sort of scholar/specimen relationship. I think it was one of the most genuinely fascinating things we’ve watched in this seminar yet.
March 3rd, 2008 at 6:43 pm
The closing segment of “Holiday from History” seems to show Zizek on exactly the same page as me with my thesis research – talking about contemporary Hollywood with the same with-it voice that he discussed Big Brother and cyber-porn in our previous reading. He actually says: “The ‘dream factory’ Hollywood, functions to fabricate these hegemonic ideological dreams, to provide coordinates for private fantasies. In the post-September 11th era, the Hollywood machinery is perturbed and executives are desperately trying to guess and/or establish new rules. No more catastrophe movies: will single-hero movies such as, for instance, James Bond movies survive? Will there be a shift towards family melodramas or blatant patriotism?” These are exactly the sorts of issues that I am engaging with and the sorts of questions I hope to answer.
When contrasting the post-9/11, culture war era to the “Holiday from History” that was speciously perceived to exist before, some of the differences to Hollywood product can by now seem so extreme as to have put us into Foucault-land, dealing with different epistemes/modes of thought. For example, obviously Starship Troopers could never exist now in the form it did back in 1997, and in light of Cloverfield recently, it’s hard to imagine Godzilla being made now the way it was in 1998, with a team of crack French paratroopers doing most of the Americans’ gunplay work for them.
BTW, that new entente between the Hollywood executives and the Pentagon was covered with appropriate ambivalence at the time by Cineaste. It’s in the Summer 2002 issue, or Volume 27 Issue #3. Unsurprisingly, it turns out Jerry Bruckheimer was involved.
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:55 pm
I wanted to respond to something Eli mentioned about emotions and cinema and Hitchcock in particular, as the discussion went elsewhere at the time – the quote from Hitchcock may have had a bit of a Machiavellian ring to it, but I think filmmakers are always ultimately interested in producing emotional response, Hitchcock revealing it in perhaps a more bare naked way than others.
There is that famous list by editor Walter Murch (who cut The Conversation, The English Patient, and a whack of other stuff) about what his priorities are when making editing choices, and he breaks the categories down by percentages, giving Emotion 51%, Story 23%, Rhythm 10%, and so on through a few more technical categories. The point being: Emotion is really what it’s all about. Story is key, story is crucial, but if you don’t FEEL something while you watch the story, there is no point.
What I loved about the movie was the extent to which Zizek appears to be deeply engaged in cinema very much on this level – the scenes that he offers up are raw and elemental moments of love, death, sex, fear, horror, etc etc – messy human stuff. It made me wonder about a term I’ve heard of from literature but know nothing about, The Grotesque, as it seemed like it was especially well represented.
March 3rd, 2008 at 8:13 pm
I’m with Malcolm on loving the film; I found Zizek’s analyses of the clips shown to be very intriguing and far from dry. I also love that he took time to focus on Tarkovsky, but along with Torri’s presentation on malignant properties (I think that is the phrase) and ‘unknown knowns’, I can’t help but think that Zizek’s description of ‘The Zone’ is overly simplistic, as he describes it as the remnant of some sort of outer space visit (the origin of ‘The Zone’ is never revealed), and his psychoanalytic stance he mentions earlier in the film provides a much better interpretation.
‘The Zone’ is never shown or described because it is more of an inner space than the exterior room that Writer, Professor, and Stalker seek. ‘The Zone’ functions at the level of the ‘unknown knowns’—the ID. It brings about the savage realization that what we think we want or need is not exactly what we truly desire. The moral SuperEgo faces off against the primal ID (the unknown known), and it is the ID, the basic drives that define our character, that come to fruition. For example, Porcupine (a former stalker), led his brother to ‘The Zone’ and ultimately to his death. Upon Porcupine’s return to ‘The Zone’, he enters the room to wish for his brother to be alive. Instead, he is granted a fortune because money and not his brother’s life is his primal desire. As a result, he hangs himself. Thus, none of the men actually enter the room because of the fear of what they don’t know about their desires, but have the feeling that they too—their characters—could be build on greed, pleasure, or some other vice.
‘The Zone’ is less of a room as it is an internal representation of fundamental state of being. But, as mentioned, it would be impossible to go too far in depth, as the film packs an incredible amount of information into an already long run time. I’d love to see where he would go with his own psychoanalytic reading of Tarkovsky’s cinema, especially in Tarkovsky’s latter three films where the form is largely structured by time. If there is any Zizek criticism on this please let me know.
March 3rd, 2008 at 9:13 pm
3 separate thoughts:
1) I agree with Katharine’s observation that The Pervert’s Guide deals with the grotesque. From my understanding of the grotesque there are several different yet overlapping definitions. In Mary Russo’s article “The Female Grotesque”, she gives a broad definition of the grotesque as “[l]ow, hidden, earthly, dark, material, immanent, visceral. As bodily metaphor, the grotesque cave tends to look like … the cavernous anatomical female body” (1). The grotesque is also linked to psychoanalysis as there is a subset of the grotesque called the uncanny grotesque that relies on Freud’s theories of the uncanny and revolves around interior feelings of abjection and uncanny doubles. In terms of the grotesque, the most poignant film clip that Zizek showed was the alien birthing scene from Alien. The male body which is viewed as the “norm” is violated, impregnated, and turned into a representation of a female body which is a lower form of sorts, a subset of the norm. Having the alien inside the body produces feelings of abjection, and when the phallic alien erupts from the male body it leaves behind the grotesque image of the cavernous female body.
