notes on zizek’s absolute recoil (2) | public seminar

12/16/14 9:52 PMNotes on Zizeks Absolute Recoil (2) | Public Seminar

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Notes on Zizeks Absolute Recoil (2)

When ever Marxists lift their attention from vulgar matters and start creatingtheories of the subject, it is always the bourgeois subject that seems to needtheorizing. Perhaps there is no other kind.

Althusser illustrates his theory of ideology with an anecdote about beinghailed in the street by a cop: Hey you! In recognizing (or rather mis-recognizing) oneself when being hailed as the subject addressed by power,one become the subject of an ideology.

But what if one takes this anecdote seriously and asks about what else mighthappen in the encounter with a cop in the street? As I write, people in thetown of Ferguson near St Louis is still taking to the streets and refusing to begood subjects over the shooting by a cop of an unarmed young Black youth.

For people of color, Hey you! might mean something quite different. Itmight mean that it does not matter whether you are guilty or not, or whetheryou think you are guilty or not. A cop has seen you who automatically knowsyou are guilty.

A person of color in todays United States might be less worries about the hailof address and more about the hail of bullets. There is no neat partition be-tween the ideological and repressive state apparatuses. The police rather se-lectively turn the ideological face toward property-owners, but it is the re-pressive boot that many people so more regularly get to see.

Moreover, it matters which street you happen to be on. There is no universalabstract street. All streets have qualities, affordances, ambiances psycho-geographies and much else besides.

Surely Althusser might have known this. He was writing just after the peak ofthe Algerian war, when the Paris police were at war with Algerian freedomfighters, when Paris regularly had curfews, and Algerians were ending up

http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/04/four-cheers-for-vulgarity/http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/10/althusserians-anonymous-1/https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm



dead in the Seine with their hands handcuffed behind their backs.

And surely his Hey you! anecdote owes more than a little to Sartre, whohad used a similar anecdote about cops and the street to illustrate what a sit-uation is. If I go out after curfew, I exercise my freedom, but I dont know theexact contours of freedoms limit. The cops might be there to challenge me,or they might not. Not only do street have affordances, they can be variable.Sartre, who in other respects probably started the Marxist obsession with thebourgeois subject, at least knew a little bit about streets.

But none of these are objections that occur to Zizek, in his commentary onAlthusser in Absolute Recoil. The sort of street Marxism that passes fromSartre to Debord and Lefebvre, does not show up in Althusser or Zizek, forwhom the anecdote about what is clearly the bourgeois subject being hailedby the police grounds a theory of universal subject which is to say, thebourgeois subject.

Althussers anecdote does deal with the relation between ideology andrepression, but in the following manner: first, force can be shown, so as notto have to be used; secondly, force does not even have to be shown, so as notto have to be used. Zizek: First, one makes a show of force so as not to haveto use it; then, one does not make a show of force so as not to have to use it.We are effectively dealing here with a kind of negation of the negation.(53)

The first is the real, the second is the symbolic. And so even with the non-showing of force, force is still present as that little piece of the real (54) stillinheres in the symbolic. Zizeks reading of Althusser is a fun one if one is abourgeois subject. For Zizek what elides Althussers theory is the gap inknowledge that requires supplement with belief. In Althusser the ideologicalfield constructs subject positions, while a science does not. In Zizek, it is ide-ology all the way down.

Zizek will then use the cop-anecdote to found an allegedly radical

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materialism, one not just about the priority of the material, but the imma-nent materiality of the ideal order itself (55) Note, however, that the priorlevel of the material, that of a street Marxism, here does not occur at all. Weimmediately to the ethereal real of the bourgeois subject.

Our subject is then not going to be the unreasonable use of direct violenceagainst Black bodies by cops who seem to get their armaments out of Marvelcomics. Rather it is going to be the unreasonable taint at the heart of reasonitself, the impossibility of a knowledge that does not traverse non-knowledge.Any actual materiality can only ever be mentioned in passing in Zizek: hissubject is the subject, which is everywhere.

Zizek:Hegels point is that the endless postponement of the arrival of a fullymoral universe is not just an effect of the gap between the purity of the Idealand the empirical circumstances which prevent its full actualization, it is lo-cated in this Ideal itself, inscribing a contradiction (a self-sabotaging desire)into its very heart. (56) For those for whom irrational violence does not ar-rive first from without.

For Zizek, contra Habermas, the tendency to cheat, lie, to distort language,is not a secondary effect but is at the core of language itself. Hence a certaininternal difficulty in those regimens for producing good bourgeois subjects inwhich one goes through the rituals, the external manifestations, and in theprocess becomes a believer. In Pascal, and in a different mode in Althusser,external obedience is the beginnings of faith or in Althussers terms, ofideology.

