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The Politics of Universal Truth: An Introduction to Slavoj ieks Lacanian Dialectics

Geoff Boucher Sketch Draft, Friday, January 11, 2013

In the arena of contemporary theory and postmodern culture dominated by the postmarxian abandonment of revolutionary politics and the envious resentment of Enlightenment that is characteristic of postmodernism Slavoj iek is a breath of fresh air. iek swims against the stream: a defender of Hegel against the legions of deconstructionists for whom totality means totalitarian; a supporter of Lacan not as a postmodern theorist but as an Enlightenment thinker; an advocate of Lenin in an age of universal Menshevism. In opposition to cynical resignation, postmodern relativism and New Age obscurantism the plague of pragmatists, sophists and mystics that represent the intellectual apologists for the New World Order iek calls for a revolutionary analysis of the links between corporate globalisation and cultural subjectivity that might, according to the manifesto for the series he edits, detonate a dynamic freedom from capital. If modernity opens the abyss of freedom, then postmodernism is precisely the symptom of a retreat from that abyss. ieks work is an effort to re-open the abyss of freedom and determine a different direction for the social, by means of a politicised, Lacanian Enlightenment. Whats more, iek is immensely entertaining. Enjoy your iek! is the imperative of the amusing introduction to ieks work currently circulating on the Internet. The article highlights ieks eccentricities, role as theoretical provocateur and what iek would perhaps call the idiotic enjoyment of reading iek. Enjoy your iek! probably sets the standard for the reduction of ieks politicisation of Lacanian psychoanalysis to an ensemble of discursive quirks central castings pick for the role of Eastern European intellectual (Boynton, 1998: 1). The potential trap that the article flirts with, of course, is that this is iek as the object of an Orientalist fantasy. It is not a fantasy that he is averse to manipulating. iek plays on the tropes of the fantasy space marked out by what has been called a non-doxological, even exotic interpretation of Hegel (Gasch, 1994: 278 n.214). This produces a seemingly bizarre medley of popular culture, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian philosophy and radical politics. Shifting effortlessly between recondite polemics with deconstruction and interesting motifs from Alien, iek proclaims that his intent is to read in the spirit of Lacans Kant avec Sade the most sublime theoretical motifs of Jacques Lacan together with and through exemplary cases from contemporary mass culture (iek, 1991: vii). Looking awry at contemporary philosophy, ieks texts are generously larded with invective (who can possibly forget ieks description of the work of his former postmarxist cothinkers, for instance, as a hysterical demand for a new master?) and the ascription of psychopathologies to his highly respected discursive interlocutors (Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida are, for instance, perverts). Working hard to position himself as the Other of trans-Atlantic postmodern cultural studies, iek delights in the paradoxes engendered by the Lacanian concept of the Real and the frisson of politically incorrect provocations to postmodern relativism. At once disturbing (the enemy today is not the fundamentalist but the cynic (iek, 2001: x)) and eerily familiar (the unbearable is not difference [but] the fact that there is no difference: there are no exotic, blood-thirsty Balkanians in Sarajevo, just normal citizens like us (iek, 1994: 2)), ieks discourse is designed to appear as outlandish and fascinating. Page 1 of 10

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In short, iek likes to play the fool. Now, the role of the fool, of course, is to gild unpleasant truths with wit. Indeed, Lacan takes the effect of the witticism to be exemplary of what psychoanalysis refers to as the subversion of the subject in the dialectic of desire. The joke plays on the split between the (conscious) subject of the statement and the (unconscious) subject of the enunciation. We laugh at the jokes subversion of the self-identity of the ego. If, then, the joke is on us, what is ieks position of enunciation, and what is the content of the iekian witz? The description of ieks discourse as outlandish and fascinating, yet eerily familiar, was intended precisely to evoke the Freudian concept of the manifestations of the unconscious as uncanny. iek positions himself as analyst to contemporary culture including theory as its highest expression and effects a dialectical punctuation of the philosophical discourse of (post)modernity. Contemporary theory is concerned above all with the forms of the coming community that is, with the destiny of modernity and the possibility of a democracy to come. The contemporary motifs of intersubjectivity regulated by unconstrained communication (Habermas), the gift as the