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First Impressions
Fredric Jameson

The Parallax View by Slavoj Žižek Buy this book

As every schoolchild knows by now, a new book by Žižek is supposed to

include, in no special order, discussions of Hegel, Marx and Kant; various
pre- and post-socialist anecdotes and reflections; notes on Kafka as well as on
mass-cultural writers like Stephen King or Patricia Highsmith; references to
opera (Wagner, Mozart); jokes from the Marx Brothers; outbursts of
obscenity, scatological as well as sexual; interventions in the history of
philosophy, from Spinoza and Kierkegaard to Kripke and Dennett; analyses of
Hitchcock films and other Hollywood products; references to current events;
disquisitions on obscure points of Lacanian doctrine; polemics with various
contemporary theorists (Derrida, Deleuze); comparative theology; and, most
recently, reports on cognitive philosophy and neuroscientific ‘advances’.
These are lined up in what Eisenstein liked to call ‘a montage of attractions’, a
kind of theoretical variety show, in which a series of ‘numbers’ succeed each
other and hold the audience in rapt fascination. It is a wonderful show; the
only drawback is that at the end the reader is perplexed as to the ideas that
have been presented, or at least as to the major ones to be retained. One
would think that reading all Zizek’s books in succession would only
compound this problem: on the contrary, it simplifies it somewhat, as the
larger concepts begin to emerge from the mist. Still, one would not have it any
other way, which is why the current volume – which, with its companion The
Ticklish Subject (1999), purports to outline the ‘system’ as a whole (if it is
one), or at least to make a single monumental statement – inspires some
apprehension.

It will be dialectical to say that this apprehension is and is not confirmed. The
first chapter, which explains the title and seeks to ground Zizek’s philosophy
in some definitive method, is tough going indeed; I’ll come back to it. But
later chapters – on Heidegger and politics, on cognitive philosophy and its
impasses, on anti-semitism, on politics today – are luminous and eloquent,

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and will surely stand as major statements, with enough to provoke and irritate
people from one end of the ideological spectrum to another (I am myself
attacked in passing as some kind of gullible practitioner of commodification
theory). Nor are they lacking in jokes, as tasteless as you might wish, and in
passing remarks on current films (Zizek seems to have got Hitchcock out of
his system, if not out of his unconscious – one never does that).

As for what has persisted through this now considerable oeuvre, I will start
with the dialectic, of which Zizek is one of the great contemporary
practitioners. The old stereotype is that Hegel works according to a cut-and-
dried progression from thesis, through antithesis, to synthesis. This, Zizek
explains, is completely erroneous: there are no real syntheses in Hegel and
the dialectical operation is to be seen in an utterly different way; a variety of
examples are adduced. Still, that stupid stereotype was not altogether wrong.
There is a tripartite movement in the Hegelian dialectic, and in fact, Zizek
goes on, he has just illustrated it: stupid stereotype, or the ‘appearance’;
ingenious correction, the underlying reality or ‘essence’; finally, after all, the
return to the reality of the appearance, so that it was the appearance that was
‘true’ after all.

What can this possibly have to do with popular culture? Let’s take a
Hollywood product, say, Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window (1944). (Maybe
now Fritz Lang belongs to high culture rather than mass culture, but
anyway . . .) Edward G. Robinson is a mild-mannered professor who, leaving
his peaceful club one night, gets caught up in a web of love and murder. We
think we are watching a thriller. At length, he takes refuge in his club again,
falls asleep from exhaustion, and wakes up: it was all a dream. The movie has
done the interpretation for us, by way of Lang’s capitulation to the cheap
Hollywood insistence on happy endings. But in reality – which is to say in the
true appearance – Edward G. Robinson ‘is not a quiet, kind, decent, bourgeois
professor dreaming that he is a murderer, but a murderer dreaming, in his
everyday life, that he is a quiet, kind, decent, bourgeois professor’.
Hollywood’s censorship is therefore not some puritanical, uptight middle-
class mechanism for repressing the obscene, nasty, antisocial, violent
underside of life: it is, rather, the technique for revealing it.

Zizek’s interpretative work, from page to page, seems to revel in these

paradoxes: but that is itself only some ‘stupid first impression’ (one of his
favourite phrases). In reality, the paradox-effect is designed to undo that

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second moment of ingenuity, which is that of interpretation (it looks like this
to you, but in reality what is going on is this . . .): the paradox is of the second
order, so that what looks like a paradox is in reality simply a return to the first
impression itself.