2) As far as Malcolm’s comment about Zizek’s closing statement where he asks, “will single-hero movies such as, for instance, James Bond movies survive?”, I think the answer to this is a resounding Yes. Although since 9/11 we have had films like World Trade Centre and Ladder 49, we have also had intensely popular single-hero movies like Casino Royale and Live Free or Die Hard which are part of a genre of action hero films that no tragedy will ever wipe out, except maybe if the tragedy destroys Hollywood. America will always revel in the fantasy that one person with enough guts, skill, and firepower can save an entire nation.
3) I tend to agree with Zizek’s comment on page 282, “What about the phrase which reverberates everywhere: ‘Nothing will be the same after September 11’? … What if, precisely, NOTHING EPOCHAL HAPPENED ON SEPTEMBER 11? What if – as the massive display of American patriotism seems to demonstrate – the shattering experience of September 11 ultimately served as a means for hegemonic American ideology to ‘return to its basics’, to reassert is basic ideological coordinates against the anti-globalist temptations?” The American government used 9/11 to as an excuse to be even more self involved than it ever was. Everything they wanted to do that before would have seemed barbaric or like they were removing rights of the citizens is now suddenly okay because America is the poor little victim and they are justified in helping themselves before helping everyone else. After 9/11 the American attitude did not change, it became even more patriotic, even more supportive of the government, and even more democratic in nature.
March 4th, 2008 at 2:02 am
In the second half of the presentation, on Slavoj Zizek and The Perverts Guide to Cinema,Tori posed this question: Why has Zizek chosen to place himself in the foreground of the films he is analyzing? And, what effect might this have on the spectator?
It was this question that followed me home. Zizek could have stuck to print, putting words on paper like most theorists, but instead he felt the need to discuss cinema and psychoanalysis visually. Placing himself within memorable film environments, which he references, Zizek becomes both the analytic spectator and the analyzed spectacle. The same comment can be made about Alfred Hitchcock, a director whose films are discussed frequently in The Perverts Guide to Cinema. Hitchcock appears in the virtual settings of all his films by means of cameos, and within his promotional trailers as a tour guide, somewhat like Zizek. By becoming physically familiar, or connected, with the environments they theorize about or create Zizek and Hitchcock enter the illusion.
Since they both give guided tours within settings, which were once and continue to be, integral to the spectators’ illusion, how does this affect the virtual realness of these films (e.g., Psycho)?
After watching the entire trailer on Psycho, which is briefly shown in The Perverts Guide to Cinema and is also attached to the end of this blog, it seems as though Hitchcock, is completely spoiling the illusion of the film before audiences get to view it. Hitchcock doesn’t threaten to jeopardize the illusion of Psycho by giving away important information but by placing himself in the film’s setting. Isn’t it difficult for a spectator to get lost in a spectacle after they have been reminded of its illusion? Obviously not, as Psycho is considered one of the most thrilling films of all time.
As Eli mentioned in class and Katharine writes in her blog, it is emotion that counts, and since Hitchcock presses the right reactionary buttons at the right instant the spectator becomes consumed by the precisely manufactured illusion of what is “real”.So, just because Zizek has physically entered this nostalgic realm of cinematic illusion in The Perverts Guide to Cinema, it does not mean that he has forever effected these films and their settings (i.e. the quaint garden in Blue Velvet or the fictional Bodega
Bay in The Birds).
In my opinion both Zizek and Hitchcock, characters in their own right, are merely being playful, as they promote their theories/films, by physically entering the cinematic illusion, something which a hybrid psychoanalytical theorist and a Master of Suspense might not often do.
Trailer
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzAnE4zuYuA
March 4th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
There seemed to be an interesting contradiction in Zizek’s film. In the shot he chose from the Ten Commandments when Cecil B. DeMille came out to introduce the film as an allegory or metaphor of continuing importance in modern times (as anti communist) and Zizek says something along the lines of “there is the director…telling you what to think.” But throughout perverts “there is the director (Zizek) literally telling you what to think step by step as you go along. I just wanted to see if anyone else thought about this.
Zizek says “THE REAL WHICH RETURNS HAS THE STATUS OF ANOTHER SEMBLANCE: precisely because it is real, i.e. on account of its traumatic/excessive character, we are unable to integrate into (what we experience as) our reality, and therefore compelled to experience it as a nightmarish apparition.” (P279) In the reading, he is specifically addressing how the images of the twin towers falling were viewed. The best way I understand this is the clip from the matrix where Neo wakes up in the pink goop to realize his whole understanding of the life as he knew it has been a simulation from a machine. So when the twin towers exploded on 9/11, human understandings of reality as a stable and concrete thing became questioned and disturbed. So did we all feel the pink goop for a while?