beginning of every social relation and an infinite hospitality towards the other (Derrida), the pragmatic acceptance of postmodern liberal bourgeois democracy as the best of all possible worlds (Rorty), all aim at a utopian concept of universal peace. The unpleasant truth carried by iek is stated with a characteristic combination of the categorical imperative laced with illegitimate enjoyment: Enjoy Your Symptom!; Love Thy Neighbour? No Thanks!; Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself! The postmodern ethics of infinite responsibility towards the other and the regulatory-cum-ethical framework of postmodern political correctness are only, iek suggests, efforts to evade the traumatic encounter with the filthy enjoyment that the other is supposed to possess. The postmodern ethics of Otherness is a polite displacement of an unconscious hatred for the other. The completion of modernitys destruction of tradition the famous reflexive modernity and the risk society - are supposed to make possible the democratisation of the institutions of modernity and the pacification of social antagonisms in a postmodern social contract. Taking the appalling disintegration of former Yugoslavia as paradigmatic of the discontents of postmodernity, iek suggests that the sublimity of a democracy to come and openness towards the Other are forms of self-deception. Instead of ethnic nationalism being as the sociologists of the risk society propose - the product of a regression to tradition, it was, iek suggests, the result of the complete entry of former Yugoslavia into modernity. Instead of the openness to the Other being an ethical response to ethnic cleansing that might avert future catastrophes, this actually leads either to a suspension of ethics (how can we possibly judge the Others practices of mass executions, clitoridectomy, widow burning and torture?), or to an assimilationism masked by folkloric condescension (we love the funny hats and falafels of the Other, but the moment they acquire guns they suddenly oh, mystery! turn into Islamic fundamentalists, who have to be bombed by the cruise missiles of democracy). Both the postmodern ethics of Otherness and the sociology of reflexive modernity have no answers to what iek calls the momentous question of the momentous question of the disavowed passionate attachments which support the new reflexive freedom of the subject delivered from the constraints of Nature and/or Tradition (iek, 2000: 344). By passionate attachments, iek is referring to the dependency on subjection that sustains the freedom of the subject. ieks claim is that postmodern culture inverts the standard relation between public hierarchy and a private freedom composed of secret transgressions: the typical subject is now the secret devotee of sado-masochistic sexual practices, as the hidden obverse to the new social freedom. The passionate attachment to some extreme form of regulated domination and submission becomes the secret transgressive source of libidinal satisfaction, the obscene supplement to the public sphere of freedom and equality. The rigidly codified Master/Slave relationship turns up as the very form of inherent transgression of subjects living in a society in which all forms of life are experienced as a matter of the free choice of a lifestyle (iek, 2000: 345). This may be taken in the widest possible sense, so that, for instance in Australia, we are all good multiculturalists, but, strangely enough, vote en masse for one of the most racist governments in Australian history that is, our public pluralist tolerance is sustained by a private regimen of Page 2 of 10

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fanatical hatred towards this or that marginalized group, something that the conservatives knew well how to exploit in the conditions of the secret ballot. In the face of this perversion of moral life, the postmodern ethics of Otherness and the sociology of reflexive modernity can suggest only to love thy neighbour. It is not the lameness of this injunction that disturbs iek, so much as its suppressed premise: the full (Biblical) injunction is to love your neighbour as you love yourself. It is precisely this narcissistic pseudo-dialectic of identification with the Same and rage against the Other that forms the core of the discontents of modernity, according to iek. What psychoanalysis reveals is that the neighbour, precisely as my Other, confronts me first and foremost as a stranger, as a traumatic, unwelcome reminder of the division that I bear within myself. In my unconscious fantasy, I convert this internal impossibility of being whole into an external obstacle to be managed or destroyed, as opportunity permits. ieks claim is that this fantasy is normally constrained by symbolic rituals (forms of ethical life) that supply a neutral medium for the resolution of differences but the perversion of moral existence consonant with postmodernism leads to the disintegration of this shared world of social norms. The terrifying irruptions of communal violence, religious