Or perhaps we might rather say: this is not a paradox, this is perversity. And
indeed, the dialectic is just that inveterate, infuriating perversity whereby a
commonsense empiricist view of reality is repudiated and undermined. But it
is undermined together with its own accompanying interpretations of that
reality, which look so much more astute and ingenious than the
commonsense empiricist reality itself, until we understand that the
interpretations are themselves also part of precisely that ‘first impression’.
This is why the dialectic belongs to theory rather than philosophy: the latter is
always haunted by the dream of some foolproof self-sufficient system, a set of
interlocking concepts which are their own cause. This dream is of course the
after-image of philosophy as an institution in the world, as a profession
complicit with everything else in the status quo, in the fallen ontic realm of
‘what is’. Theory, on the other hand, has no vested interests inasmuch as it
never lays claim to an absolute system, a non-ideological formulation of itself
and its ‘truths’; indeed, always itself complicit in the being of current
language, it has only the vocation and never-finished task of undermining
philosophy as such, by unravelling affirmative statements and propositions of
all kinds. We may put this another way by saying that the two great bodies of
post-philosophical thought, marked by the names of Marx and Freud, are
better characterised as unities of theory and practice: that is to say that their
practical component always interrupts the ‘unity of theory’ and prevents it
from coming together in some satisfying philosophical system. Alain Badiou
has recently coined the expression ‘anti-philosophy’ for these new and
constitutively scandalous modes of intervening conceptually in the world; it is
a term that Zizek has been very willing to revindicate for himself.

Still, what can be the theoretical, if not indeed the philosophical content of
Zizek’s little interpretative tricks? Let’s first take on the supremely
unclassifiable figure who somehow, in ways that remain to be defined,
presides over all Zizek’s work. One of Jacques Lacan’s late seminars has the
title Les Non-Dupes errent. The joke lies in the homophony of this enigmatic
proposition (‘the undeceived are mistaken’) with the oldest formula in the
Lacanian book, ‘le nom du Père’, the name of the Father or, in other words,
the Oedipus complex. However, Lacan’s later variant has nothing to do with

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the Father, but rather with the structure of deception. As everyone knows, the
truth is itself the best disguise, as when the spy, asked what he does in life,
answers, ‘Why, I’m a spy,’ only to be greeted with laughter. This peculiarity of
truth, to express itself most fully in deception or falsehood, plays a crucial role
in analysis, as one might expect. And as one might also expect, it is in that
great non- or anti-philosopher Hegel that we find the most elaborate
deployment of the dialectic of the necessity of error and of what he called
appearance and essence, as well as the most thoroughgoing affirmation of the
objectivity of appearance (one of the deeper subjects of The Parallax View).
The other great modern dialectician, Theodor Adorno (whose generic tone
compares with Zizek’s, perhaps, as tragedy to comedy), was fond of observing
that nowhere was Hegel closer to his heroic contemporary Beethoven than in
the great thunderchord of the Logic, the assertion that ‘Essence must appear!’

Yet this insistence on appearance now seems to bring us around unexpectedly

to the whole vexed question of postmodernism and postmodernity, which is
surely nothing if it is not a wholesale repudiation of essences in the name of
surface, of truth in the name of fiction, of depth (past, present or future) in
the name of the Nietzschean eternally recurring here-and-now. Zizek seems to
identify postmodernism with ‘postmodern philosophy’ and relativism (an
identification he shares with other enemies of these developments, some of
them antediluvian, some resistant to the reification of the label), while on the
other hand he endorses the proposition of an epochal change, provided we
don’t call it that and provided we insist that it is still, on whatever scale,
capitalism – something with which I imagine everyone will nowadays be
prepared to agree. Indeed, some of his basic propositions are unthinkable
except within the framework of the epochal, and of some new moment of
capitalism itself; Lacan is occasionally enlisted in the theorisation of these
changes, which have taken place since Freud made his major discoveries.

Take the new definition of the superego. No longer the instance of repression
and judgment, of taboo and guilt, the superego has today become something
obscene, whose perpetual injunction is: ‘Enjoy!’ Of course, the inner-directed
Victorian must equally have been directed to enjoy his own specific historical
repressions and sublimations; but that jouissance was probably not the same
kind of enjoyment as that taken by the subject of consumer society and of
obligatory permissiveness (Marcuse called it ‘repressive desublimation’), the
subject of a desperate obligation to ‘liberate’ one’s desires and to ‘fulfil
oneself’ by satisfying them. Yet psychoanalysis always involves a tricky and

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unstable balance between the theorisation of an eternal human psyche and

the historical singularity of culture and mores: the latter tilts you back into
periodisation, while the ‘eternal’ model is secured by the simple reminder that
desire is never satisfied, whether you are a Victorian in thrall to duty or a
postmodern intent on pleasure.