Obviously the Matrix is a fantasy, but the core idea of accepting reality any other way than as it is dominantly understood in society interferes with the way one can exist in any world is prevalent. What I mean is that people who question reality are usually found in academic institutions and people who exist in other realities usually found in mental institution. This raises the questions of the construct of reality and who creates that construction. No one person can create a reality that society believes it has to be a framework of assumed signs and symbols that are accepted on a mass scale. This raises the issue of sanity, for what about the symbols and signs that are rejected? Where do they go? What happens to them? Does the Avant-garde and much of absurdist and modern art try to reorganize or actualize the forgotten and ignored symbols that society rejects precisely as a way to critique the standardization of accepted norms?
On September 11 everyone probably questioned their sanity for a moment, maybe all the mentally ill felt sane for a day? What I am getting at is that in the matrix, there was a hunt to find those who fought against to the controllers of the ideological framework in both realities. In the film, people who questioned reality or sought to expose its flaws were treated as criminals—hunted to be destroyed for their threat they posed to the functioning of the system. So is the “real” returned as “nightmare” some inversion of reality? In those moments do we feel more real?
When JFK died, it became a marker of mass emotional trauma. People tend to discuss where they were situated by describing the physical space as a marker of their existence in space and time in history. But isn’t it as if they were holding on to their conception of space and time for support as it was being ripped out from under them by the event of JFK’s death? The same might be said of 9/11. Would a mass recognition of reality as fantasy cause hysteria, panic and social collapse? I was just trying to get some understanding of the ideologies behind 9/11 and the films that Zizek is referencing in Perverts.
For instance, Zizek uses this description in a similar way in Haneke’s Piano Teacher to describe act of desire being realized as a physical horror. Zizek’s argument, based from Lacan, is that we have to form our idea of reality or accommodate to the reality of everyday life in order to maintain some form of sanity or structure. But does the realization of one’s desire always have to result in some form of horror? In his essay “An Aesthetic of Reality” Andre Bazin says:
Reality is not to be taken quantitatively. The same event, the same object, can be represented in various ways. Each representation discards or retains various of the qualities that permit us to recognize the object on the screen. Each introduces, for didactic or aesthetic reasons, abstractions that operate more or less corrosively and thus do not permit the original to subsist in its entirety. At the conclusion of this inevitable and necessary “chemical” action, for the initial reality there has been substituted an illusion of reality composed of a complex of abstraction (black and white, plane surface), of conventions (the rules of montage, for example), and of authentic reality. It is a necessary illusion but it quickly induces a loss of awareness of the reality itself, which becomes identified in the mind of the spectator with its cinematographic reproduction. As for the film maker, the moment he has secured this unwitting complicity of the public, he is increasingly tempted to ignore reality. From habit and laziness he reaches the point when he himself is no longer able to tell where lies begin or end. There could never be any question of calling him a liar because his art consists in lying. He is just no longer in control of his art. He is its dupe, and hence he is held back from any further conquest of reality.
But he also says : “The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.”
If the cinema is more in tune to our desires, is it so because our gaze is being conditioned and guided by the camera? But if our desires are realized on the screen is the recognition of this always a horror? For Haneke I believe this is true. He is always making us feel things that would never be felt in mainstream cinema. According to Bazin our definitions of reality are exhausted to the point of non resistance–much like the passivity and ignorance is bliss nature of the sleeping people in the matrix. That is why someone like Haneke is so refreshing.
Part of Christina’s thesis works off the notion a film can blur the line between the Real and the imaginary, or that maybe there is no line between the two and that perhaps they are one and the same as it could be that our perception and memory are the prohibitory elements limiting our awareness or willingness to accept the real “Real.” So starting from there, I was wondering if anyone ever though of comedy as an attack on the real. Comedy uses breaks and fissures in logic and language (the realm of the father) to cause the bodily reaction of laughter (emotion which is the realm of the mother).
Also, in response to the questions of “the grotesque” has anyone thought of Anonin Artaud’s idea of a cinema of cruelty in relation to Zizek or 9/11? This is the idea that something must be so physically repulsive or traumatic that it shocks the body to react. The “Cinema of Cruelty” is meant to shock the body out of passivity and into an active recognition of and into a healing from social inhibitions, ideological restraints, and social taboos. Similar to Zizek, Artaud posits that one must come face to face with the horror that their reality is not in fact real. Yet with all great theories, I have always wondered what’s next? What is the alternative? We now know all this and where do we go from here? Social reality is a construct and to see it as it really is can be a nightmare but now what? Are we left to accommodate and get used to it as if it were another dream? David Cronenberg posed this question in Existenz and his answer was there is no way out. For Cronenberg, getting to another level of reality or trying to break the illusion of reality is just as much of an illusion as the last one. For Zizek I’m not sure what the way out would be, I suppose the third pill he mentioned, but then is that not just the illusion of choice as another illusion? Like the Zapping conversation from last week?