fundamentalism and Western militarism are evidence that the second, reflexive modernity (for iek, equivalent to postmodernism) brings not just liberation, but also frightening new forms of domination. For iek, therefore, only Lacans ethics of the drive and the concept of psychoanalytically-informed politics as traversal of the fantasy yield a compelling response to the problems of community and violence in the postmodern condition. For iek, modernitys leap into the abyss of freedom leads not to the emancipation of the autonomous subject but to the hypocritical conformism of an enlightened cynicism. The new end of history of the post-Communist global hegemony of American finance capital the event-less reality of the New World Order intensifies the depoliticisation characteristic of modernity. This produces postmodern post-politics: Richard Rortys postmodern liberal bourgeois democracy as the horizon for the multiplicity of all particular struggles for recognition. Postmodern post-politics, iek argues: no longer merely represses the political, trying to contain it and pacify the returns of the repressed, but much more effectively forecloses it, so that the postmodern forms of ethnic violence, with their irrational excessive character, are no longer simple returns of the repressed but, rather, represent a case of the foreclosed (from the Symbolic) which, as we know from Lacan, returns in the Real (iek, 2000: 198). The deadlock of the contemporary world, then, springs from the declining efficiency of symbolic authority and the rise of post-political technocracy, exemplified by the global Third Way of Anthony Giddens and Tony Blair. This generates a combination of depoliticised apathy and anti-political fundamentalism, which means that violence is increasingly the matrix for the resolution of social conflicts. ieks effort to create an emancipatory politics capable of breaking through this pseudo-dialectic of cynicism and violence leads him to declare himself a Pauline materialist, or ethical Marxist. As he explains, the New World Order, as in medieval times, is global, but not universal, since it strives for a new, global order with each part in its allocated place (iek, 2000: 200). Therefore: we are thus more and more locked into a claustrophobic space within which we can only oscillate between the non-event of the smooth running of liberal-democratic capitalist global New World Order and fundamentalist Events (the rise of local proto-fascisms, etc.) which temporarily disturb the calm surface of the capitalist ocean no wonder that, in [similar] circumstances, Heidegger [for instance] mistook the pseudo-event of the Nazi revolution for the Event itself. Today, more than ever, one has to Page 3 of 10

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insist that the only way open to the emergence of an Event is that of breaking the vicious cycle of globalisation-with-particularisation by (re)asserting the dimension of Universality against capitalist globalisation. [Alain] Badiou draws an interesting parallel here between our time of American global domination and the late Roman Empire, also a multiculturalist global state in which multiple ethnic groups were thriving, united (not by capital, but) by the non-substantial link of the Roman legal order so that what we need today is the gesture that would undermine capitalist globalisation from the standpoint of universal Truth, just as Pauline Christianity did to the global Roman Empire (iek, 2000: 211). Yet ieks most recent statements tend instead towards a Romantic refusal of the Law. For iek, the enigma of freedom is the sudden suspension of the principle of sufficient reason. Freedom is the moment of a groundless, irrational decision (iek, 1997: 30), paradoxically executed by a new Master (iek, 1997: 72). We need to repeat Lenin and proceed to the reconstruction of society from the ground up. We have to embrace the terrifying violence of a New Beginning, one wrought by the asocial drives and not by a universalisable desire (for instance, for justice). It is high time to realize that so-called diabolical evil opposition to the moral law on principle is actually the same as the formal structure of the ethical act. Therefore we should proceed immediately to the suicidal passage al acte, the political Act that disturbs the Real and bypasses the symbolic texture of social norms and discursive legitimacy. This leads to his advocacy of the step beyond desire itself [to] adopt the position of the saint who is no longer bothered by the Others desire as its decentred cause (iek, 1997: 79). According to iek, desire is historical and symbolised, generated within the ceaseless metonymy of the signifier. Drive, by contrast, is acephalous, nonsignified, a kind of inert satisfaction exemplified by repulsive private rituals the saint is an undead partial object, pure willing, what is in the subject beyond the subject the death drive (iek, 1997: 80-81). The consequence of this position is that there is no intersubjectivity proper in drive: desire is