This is the point at which we reach the most persistent of all Zizek’s
fundamental themes: namely, the death wish, the Thanatos, or what he
prefers to call the ‘death drive’. Modern theory is indeed haunted by Freud’s
death wish, that better mousetrap which any self-respecting intellectual owes
it to himself or herself to invent a theory of (Freud’s own version having
satisfied nobody). But we also owe it to ourselves to retain everything that is
paradoxical (or perverse) in Zizek’s (or in Lacan’s) version of the matter; for
here the Thanatos has nothing to do with death at all. Its horror lies in its
embodiment as life itself, sheer life, indeed, as immortality, and as a curse
from which only death mercifully relieves us (all the operatic overtones of The
Flying Dutchman are relevant here, all the mythic connotations of the
Wandering Jew, or indeed the vampire, the undead, those condemned to live
for ever). The death drive is what lives inside us by virtue of our existence as
living organisms, a fate that has little enough to do with our biographical
destinies or even our existential experience: the Thanatos lives through us (‘in
us what is more than us’); it is our species-being; and this is why it is
preferable (following the later Lacan) to call it a drive rather than a desire,
and to distinguish the impossible jouissance it dangles before us from the
humdrum desires and velleities we constantly invent and then either satisfy or
substitute.

As for jouissance, it is perhaps the central or at least the most powerful

category in Zizek’s explanatory resources, a phenomenon capable of
projecting a new theory of political and collective dynamics as much as a new
way of looking at individual subjectivity. But to grasp the implications it is
best to see jouissance as a relational concept rather than some isolated
‘ultimately determining instance’ or named force. In fact, it is the concept of
the envy of jouissance that accounts for collective violence, racism,
nationalism and the like, as much as for the singularities of individual
investments, choices and obsessions: it offers a new way of building in the
whole dimension of the Other (by now a well-worn concept which, when not
merely added mechanically onto some individual psychology, evaporates into
Levinassian sentimentalism). The power of this conception of envy may also

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be judged from the crisis into which it puts merely consensual and liberal
ideals like those of Rawls or Habermas, which seem to include none of the
negativity we experience in everyday life and politics. Zizek, indeed, includes
powerful critiques of other current forms of bien-pensant political idealism
such as multiculturalism and the rhetoric of human rights – admirable liberal
ideals calculated to sap the energies of any serious movement intent on
radical reconstruction.

All these ideals presuppose the possibility of some ultimate collective

harmony and reconciliation as the operative goal or end of political action. It
would be wrong to identify these ultimate aims with utopian thinking, which
on the contrary presupposes a violent rupture with the current social system.
Rather, they are associated, for Zizek, with that quite different absence of
antagonism denounced in his very first book, The Sublime Object of Ideology
(1989), a target also identified by Lacan and which has always been central in
Zizek’s tireless explanations and propagation of Lacanian doctrine. This is the
conviction that human subjectivity is permanently split and bears a gap
within itself, a wound, an inner distance that can never be overcome:
something Lacan demonstrated over and over again in an extraordinarily
complex (and dialectical) articulation of the original Freudian models. But
taken at this level of generality it is a view that might easily lead to social
pessimism and conservatism, to a view of original sin and the incorrigibility of
some permanent human nature.

It is to forestall and exclude just such a disastrous misunderstanding of the

social and political consequences of the Lacanian ‘gap’ that is the task of The
Parallax View. The book does so, however, not by any immediate
extrapolation of the gap or constitutive distance from individual to collective;
but rather by juxtaposing the theoretical consequences of split subjectivity on
a variety of disciplinary levels (whence the difficulty of the opening chapter).

A parallax, Webster’s says, is ‘the apparent displacement of an observed

object due to a change in the position of the observer’; but it is best to put the
emphasis not on the change or shift, so much as on the multiplicity of
observational sites, for in my opinion it is the absolute incommensurability of
the resultant descriptions or theories of the object that Zizek is after, rather
than some mere symptomal displacement. The idea thus brings us back to
that old bugbear of postmodern relativism, to which it is certainly related.
(Popular locution mutes this scandal by way of narrative: X tells the story of

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quantum theory, or modern dictatorship, this way; Y tells a different story.

These convenient and widely accepted turns of phrase efface all the serious
philosophical debates about causality, historical agency, the Event,
philosophies of history, and even the status of narrative itself, which is
probably why Zizek, assimilating the problems themselves to ‘postmodern
philosophy’, has often been dismissive of narrative as such.)

The more fundamental difference at issue can be measured by comparing the

parallax idea with the old Heisenberg principle, which asserted that the object
can never be known, owing to the interference of our own observational
system, the insertion of our own point of view and related equipment between
ourselves and the reality in question. Heisenberg is then truly ‘postmodern’ in
the assertion of an absolute indeterminacy of the real or the object, which
withdraws into the status of a Kantian noumenon. In parallax thinking,
however, the object can certainly be determined, but only indirectly, by way of
a triangulation based on the incommensurability of the observations.