March 6th, 2008 at 3:49 am
I thought I’d open myself up to stern correction by grappling with the Hegelian concept of “concrete universality” that Zizek mentions in the article from Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (311), and which Ananya expressed some confusion about in her post. Tonight, I pulled out the only copy of Hegel’s work I own, his Philosophy of Right (trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford UP, 1967), and searched the index for “universality.” Not the most rigorous way to interrogate Hegel, I know, but here are a couple (I hope) useful quotes I drew from the text:
1) Hegel states: “In connexion with this word ‘universality’, what strikes representative thinking first is the idea of abstract and external universality; but in connexion with absolute universality . . . we have to think neither of the universality of reflection, i.e. ‘all-ness’ or the universal as a common characteristic, nor of the abstract universality which stands outside and over against the individual, the abstract identity of the Understanding . . . It is the universality CONCRETE [overemphasis, mine] in character and so explicitly universal which is the substance of self-consciousness, its immanent generic essence, or its immanent Idea. This—the concept of free will—is the universal which overlaps its object, penetrates its particular determination through and through and therein remains identical to itself. The absolutely [i.e. concrete] universal is definable as what is called the ‘rational’, and it can be apprehended only in this speculative way” (31).
In case this concept still wants parsing, here are some further remarks taken from the Translator’s Notes:
2) “An abstract universal has no organic connexion with its particulars. Mind, or reason, as a CONCRETE UNIVERSAL [again, my caps], particularizes itself into differences which are interconnected by its universality in the same way in which the parts of an organism are held together by the single life which they all share. The parts depend on the whole for their life, but on the other hand the persistence of life necessitates the differentiation of the parts” (324).
What I gather from this perversely short gloss on Hegel’s “concrete universality” is that the concept refers to a set of differences, universal in their sharing a context (i.e., reason), given life by that context, and at the same time sustaining that context by remaining different, contradictory (reason cannot play itself out in the absence of contradictions). So, when Zizek says, “In the case of Judaism as well as in the case of Islam, one should thus dare to accomplish the Hegelian step towards ‘concrete universality’, and to transpose the site of antagonism and inconsistency into the very core of the religious edifice, not to dismiss it as pertaining only to the secondary fundamentalist misuse” (311), I believe he means that Islam and Judaism should admit there are contradictions within their respective contexts, both good and bad aspects that sustain the religions. The good and the bad are not separable: “Judaism is, as such, the moment of unbearable absolute contradiction, the worst (monotheistic violence) and the best (responsibility towards the other) in an absolute tension: the same, coinciding, and simultaneously absolutely incompatible” (311). Judaism and Islam are concrete universal concepts—organisms—which contain contradictions; that people have not accepted this fact is what causes the nonsensical, totalizing separation between, for example, “two kinds of Islam”: True Islam, and Fundamentalist Terrorist Islam. Zizek seems to argue for a reasoned negotiation of the contradictions within both Islam and Judaism—a dialectical process that, in line with Marx, “tries to keep the good and fight the bad” (311). Zizek calls for a transposition of antagonism into the core of these religions as a way to realize that the opposing Islams/Judaisms share a connection to originary concrete religious edifices, and that in their opposition—their opposing ideas which constitute the religious edifices—exists the potential for an improved and more nuanced conception of these religious edifices, a more reasoned understanding of the opposing parties’ “common interest” (e.g., the Jewish legacy). This project is about more than identifying a common banner; it is about recognizing the concrete universality of the concept of religion, which can only live on by continuing to reason through its internal contradictions (again, because there is no reason without contradiction). I gather this is what Zizek means when he says, “Precisely because Islam harbours the ‘worst’ potentials of the Fascist answer to our present predicament, it can also turn out to be the site for the ‘best’. In other words, yes, Islam is indeed not a religion like the others, it does involve a stronger social link, it does resist integration into the capitalist order – and the task is work out how to use this ambiguous fact politically” (311). Zizek wants to find out what makes fundamentalist Islam resistant to modernization, to transpose the “antagonism” of the fundmentalists into universal Islam as a means to discovering what could sustain and defend the religion in the face of capitalist/globalizing threats (Zizek: “this resistance does not necessarily lead to ‘Islamo-Fascism’, it can also be articulated into a socialist project” [311]). This all seems to belong to a larger discourse in the article, and throughout our readings, on understanding the complexity of terrorism and the knottiness of the issues of globalization, the war over modernity, the formation of an anti-globalization global front, etc.
A further thought: The idea of concrete universality seems to have reverberations in Zizek’s plea for a certain kind of “infinite justice” practiced on our part with respect to the “war on terror,” which closes our excerpt from The Borrowed Kettle: “This self-relating [i.e., like Derrida, believing none of us is ‘politically guiltless’], this inclusion of oneself in the picture, is the only true ‘infinite justice’” (320). Admitting our own hypocrisy into the concrete universality of our reason is the first step towards instigating a stronger reason, and making bolder political subjects of ourselves.
Above is my interpretation of Hegel, and of the passage in Zizek. I’m not a Hegelian; I sincerely hope some of you are better versed in him than I and are willing to correct me. We don’t learn without some antagonism. And we’ll never approach that hard kernel of the Real without trauma (I experience all criticism of my work as trauma, by the way).
Apologies to you Ananya if I have bent the argument away from your concerns.
March 9th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Thank you for the explanation of ‘concrete universality’ Cameron! I really appreciate it!