addressed to the symbolic Other, seeking active recognition, while drive addresses itself to the silence in the Other (iek, 1997: 81). Drive is external to the reference to the Other, to the Symbolic Law, to the social it is asocial and apolitical. The ethical act (which by a short-circuit of the normal hiatus between ethics and politics is also the political Act) is a supreme crime against the moral order, one that creates its own norms ex nihilo and retroactively justifies itself history will absolve us, since, if we win, we shall write the history etc., etc. The next step actually taken by iek, since he is nothing if not consistent with his own positions is to accept that (on these terms, at least), repeating Lenin involves re-writing Stalinism, this time as high tragedy rather than as dark farce. While iek insists that this is not an advocacy of amorality (but instead the restitution of ethical life), his paradigm of the ethical act in The Ticklish Subject is a love affair between a teacher and a 14 year old student; while iek assures us that this is not a terrorist ethics, his most recent example of an act that touches the Real was the destruction of the World Trade Centre buildings iek is caught in an antinomy. In the important essay, The Unconscious Law: Towards an Ethics Beyond the Good, iek asks: is not Lacans entire theoretical edifice torn between these two options: between the ethics of desire/Law, of maintaining the gap, and the lethal/suicidal immersion in the Thing? (iek, 1997: 239). Whatever the case with Lacan, this certainly describes ieks dilemma perfectly. On the one hand: Approached from [the] Kantian standpoint, Lacans do not give way on your desire (the ethical injunction not to compromise on ones desire) in no way condones the suicidal persistence in following ones Thing; on the contrary, it enjoins us to remain faithful to our desire as sustained by the Law of maintaining a minimal

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distance towards the Thing one is faithful to ones desire by maintaining the gap which sustains desire, the gap on account of which the incestuous Thing forever eludes the subjects grasp (iek, 1997: 239). This is the iek who declares that the death drive (the Thing) represents the dimension of radical negativity that cannot be reduced to an expression of alienated social conditions. Instead, it defines the human condition as such: there is no solution, no escape from it; the thing to do is not to overcome, to abolish it, but to learn to recognise it in its terrifying dimension and then, on the basis of this fundamental recognition, to try to articulate a modus vivendi with it (iek, 1989: 5). Therefore: it is not only that the aim is no longer to abolish this antagonism, but that the aspiration to abolish it is precisely the source of totalitarian temptation; the greatest mass murders and holocausts have always been perpetrated in the name of man as a harmonious being, of a New Man without antagonistic tension (iek, 1989: 5). Indeed, this fantasy of the absolute crime that opens a New Beginning is sadistic. It is the fantasy that: liberates Nature from its own laws, rendering it possible to create new forms of life ex nihilo, from the zeropoint. It is therein that Lacan locates the link between sublimation and the death-drive: sublimation equates to creation ex nihilo, on the basis of the annihilation of the previous Tradition. It is not difficult to see how all radical revolutionary projects, Khmer Rouge included, rely on this same fantasy of a radical annihilation of Tradition and of the creation ex nihilo of a new (sublime) Man, delivered from the corruptions of previous history (iek, 1991: 261). But on the other hand, prohibition eroticises, and so theres an irresistible fascination in the lethal/suicidal immersion in the Thing at least for iek. Hence, in the unplugging from the new world order by the authentic psychoanalytic and revolutionary political collectives that iek now urges (iek, 2000: 160): uncoupling does actually involve symbolic death one has to die for the law (Saint Paul) that regulates our tradition, our social substance. The term new creation is revealing here, signalling the gesture of sublimation, of erasing the traces of ones past (everything old has passed away) and beginning afresh from the zero-point: consequently there is also a terrifying violence at work in this uncoupling, that of the death drive, of the radical wiping the slate clean as the condition of the New Beginning (iek, 2000: 127). This sort of Year Zero-style rhetoric may be meant as a provocation to the relativists, as a gesture of defiance towards the contemporary prohibition on thinking about revolution. (You say that revolution always leads to the gulag, that Im a secret Stalinist? Very well then I openly affirm myself a Stalinist. Now what actual arguments do you have against my Stalinism, aside from the consensus on the undesirability of social transformation, ie., the current doxa?) Nonetheless, I suggest that this combination of Leninist voluntarism and irrational Pauline materialism does not resist the postmodern couplet of cynical distance and irrational fundamentalism, but repeats its terms. Let me make myself perfectly plain on this point. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the advocacy of revolution, including the resort to violence in order to defend the revolution from reaction. To advocate violence for its own sake, however, to claim that the revolution is made not in the interests of universal justice, but rather so as to wipe the slate clean this is categorically not Marxism, but a cynical perversion of socialism lifted from the pages of Karl Popper or Hannah Arendt, one that accepts the terms of debate set forth by the enemies and slanderers of socialism, for whom the alternatives are enthusiastic resignation to capitalism (postmarxism) or the brutal machine of the Page 5 of 10

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totalitarian state, where fascism and socialism meet at the extremes of opposition to liberal democracy (totalitarianism). (Very well then, cries iek in despair, let us have totalitarian violence rather than this ubiquitous nothing.) Nothing compels the Left except for the moral cowardice, the willingness to give way on our revolutionary desire, which is the staple of todays postmarxian Menshevism to accept this fatuous opposition between reformism and totalitarianism. Nothing could be more alien to Marxs thought (or Lenins) than this advocacy of a New Beginning starting from the zero-point. What is dialectics which the adversaries of the dialectic have long stigmatized for its fantasy of progress, for what they claim is its inability to conceptualise that something might be lost in the historical process and not lifted up to a higher form of development except a teaching on the idiocy of any moralizing opposition to the bourgeois order as corrupt and degenerate? Adam Smith and Milton Friedman together cannot compete with the praise lavished upon capitalism as a socially and morally progressive system by The Communist Manifesto. It is not that capitalism is an economically progressive society whose moral corruption must be eliminated on the contrary, capitalism is a morally superior system whose economic contradictions retard humanitys social advance. The proletariat as Lenin and Trotsky tirelessly repeated has no culture of its own, and must develop a higher culture by building upon bourgeois norms. ieks concepts of the ethical decision and the political act combine political voluntarism with ethical decisionism. In political voluntarism, sheer will substitutes for the ceaseless weaving of the spirit, the slow, nearly invisible accumulation of objective contradictions and subjective convictions. Instead of the task of patiently explaining, the indefatigable hammering away of revolutionary propaganda, we have the guerilla fantasy of the propaganda of the deed, the exemplary (terrorist) act that galvanizes the population by awakening their latent opposition to the social order. In ethical decisionism, a sovereign subject that precedes all socialization determines, thanks to the unity of the sovereign will, a fresh course, without reference to established norms or protocols of legitimacy. Advocates of ethical decisionism (the legions of postmarxian admirers of the semi-nazi legal theorist, Carl Schmidt, for instance) tend to present the moment of decision as a leap into madness, a Pascalian wager, an ex nihilo determination of the exception that creates the rule. This mistakes the absence of any Divine Guarantee for moral conduct for an absence of any criteria for moral judgement whatsoever, the impossibility of knowing all the results of an action for the impossibility of judging which course seems best under the circumstances. In the iekian ethicopolitical Act, the death drive as a pure undivided will prior to socialization, the primordial Will that wills nothing (that is absolute negativity) inhabits the saint, who becomes the object-like instrument for the ethical, asocial drive. This combines ethical decisionism and political voluntarism into a single figure. It is uncannily close to the psychoanalytic description of perversion: the pervert believes that they have to become the instrument for the enjoyment of the Other (for instance, the Stalinist, who believes that their crimes are legitimate because they are the instrument of the historical process). iek believes that the saint has to become the instrument, not of the Other (of the social norms), but of the death drive itself. The operative difference, I suggest, will be negligible. Strange as it may seem, ieks rehabilitation of Stalin (iek insists that we cannot have the revolution without the revolutionaries, that is, that we cannot have the insurrectionary moment without the subsequent period of consolidation in which the revolution eats its own children: no Guevarra without Castro; no Lenin without Stalin) is a symptom of his resistance to revolutionary politics. For iek, Trotsky (and presumably Guevarra also) remains a beautiful soul, a whinger who cannot stand to see the consequences of the act, and instead maintains the hysterical stance of demanding the impossible, so as to protect their Simon-pure desire from corruption by its enactment. That is to say, Trotskys insistence that the social revolution not become mired in the familiar filth of capitalism (for instance, Stalins rehabilitation of nationalism and traditional gender roles), strikes iek as hysteria, in opposition to Page 6 of 10