For Zizek, of course, it all functions in a much more twisted way (62) The[bourgeois] subject, who hears the Hey you! in the street, feels both inno-cence but also Kafkaesque guilt upon being hailed. What remainsunthought in Althussers theory of interpolation is thus the fact that, prior toideological recognition, we have an intermediate moment of obscene, impen-etrable interpellation without identification, a kind of vanishing mediatorthat has to become invisible if the subject is to achieve symbolic identity.



(64)

Or in short, who is the bourgeois subject before it becomes the bourgeoissubject, (mis)recognizing itself as hailed? But why should that even be ourquestion? Why not ask: who is the Black man hailed by the police in todaysAmerica? What if there is no universal act of enhailment into the space ofideology? Who even gets to be a subject? Who rather gets a bullet in theback?

Thus, we can answer Zizeks question, but perhaps not in the way heintended. Zizek: What would a materialism look like which fully took intoaccount this traumatic core of subjectivity irreducible to natural processes?In other words, what would a materialism look like which fully assumed themain result of transcendental idealism: the gap in the natural order signaledby the emergence of subjectivity? (72) It would give us a definition of thebourgeois: those for whom there appears to be a gap in the natural order.

The truth of Althussers theory of the bourgeois subject is to be found inBadious reversal. For Althusser subjectivity is ideological, for Badiou, Truthis subjective. This is the foundation of Badious bourgeois communism.Zizeks position will end up close to this, but not before subjecting Badiou tothe strictures of a more orthodox Lacanian critique. What the two of them to-gether Badizek opposed is democratic materialism.

Zizek: The predominant philosophical struggle occurs today withinmaterialism, between democratic and dialectical materialism and whatcharacterizes dialectical materialism is precisely that it incorporates the ide-alist legacy, against vulgar democratic materialism in all its guises, from sci-entific naturalism to the post-Deleuzian assertion of spiritualized vibrantmatter. Dialectical materialism is, first, a materialism without matterit is amaterialism with an Idea (73)

Now, I have my differences with the post-Deleuzians on precisely their pro-clivities towards forms of vitalism (hence my interest in strong critics of vital-



ism such as the neglected Needham). But here I must close ranks with thepost-deleuzians against the onslaught of this nonsense.

Zizek: materialisms problem is how to explain the rise of an eternal Idea outof the activity of people caught in a finite historical situation. (73) Well no,but that is Badious problem. The answer is the mystified notion of the eventas a kind of non-dialectical, contingent starting point of the dialectic.

If for Althusser the subject is the one interpolated by the hey you, of theideological state apparatus, in Badiou the subject is the one who says yes tothe event. The subject is curiously not that which has free choice, but is theproduct of a free choice, a choice of fidelity to an event. But who exactly getsto be a subject of an event?

On this Badiou has changed his mind. In Being and Event, only those whoname and love the event are its subjects. Later, in Logic of Worlds, the eventincludes other kinds of subjects besides those who affirm it, even though itstill excludes the neutral observer. Now there is the faithful subject, the reac-tive subject, the obscure subject and the resurrection. The event localizesthe void in the subjects who not only affirm it but acknowledge it.

Zizek: We thus have three (logically, if not temporally) consecutivemoments: the primordial unlocalizable void of multiplicity; the event as thelocalization of a previously unlocalizable void; and the process of subjec-tivization which emerges out of the free decision to choose fidelity to theevent. (77)

One is reminded here of Sartre, perhaps the great thinker of the bourgeoissubject, for whom the world just is, made by nobody, maintained by nobody,just waiting for the bourgeois subject to arrive to give it all meaning. Thatsame Sartre who had the nerve to accuse the woman and the waiter of livingin bad faith. Bourgeois subjects tend not to know who makes the world forthem, and to be rather judgy about those who do.

http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/09/joseph-needham-the-great-amphibian/



But if it takes a special event to make a subject, what about those of uswannabe bourgeois subjects who live in boring times? Even better! Those arethe times of the anticipatory subject who holds open a place for a politicalsubject to come the philosophical subject!

The philosopher gets to be the proto-bourgeois subject. Zizek: the subjectis prior to the process of subjectivization: this process fills in the void (theempty form) that is the pure subject. (80) You wont get to be Lenin (andstill less Bogdanov) but even better! you get to be Plekhanov.

The subject is thus not the unstable, provisional, plural thing that it might befor democratic materialisms, be they deleuzian or not. For this so-called di-alectical materialism the subject is first and last, first the empty frame, thepure form, and then the full subject that chooses to affirm the event in somemanner.