So ‘concrete universality’ – is a concept that is not antithetical of the de-centering and plurality discourses, but an essential and necessary follow through of these concepts: Once the particulars, the differences have been recognized, and the centered and closed identity has been destabilized – the whole must be recognized (which allows these particulars to occur, to be perceived, to be understood) and then this whole itself needs to be challenged.
This explanation does respond, very well (I think) to my question about applying the concepts of de-centering, and the floating signifier to the state…and I meant something even more specific than that - the government. The government, where individual units (of individuals and roles) make up part of an institution, can be understood in the same way as the organ/body relationship mentioned in the translator’s notes that were cited – where once part can be identified with a problem, but other parts are not free from responsibility of this problem…errr I’m heading towards some bad/ simplistic analogies of holistic health, so I’m going to stop here…but thanks again, the idea is much clearer now!
March 9th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
In response to Christina’s post about fascism as a possible outgrowth of the west, I immediately thought of clips from Chaplin’s ‘The Great Dictator’ that Zizek used. Zizek points out that the same music is used for when Chaplin tosses around the balloon globe with ideas of domination and then when he stands up and makes the heartfelt declaration about democracy and ‘doing good’ in the world. And the horrified reaction the ‘peaceful’ Chaplin shows to receiving the same adulation from the roaring crowds as he did when acting as Hitler hits the same theme.
March 9th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Other than the auteurist argument, which saw little consensus in class, and maybe the issue of sado-masochism, it seems to me there are two other “elephants in the room” in “Pervert’s Guide” (especially compared to Zizek’s writings):
1) the total lack of mentioning Lacan by name. Again, maybe this has a lot to do with producers/director’s decision about ensuring the film is marketable or something, but he’s not just talking about Freudian psychoanalysis but Lacanian psychoanalysis and I wonder if it’s disingenuous not to mention him by name (it seemed really glaring in the “mirror scene” clip from “Duck Soup”).
2) 9/11, especially since Zizek makes a rather convincing parallel in p.278 of the reader between the planes crashing into the Twin Towers and Tippi getting birded in the Hitchcock film. There’s never any overt mentioning of the attacks in “Pervert’s” that I’m aware of, and yet that shot of Zizek in the boat in Bodega Bay is one of the privileged images in the film. (It’s the image on the menu screen of the DVD.) Surely it’s making some kind of argument (?), but it feels like some kind of bizarre in-joke between the people who’ve read something of his rather than actually following the argument that Zizek makes to its ultimate conclusion.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the film very much, but I still haven’t come to terms with any of those three things.
March 9th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I didn’t mean to end my last post so abruptly, but hey it saves me from having to perform the conceptual gymnastics to make the transition from Fasicsm/Western Democracy to Universalism and Difference. I know there are beautiful ways to do this but I’ve got a brutal cold I’m not feeling so hot today.
I think that Hegel is a great place to start for gaining an understanding of universalism, but we should also consider Alain Badiou’s analysis of the concept. Badiou, a close friend of Zizek, and as Tori pointed out of a very different line of thinking, sees the universal as something that goes beyond difference. I know we are looking at Zizek’s direct reference to Hegel here, but Badiou’s interpretation is importantly different from traditional Kantian/Hegelian approaches because it is process related and driven in a creative spirit rather than a particular set of objects/immanent ideas.
Badiou sees Hegel’s universalism as stuck in a grammatical construct of judgement, looking to the past at what can be established as ‘different’ and ‘the same,’ where Badiou emphasizes how the universal develops out of a particular event and creates an entirely new situation where differences and separations must be dealt with in a way that is relevant to the new situation. The truth becomes something entirely different from what it was before, and certain ways of conceiving of differences or separations become obsolete or no longer pertinent.
This allows for the universal to be connected to philosophical concept of ‘the event,’ where something radically new appears, say onto the scene of a particular political episteme, and changes the way things are seen/perceived/accepted. Old differences morph into an acceptance of universal understanding when a new interpretation of the world is needed, and this happens in religion, science, politics, etc. Malcom is right on bringing up that Foucaudian epistemic territory here.
The universal in Badiou’s language is something that can change with events in history, although he would probably insist on taking things out of the historical context: he referes to the event with such langauge as ‘the opening of time space’. He sees it as a truth process that is driven by chance and potential, rather than how Hegel attaches the universal to rationality.
By taking away the attachment to Hegel’s rational subject, I think we are more able to really move to a discussion about a de-centered state, and also perhaps better prepared to answer the question of ‘Who is responsible.’ I see that Zizek is heavy on privileging the subject, but he seems to pluarlize it: he states (inspired by Derrida’s quotation) that we are all responsible for what happened to the world trade center.
I might ask, is Zizek a meeting point between Badiou and Hegel?