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Stalins gesture of the leader. Two things are interesting about this. The first is that, in psychoanalysis, the discourse of the master (the foundation of a new order through a passage to the act - Lenins revolutionary gesture, for instance) is succeeded by the discourse of the university, a bureaucratic discourse of legitimation that tries to erase the traces of contingency in the foundation of the new order, to re-write history as an evolutionary process issuing inevitably in the current social order. Stalin appears in this light as the bureaucratic leader intent upon the eradication of all traces of the past so as to create a harmonious New Order. But this is itself succeeded by the discourse of the hysteric, a discourse that revives the traces of the traumatic origins of the current order, that prods the symbolic texture of the present, searching for the hidden evidence of its imperfection that show how this order might have been otherwise (and might be otherwise once more). And finally, the hysteric is succeeded by the discourse of the analyst, a discourse of radical emptying of the passionate attachments to the current order, an insistence on once more an effort an insistence that we not give way on our desire and settle for conformity to the new order or the compensations of armchair criticism, but proceed once more to the act. Now, whether Trotsky should be considered, in this light, a hysteric or an analyst, is really irrelevant. What is interesting is ieks suspension of this dialectic at the discourse of the university, and the related petrifaction of the process into a series of water-tight, necessary and inevitable stages. The insistence of the early ieks work, on the radical contingency of the historical process, seems to me a useful corrective to this atrophy of the revolutionary instinct. There is no Lenin without Stalin, and no Trotsky without Stalin either certainly. But nothing absolutely nothing predetermines the victory of Stalin. I dispute that a revolutionary desire includes acceptance of the figure of the bureaucratic leader as the inevitable result of the revolutionary passage to the act. For my money, Trotsky is an analyst: the revolution in permanence means, do not give way on your desire. Nothing rests upon the precise choice of historical figures here I might have chosen Che Guevarra, for instance since this is not about wrangling over the interpretation of historical details, but about symbolic paradigms (archetypes) upon which to develop ethical judgements. To continue: in this interpretation, the hysterics are figures like Lukcs, Bukharin and Joffe, figures whose criticisms of the Stalin rgime concealed a hidden passionate attachment to their subjection and whose actions (recantation, self-destruction) betrayed their inability to break with the new order. Against the desperate poverty of ieks example of Mary Kays romance with a teenager as the paradigm of an ethical act beyond the good (iek, 2000: 385-388), I claim that Leon Trotskys exile from Russia and formation of the Fourth International is a real ethical act. Trotskys exile meant the end of any effective political opposition in the Soviet Union, while the formation of the Fourth International ended the intervention of the Left Opposition within the Third International and made the Trotskyites into international pariahs. Recall that the accommodation to Stalinism made by figures like Brecht and Lukcs was justified on the grounds that membership of the Third International (including repudiation of Trotskyite deviations) was the essential condition for any effective fight against fascism, and you have some sense of the subjective stakes involved. Even for sympathetic biographers of Trotsky, such as Isaac Deutscher, the formation of the Fourth International was a suicidal act of madness that ruined any chance of winning over the tends of thousands of communists in the international movement. By forming an alternative International (and declaring the Soviet Union betrayed and the mass communist movement dead for the revolution), Trotsky committed symbolic suicide that is, he destroyed what it was in the social order that supported his identity (the leader of the October Revolution, second only to Lenin), and became an excremental remainder, a piece of waste without a symbolic place (literally no country would accept Trotskys documents or receive him into exile). Trotskys assassination simply sealed what was already, at the level of the symbolic order, the truth.