This is unfortunate, as in Zizek the question never really gets asked as towhat produces the subject other than the pure empty frame of the subject. Ifthere was a productive side to the deleuzian or democratic materialism, it isin work such as Maurizio Lazzaratos Signs and Machines, or BatrizPrciados Pornotopia and Testo Junkie works which really inquire into theapparatus that produces subjects and their corresponding objects. Thesebooks seems to me closer to the Marxist tradition in asking after the means ofproduction in this case not of the commodity but of the corresponding sub-jects that might produce and consume them.

Another point on which one might choose to side (with some reservations)with the deleuzians is in their refusal of a priori hierarchies of the human andthe non-human. Here Zizek joins hands with those like Ray Brassier whowant to celebrate a kind of scientific rationality which can only be a firstly hu-man but then possibly posthuman attribute.

Weirdly, the marking off of the human is here going to be for quite oppositequalities, in the one case for a rationality that can supersede the human, the

http://www.publicseminar.org/2013/12/testo-junkie-by-beatriz-preciado/



other for a rationality that is always and necessarily traversed by some mere-ly human and subjective irrationality. And, as is all too clear from Althussersinterpolation scene, or Badious insistence on the rarity of the event thatmakes the subject only certain humans ever seem to get to be fully human even if these are philosophers who claim to speak in the name of auniversality.

As Zizek notes, (apropos Badiou) animals merely follow their tasks, they donot reflect upon them. Humans, however, have the magical capacity to decideto follow or more often not follow the event. Zizek: the human being is a lazyanimal. (83) The subject gets bored, depressed, melancholic. Here he touch-es for a moment on a lively contemporary theme.

This depressive subjectivity has its uses, as it is also a way of evadinginterpolation. In the over-developed world, the worker is supposed to be onall the time, constantly innovating and disrupting itself. As Franco Berardinotes (in a deluzian mode) depression is now a common form of resistance,even if not actively chosen to be such.

Zizek wants to find a contradiction between Berardi and Hardt + Negri onthis. For the former, the cognitariat withdraws from such demands, for thelatter, it is supposed to plunge on in to immaterial labor, the increasingly so-cial quality of which will eventually render the capitalist class superfluous.But really, it is more that neither Hardt + Negri nor Berardi have a sharpenough analysis of the contemporary means of production, which at one andthe same time draws the social directly into production, but yet renders itasocial, unable to compose itself as itself.

But if given the choice, one has to go here with Hardt + Negri and Berardiand the other deleuzians, who at least are asking the right sorts of questions,about how subjectivity is industrially produced, rather than finding again andagain the same transcendental subject, which is of course always there whenone applies a hermeneutic strategy whose whole point is to always find it.



Predictably enough, Zizek does not really inquire very far into the productionof the subject today. Instead, we get that old Zizekian chestnut, Chesterton,and his charmingly everyday defenses of religious orthodoxy, and this timewithout the twist. For Chesterton, the law-breaker is boring, whereas the po-lice are interesting. Promiscuity is boring, marriage is a true adventure.(87) Heresy is boring, orthodoxy be it Catholic or Lacanian, is supposedly ahoot. Here for once Zizek is not kidding.

And thus, the non-evental time turns out not to be a problem either: theproperly Hegelian approach posits the anticipatory empty subject as theuniversal model, as the zero-level of subjectivity it is only in the void of an-ticipation that the universal form of subjectivity appears as such. (87) Onesimply repeats the philosophical procedure over and over, awaiting an eventthat comes from without even if it gets a little boring.

It may well be the case that the one thing that is not obvious about a philoso-phy is what it actually does. But what could not be clearer about Zizek is theway he legitimates the existence of a philosophically inclined bourgeois sub-ject in an era which probably no longer has or needs either a bourgeoisie orsubjects. The ruling class is of another order now, and the machines thatmanage bodies and produce objects may no longer exactly produce subjectsto correspond to them, even on the rather generous understanding ofsubject as the deluzians understand to the term.

What could be better in such an age to be a kind of Jesuitical-Lacanian sage?Awaiting the great event which one secrets hopes and even knows will nothappen. Producing the purely philosophical subject that only has to preparethe way. Taking an interest only in those things that speak to such a mode ofthinking. Lets talk about Wagner and Heidegger and Beckett just like thebourgeois intellectuals of old! Lets not sully ourselves with any knowledge ofhow the world actually works. And in our leisure time pulp fiction, andPulp Fiction. All with the charming and seemingly daring alibi that this is adialectical materialism. No wonder it has been popular, even if like the



actual diamat of old the charm is wearing thin.

notes on zizek’s absolute recoil (2) | public seminar

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