March 12th, 2008 at 11:53 am
I am trying to follow through on the idea of the partial. So far in the course material we have had three ideas of partial space. First, Donna Haraway asks for situated knowledge that is grounded in a partial perspective. By collectively “joining of partial views and halting voices”(Haraway196) this allows for a new subject position that “promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living within limits and contradictions” (Haraway196). Second, Buck-Morss’ pushes for a partial discourses to create a new global left discourse that will allow for a greater theoretical discussion. Buck-Morss states, “one way that we as intellectuals can help make such a discourse possible is to teach and write against the disciplinary boundaries”(106) and by doing opens will open up a global space that is both inside and outside culture, religion etc. Third, Zizek addresses the partial body in the first part of his film. He address, “the voice” and the embodiment of evil and the idea that in order to “attack evil” we must attack ourselves. Further, he explains that within the partial gaze what is reveled is the partial body. At one point in the film, Zizek suggests that in order to attack others you have to attack yourself. He gives the example of the movie, Blue Velvet and the movie The Conversation. It seems to me that “the body” becomes the site of any partial discourse. When we attempt to speak from a new subject position that is partial, the partiality straddles our boundaries and the shift that occurs, occurs on/in the body. Zizek subject position in the film speaks to this partial gaze and vision. When he “takes up” subject positions in the film, he repositions the audience gaze therefore creating a new space that is grounded in partial vision (or in other words is on the inside and outside of the film). These are the moments in the film that I thought was funny or amusing. As I have been thinking about the film I am able to shift my own subject position. I thought the camera might impede this “shifting” however, I don’t think it does, rather it adds another element of partiality.
March 15th, 2008 at 11:14 am
Zizek’s notion of the Real, is a intersting one and a problematic one at best. However his beliefe that “when gets too close to the desired object, erotic fascination turns to digust at the Real of bare flesh” is simply fascinating. In a sense Zizek has managed to articulate (using a fantastic analagy) the necessary distance/buffer zone required between “us” and “not us”. In the same way that the insecure individual laughs at the others difference in order to cover up their own insecuties, when faced with the origin of their belief system, becomes disgusted by their own realness.
In contemporary America, it seems the culture is now dealing with the return of the repressed, in which neo-liberal capitalism has both created a pushed certain realities to the fringe. Terrorism and illegal immigration as prime examples of how capitalism and Americas desire of excess wealth and power have now backfired, in that the White Christian world has created a possessed that which is desired, and those who have not, are attempting to regain what was lost.
Although 9/11 was a stunt, that questioned the very nature of the semi-virtual world we currently exist, its metaphysical presense as both real and not real, brought the repressed away form the image, away from the distance and collapsed the space in whereby America, and by extension the West had to deal with the all too realness of their actions.
In the same away that we as a society or as a person see and know, yet simultaneously do not recognize our actions at their coreness, so to did 9/11 create psychic realness which confronted teh West and their actions, by way of the very image-technology which dominates and spreads existence.
March 22nd, 2008 at 4:18 pm
These comments comprise my brief lecture.
Major Feautures of Zizek’s Arguments: Iraq: the Borrowed Kettle
In Iraq The Borrowed Kettle, Zizek’s entry point into his discussion of the Iraq war is very much indicative of his larger project. He begins his book with Freud’s anecdote about dream logic: 1) I never borrowed a kettle from you; 2) I returned it to you unbroken; 3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. This series of responses illustrate in Zizek’s terms, “an enumeration of inconsistent arguments” that “confirms…what it endeavors to deny.” Zizek’s essay is not only interested in debunking the clearly problematic logic used to justify preemptive invasion in Iraq, but focused on locating both the meaning of invoking these fabrications and of finding the “parallax” of truth behind what he suggests are the three actual reasons for preemptive invasion. Zizek suggests that ‘the three true reasons for the attack on Iraq” are “ideological belief in western democracy, the assertion of US hegemony in the New World Order and economic interests—ie. oil.’ The truth he suggests is “the very shift of perspective between…” these three reasons. What we are treated to here, is the “logic of domination.” An attempt to approach “in Hegelese, the path towards concrete totality” and simultaneously, to understand the visage of domination—the face it puts on to justify itself. What is interesting here, is that Zizek’s ultimate goal is not as his title suggests to write a book about Iraq—instead it is to deliver the logic of domination through one event. Zizek invokes Donald Rumsfeld’s famous “known unknowns” gaffe to point to the “unknown knowns” the Freudian unconscious, the “disavowed beliefs and suppositions—which America does not control, since it is unaware of their very existence.” This is the “ultimate topic of this book.” To analyze the logic of domination, Zizek is focused on the Lacanian “real” as opposed to the emphasis on the symbolic in the readings on September 11th last week.
Logical explanations, Zizek argues, have been changed to justify invasion. The practical Aristotilian causally that initially exists, (i.e. “we were attacked, we fought back” or “we preempted what was inevitably going to be a devastating attack” justified by WMD) are replaced with a larger philosophical determinant (i.e. Democracy is God’s gift to man” and the United States is in this formulation enacting the will of God). One interesting question to ponder, is how the American government profited or even fabricated events to create a causality which would garner public support for war—the 2005 NSA declassified report regarding the likely fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident which incited US involvement in the Vietnam war is an example. Here, clearly the larger issue of the spread of Communism is exchanged for an incident of perceived aggression to enter the war.