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According to ieks cothinker, Alenka Zupani, in the ethics of psychoanalysis, the ethical act involves a moment of radical subjective destitution, in which the subject proceeds to the act through an abyssal realisation of desire (Zupancic, 2000: 249-259). Psychoanalysis contrasts the ethics of the master the traditional ethics of premodern societies, expressed by the dictum better death than dishonour and typified by Antigone with the ethics of the Real, the modern ethics of the drive, expressed by the dictum liberty or death. Better death than dishonour is an either/or choice, a forced choice: only by choosing death does the master retain honour (hence pre-modern heroes are tragic heroes). Liberty or death is a neither/nor choice: only by choosing death does the modern (anti-)hero demonstrate their lack of attachment to any worldly (pathological) goods thereby losing liberty in the moment of its attainment (hence modern heroes are tragic anti-heroes). The masters realization of desire is accomplished in three steps: In life, there is one thing that one cannot surrender (the Cause - Honour); For this Thing, one is ready to sacrifice everything (even life); One realizes the Cause by sacrificing, in a single gesture, the all of which one is ready to sacrifice (better death than dishonour). This all is constituted with reference to an exception (the Cause). By contrast, the modern abyssal realisation of desire, the ethics of the Real, has the following structure: In life, there is one thing that one cannot surrender (the Cause - Liberty) For this Thing, one is ready to sacrifice everything (but this everything tolerates no exceptions) The only way to realize the Cause is to sacrifice it as an exception (sacrifice its exceptional character, include it in the everything that one is ready and willing to sacrifice: liberty or death). Consider, then, the difference between the Stalinist ethics of the master and the Trotskyist ethics of the Real. For Stalin: In life, there is one thing that one cannot surrender (the Revolution and the Comintern); For this Thing, one is ready to sacrifice everything (even the lives of revolutionaries); One realizes the Cause by sacrificing, in a single gesture, the all of which one is ready to sacrifice (better mass destruction than the destruction of the Revolution). By contrast, for Trotsky: In life, there is one thing that one cannot surrender (the Revolution and the Comintern) For this Thing, one is ready to sacrifice everything (but this everything tolerates no exceptions) The only way to realize the Cause is to sacrifice it as an exception (to denounce the Revolution as betrayed and to depart the Comintern as dead for revolution). In this light, for all the talk about the saint and the ethics of the drive, is not iek suspended, fascinated at the gesture of the master, unable to consummate the abyssal realization of desire, unwilling to accept the full cost of tarrying with the negative?