The object thus is unrepresentable: it constitutes precisely that gap or inner

distance which Lacan theorised for the psyche, and which renders personal
identity for ever problematic (‘man’s radical and fundamental dis-adaptation,
mal-adaptation, to his environs’). The great binary oppositions – subject v.
object, materialism v. idealism, economics v. politics – are all ways of naming
this fundamental parallax gap: their tensions and incommensurabilities are
indispensable to productive thinking (itself just such a gap), provided we do
not lapse into some complacent agnosticism or Aristotelian moderation in
which ‘the truth lies somewhere in between’; provided, in other words, we
perpetuate the tension and the incommensurability rather than palliating or
concealing it.

The reader will judge from the case-studies in this volume whether parallax
theory has been fruitful. In particular, the chapter on the dilemmas of
cognitive science – the material brain and the data of consciousness – is a
superb achievement which transcends Spinozan parallelism towards the
ultimate Hegelian paradox: ‘Spirit is a bone.’ As far as politics is concerned, it
seems to me that Zizek’s lesson is as indispensable as it is energising. He
believes (as I do) that Marxism is an economic rather than a political doctrine,
which must tirelessly insist on the primacy of the economic system and on
capitalism itself as the ultimate horizon of the political situation (as well as of
all the other ones – social, cultural, psychic and so forth). Yet it was always a

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fundamental mistake to think that Marxism was a ‘philosophy’ which aimed

at substituting the ‘ultimately determining instance’ of the economic for that
of the political. Karl Korsch taught us eighty years ago that for Marxism the
economic and the political are two distinct and incommensurable codes which
say the same thing in radically different languages.

So how to think about the concrete combinations they present in real life and
real history? At this point, we glimpse what is clearly Zizek’s basic Lacanian
model for parallax: it is the Master’s scandalous and paradoxical idea that
between the sexes ‘il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel’ (Seminar XX). ‘If, for Lacan,
there is no sexual relationship,’ Zizek writes, ‘then, for Marxism proper, there
is no relationship between economy and politics, no “meta-language”
enabling us to grasp the two levels from the same neutral standpoint.’ The
practical consequences are startling:

To put it in terms of the good old Marxist couple

infrastructure/superstructure: we should take into account the irreducible
duality of, on the one hand, the ‘objective’ material socioeconomic
processes taking place in reality as well as, on the other, the politico-
ideological process proper. What if the domain of politics is inherently
‘sterile’, a theatre of shadows, but nonetheless crucial in transforming
reality? So, although economy is the real site and politics is a theatre of
shadows, the main fight is to be fought in politics and ideology.

This is a far better starting point for the left than the current interminable
debates about identity v. social class (it also seems to me a more appropriate
climax than the enigmatic reflections on ‘Bartleby’ that actually close the
book).

But it is appropriate, in the light of the earlier discussion, to ask just how
dialectical this now turns out to be. I think an argument would run something
like this: that third moment of the dialectic which returned to appearance as
such is sometimes described (in Hegelian jargon) as returning to ‘appearance
qua appearance’, to appearance with the understanding both that it is
appearance and that nonetheless as appearance it has its own objectivity, its
own reality as such. This is precisely what happens, I believe, with the two
alternatives of the parallax, let us say the subjective and the objective one. To
discover that neither the code of the subject nor the code of the object offers
in itself an adequate representation of the unrepresentable object it
designates means to rediscover each of these codes as sheer representation, to

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come to the conviction that each is both necessary and incomplete, that each
is so to speak a necessary error, an indispensable appearance. I would only
want to wonder whether there are not more complex forms of the parallax
situation which posit more than two alternatives (on the order of subject and
object), but which rather confront us with multiple, yet equally indispensable
codes.

I cannot conclude without explaining my hesitant apprehensions about

Zizek’s project. Clearly, the parallax position is an anti-philosophical one, for
it not only eludes philosophical systemisation, but takes as its central thesis
the latter’s impossibility. What we have here is theory, rather than
philosophy: and its elaboration is itself parallaxical. It knows no master code
(not even Lacan’s) and no definitive formulation; but must be rearticulated in
the local terms of all the figurations into which it can be extrapolated, from
ethics to neurosurgery, from religious fundamentalism to The Matrix, from
Abu Ghraib to German Idealism.

Yet theory was always itself ‘grounded’ on a fundamental (and insoluble)

dilemma: namely, that the provisional terms in which it does its work
inevitably over time get ‘thematised’ (to use Paul de Man’s expression); they
get reified (and even commodified, if I may say so), and eventually turn into
systems in their own right. The self-consuming movement of the theoretical
process gets slowed down and arrested, its provisional words turn into names
and thence into concepts, the anti-philosophy becomes a philosophy in its
own right. My occasional fear is, then, that by theorising and conceptualising
the impossibilities designated by the parallax view, Zizek may turn out to have
produced a new concept and a new theory after all, simply by naming what it
is probably better not to call the unnameable.

Fredric Jameson teaches at Duke University. His many books include A

Singular Modernity.

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