Interestingly enough, Zizek’s description of the U.S. government’s purported and actual motives for preemptive invasion are very much in line with the Lacanian psychic apparatus he uses often in Pervert’s Guide. He allocates a space to describe the id, the impulsive, instinctive desire of the US Government to use September 11th to assert hegemony in the New World order and install a puppet regime in an oil rich country; the ego, mediating id and super-ego, the visage of the Government, is the purported mission which has indeed changed from dismantling non-existent WMD to spreading democracy; and finally the superego, the moralistic demand to eliminate an oppressive dictator justified by the state repression, Kurdish genocide, and destabilizing nature of the regime, which would inevitably be succeeded by an Islamic Fundamentalist government.
Zizek frames the initial motive of war (WMD) as a Hitchcockian MacGuffin, a fact supported by Wolfowitzs dismissal of the missing WMD as only a “bureaucratic excuse for war. The subsequent narratives justifying the invasion are deconstructed such as the judicially unsound approach of punishment prior to proof, manifested in an invasion prior to weapons inspectors determining the existence of WMD. Had the US, in Zizeks argument, believed Iraq actually possessed WMD, might they not have waited for the decisive evidence to support this?
Of the various motives, I think Zizek correctly asserts, what he suggests may be in part “paranoid speculation” is that the war was an attempt at “geopolitical rearrangement in the Middle East” a long term project of the neoconservative movement—to set up a secular democracy in the region in part to cause a “domino” effect of democracy and to facilitate a more stable future for Israel. This perspective inverts the “global policeman” label attributed to the US in previous peacemaking missions in the 1990s. Additionally it speaks to the judiciously unsound arguments of preemptive war—the “preempt an attack” mentality that has become the leading motive for a bombing campaign in Iran. This logic of domination leads Zizek to define the US as a nation-state “ruthlessly pursuing its own interests.” The exportation of democracy clearly only works if the democratic regimes are complicit with the US’ own interests—i.e. pressuring Croatia to extradite war criminals to the Hague (international war crimes tribunal) while simultaneously prohibiting Serbia from trying American’s suspected of war crimes. The exportation of democracy becomes a passionate talking point only when the outcome has economic benefits to the nation-state.
One compelling case of this hypocrisy is evident with the U.S. using economic policies as a template for its policy toward “coercive interrogation.” The exporting of factories to countries with lax labor laws for cheap goods mirrors the “extraordinary rendition” of suspects to countries willing to torture for information, or the use of an offshore base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to hold “unlawful enemy combatants.” In other words outsourcing activities the country isn’t willing to condone, but is willing to profit from.
Movement towards the Middle East:
Zizek makes some interesting, if controversial pronouncements on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. First he suggests that the Palestinians have been unfairly elevated into “global symbols of suffering—were their situation really so desperate, they would have emigrated en masse to Jordan and other relatively prosperous Arab countries.” He ultimately suggests there is a “libidinal profit gained by persisting the deadlock” on both sides. He also points out the faultiness of the pronouncement of Palestinians as “fundamntalists” in contrast to Israeli’s, when the entire Zionist project was based on an ancient “ethno-religious” claim to the land.” ( I find both these pronouncements somewhat faulty—On one end, the suggestion that the suffering of Palestinians should invariably have led to a mass exodus to Jordan completely negates sixty years of the Palestinian political project to return to land that was unlawfully reallocated. On the other hand, framing the Zionist project as a religious movement is absolutely correct in present terms, but negates the fact that it was overwhelmingly a secular-nationalist movement from 1896 to the 1940s.)
Zizek suggests that the ultimate gesture on both sides towards a solution would be to elevate Jerusalem outside of the boundaries of statehood and declare it a “extra-political sacred site.” He critiques a standard argument of liberal Jews that while a Palestinian state is the best outcome, talks cannot occur in a climate of violence.” Of course, Zizek is pointing here to a common argument of oppressive regimes that suggests until the unrest that makes a conversation between power and rebellion possible is squelched, the outcome will always be negative.
Zizek critiques several major features of Zionist argument, the term Islamic Terrorism and the formation of a Palestinian State.
First he suggests a demarcation of the conjoined terms “Islamic Terrorism” by invoking Alain Badiou, who suggests that by uniting a predicate (in this case “Islamic”) with a formal substance (terrorism) we are suggesting an inherent content to that form. He ultimately suggests we are providing a schematization of a purely formal category. Invoking Hegel now, he suggests the reflective determination Islamic Terror, confers an unavoidable reversal or determinate reflection “Terrorist Islam.”
Jumping to Heidegger, Zizek invokes critic Ernst Nolte’s justification of Heidegger’s political decision to join the Nazi party in the 1930s as a choice Heidegger made between Communism and national socialism. In these terms, Zizek defends not only Heidegger’s philosophical legacy, but his choice between two totalitarian governments. He suggests that one has to pronounce that one (either Communism or Nazism) is “fundamentally worse” and given the effects of the Gulag, a clear distinction cannot be made. He suggests that finding fascism to be the favorable choice is “an understandable reaction to the communist threat.” This communist threat is largely understood to be the reason Paul von Hindenburg seceded power to Hitler.