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The answer, then, to ieks question (is not Lacans entire theoretical edifice torn between these two options: between the ethics of desire/Law, of maintaining the gap, and the lethal/suicidal immersion in the Thing?), is No. This is a false statement of the alternatives, an ethical mirror image of the political dilemma of postmodern postpolitics (either postmarxian acceptance of the impossibility/undesirability of revolution, or totalitarian madness and the horrors of a fresh gulag). Zupanis statement of the ethics of the Real demonstrates that not giving way on ones desire (the ethical maxim of psychoanalysis) is compatible with the modern moral imperative, do your duty! Modern ethics involves neither the direct immersion in the death drive (which leads to ieks ethical decisionism and political voluntarism), nor the avoidance of the drive in a return to the ethics of the master. Instead of ieks suicidal politicoethical Act that aims directly for the Real, the ethical act involves symbolic suicide a political intervention guided by an ethical imperative that brooks no exceptions and is prepared to go all the way in its impossible demand, the revolution in permanence. For, in the final analysis, is not symbolic suicide infinitely more anxiety provoking than real suicide, than ones physical destruction (and the destruction of others)? There is a strange comfort in knowing that you are the instrument of the historical process. Who wants to end up as an excremental remainder on a planet without a visa, having sacrificed everything and yet still having no absolute guarantee that you have done the right thing? By contrast with the ethics of the drive, ieks psychotic politico-ethical Act that aims directly for the Real can only terminate in a terrorist ethics, in an ethics that substitutes violence in the Real for the dialectics of the spirit (that is, for interventions in the symbolic fields of culture and politics), and in a politics that desperately attempts to galvanise the historical process through the propaganda of the deed, through exemplary acts of violence or extraordinary acts of transgression. This is what Zupani calls the ethics of fantasy (the ethics of desire is the ethics of fantasy (or what we have also called the ethics of the master) (Zupancic, 2000: 254)), and it is, I suggest, the ethics of the antagonist, the ethics of nationalism, fundamentalism and fascism. The Left does not need such an ethics. A politics of Universal Truth? Yes, absolutely! Up to, and including, repeating Lenin. But repetition entails a minimum of difference: our repetition of Lenin will not be a slavish imitation of the past (up to and including a rehabilitation of Stalin!), but a creative adaptation. We no more need to imitate Lenin than we need to rush out and join one of the splinters of the Fourth International (and imitate Trotsky). Nor should we imagine that an ethics (a concept of ethical life, an ethics of the Real) can ground a politics in the traditional sense of supplying an Absolute Guarantee of the ethical validity of every political act. There are no short-circuits between ethics and politics, nor any deductions, in the grand metaphysical style of Hegel, of the political consequences of the dialectical unfolding of ethical life. Instead, there is a relation of singular articulation, of invention, between ethics and politics. We act without final guarantees which is to say, we accept an infinite responsibility for the unforeseeable consequences of our acts but not without criteria (such as universality and the treatment of persons as ends, not means). We accept that there are many politics minimally compatible with modern ethics, and refuse to substitute moral judgement for the rational cognition of alternative claims (moralism). The leftwing claim is not that socialism is the only ethical politics. It is that it is the best. So is iek a Romantic ruin, a symptom of the times (of the break with identity politics, during the 1990s, of a section of the Left, as its confidence began to revive after an historical defeat), with no theoretical value? Categorically not. I claim that iek provides a concept of ethical life that includes social antagonism that is, a concept of ethical life that, instead of aiming for a harmonious society staffed by the New Man, recognises the permanence of politics and articulates a modus vivendi with social antagonism. By reading iek against iek, by shifting the emphasis and refusing some of the rhetorical escalation that often traps iek into accepting alien terms of debate, I believe that it is

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possible to avoid ieks dilemma and articulate a leftwing ethics that might support a contemporary radical politics. this reconstruction is, however, the topic of a subsequent contribution.

Boynton, Robert (1998). Enjoy Your iek!: An Excitable Slovenian Philosopher Examines The Obscene Practices Of Everyday Life - Including His Own. Lingua Franca 8(7). Gasch, Rodolphe (1994). Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. iek, Slavoj (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York, Verso. iek, Slavoj (1991). For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London and New York, Verso. iek, Slavoj (1991). Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA and London, MIT Press. iek, Slavoj (1994). The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality. London and New York, Verso. iek, Slavoj (1997). The Abyss of Freedom. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press. iek, Slavoj (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. London and New York, Verso. iek, Slavoj (2000). The Fragile Absolute - Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London and New York, Verso. iek, Slavoj (2000). The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London and New York, Verso. iek, Slavoj (2001). Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. London and New York, Routledge. Zupancic, Alenka (2000). Ethics of the Real. London and New York, Verso.

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