The Silent Revolution
Zizek asserts that the tie between the moral vigor which was purportedly exerted by US policymakers prior to the Iraq war is the political equivalent of pedophilia in the Catholic church. He asserts the morality of global freedom has been transgressed over and over again by the self-appointed harbingers of freedom, the US liberation forces. These transgressions are both local and global, from US camps for “unlawful enemy combatants” to neighborhood watch programs.
I think Zizek raises some interesting questions about the secondary effects of the War on Terror and how the anti-globalisation movement has been both included into the terrorist classification system and has been diverted from their initial focus.
Finally, Zizek returns to the idea of the Lacanian Real, using Bergson’s response to the outbreak of WWI to suggest that until a possibility becomes real we can never truly believe it will happen. This is the “gap between possibility and belief.” Now, he suggests, we are seeing things become real today which we could not have imagined—the defense of terror in the United States and fascist political candidates in Wester Europe.
Notes on “Perverts Guide to Cinema”
This film is a look both at Zizek’s Lacanian method of interrogating cinema and Zizek’s greater philosophical project. We are treated to close readings of films often over film materials and frequently with Zizek visiting the “real” spaces where the films take place, some manufactured in a Hollywood studio while others are actual locations.
Zizek suggests in the opening: “The problem is not that our desires satisfy or not, the problem is, how do we know what we desire? there is nothing spontaneous, nothing natural about human desire. Our desires are artificial, we have to be taught to desire. Cinema is the ultimate pervert art, it doesn’t give you what you desire, it tells you what you desire.” In this sense Zizek interrogates cinema as a manufacturer of desires, but more so, as a space for revealing the desires inherent in cinematic works. One of the most prevalent themes of this film is that the real is manifested in cinema. Zizek suggests that our libido requires “a virtual world of fantasies.” (in regards to neo waking up in the matrix) “Why do we need a virtual supplement. Our libido needs an illusion in order to sustain itself.” The two quotes I’ve used from Zizek, one about desire, and the other about the libidinous need for fantasy, suggests that cinema is a way for an audience to enter a space to satiate libidinous need for fantasy, but also a space which manufactures desire itself. Zizek goes on to say that “Our fundamental delusion today is not to take fictions too seriously, it’s the contrary, not to take fictions seriously enough. You think it’s just a game, it’s reality.” And “in order to understand today’s world, we need cinema. It’s only through cinema that we get that crucial dimension we are unable to confront in our reality. If you’re looking for a reality more real than reality itself, look into the cinematic fiction.”
What does Zizek mean to suggest that cinema is more real than the real? Zizek proposes that cinematic texts are manifestations of reality because they are the interpreted subjective realities or the manufactured phantasmagoria of the cinematic creator. Behind the narrative are resonant emotional realities. In the words of critic Jim Hoberman, Zizek believes cinema “is a way of thinking, or rather it’s a machine that plays with (and domesticates) fantasy to instruct the viewer how to desire: “We need the excuse of a fiction to state what we truly are.” In a scene when discussing the Matrix, Zizek suggests that a third pill should be offered along with one to live in illusion and one to live in reality. This third pill is the ability to see the reality behind illusion—and it is in these terms that I think he hopes to interrogate cinema. We must do this to cinema because, in Zizek’s words “If something gets too traumatic, too violent, even too filled in with enjoyment, it shatters the coordinates of our reality: we have to fictionalize it.”
While I think this is a fascinating entry point into cinema studies, I wonder why the issue of ideology isn’t raised in this context. What are the desires we are being given, and what is their ultimate effect? Zizek competently illustrates the power of cinema on the viewer, but in this particular work, he forgoes exploring how that power can manipulate the viewer. Zizek makes interesting claims about meaning, but seems only interested in mediated reality (in this context) as a way for us to allow our libidinal desires to take over, as opposed to interrogating film objects as products or commodities that deliver ideology which contain a repressive hegemonic discourse. If we are being taught what we desire, are we not also being taught what not to desire? And is this by its very nature an oppressive way of looking at cinema?: As a means of manufacturing a reality rather than a means of interrogating our reality. Zizek does very briefly address this in A Holiday From History when he writes that Hollywood has shown itself to be the “ultimate state apparatus” when discussing the meetings between Hollywood scenarists and Pentagon officials to predict terrorist attacks. My question would be, why is this important facet of Zizek’s argument absent from “The Pervert’s Guide.” Artist Mark Rappaport suggests that the “history of cinema, is the history of repression” as an apparatus which shapes us—in some ways, against our own desires.
The major idea at play in the stylistic terms of Pervert’s Guide, in my mind, is Zizek and Sophie Fiennes’ play with “the real.” Zizek’s critiques in the film are often presented at the site of the creation of the object of critique. This decision supports some of Zizek’s declarations about the “real” in fiction. The return to the “real” space of cinematic fiction is, like a return to a crime scene, an attempt to construct the space as possessing an uncertain ontology. The “reality” of the space, and Zizek’s discussion of the scenes there affects our understanding of those scenes, as having existed in very real places—and with that, connecting them to “real” events. In other words by undermining the cinematic artifice of the location, many of which are too obscure for us to have any concrete ability to locate (ie. Bodega Bay in The Birds or the hotel in The Conversation) Zizek helps to familiarize us and initiate us into his construction of cinematic fiction as “more real than reality.”