zizek - notes towards a politics of bartleby - the ignorance of chicken

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A wonderfument is SanAlexander Osociologist Khyentse Rwell as socivalued at an

Article

Comparative American StudiesAn International Journal

Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA andNew Delhi) Vol 4(4): 375–394

http://cas.sagepub.com
DOI: 10.1177/1477570006071756
Notes towards a politics of BartlebyThe ignorance of chicken

Slavoj ZizekBirkbeck College, London, UK

Abstract Niels Bohr provided the perfect example of how a fetishistdisavowal of belief works in ideology: seeing a horse-shoe on his door, thesurprised visitor said that he didn’t believe in the superstition that itbrings luck, to which Bohr snapped back: ‘I also do not believe in it; Ihave it there because I was told that it works also if one does not believein it!’ This is how ideology works today in our epoch, which presents itselfas ‘post-ideological’: we practice our beliefs, even if, consciously, we donot take them seriously. The disavowed ideological dimension is inscribedin everyday material practices and rituals, especially in the apparentlyinnocent reference to pure utility (a man who lives in a large city andowns a Land Rover doesn’t simply lead a no-nonsense, ‘down to earth’life; rather, he owns such a car in order to signal that he leads his lifeunder the sign of a no-nonsense, ‘down to earth’ attitude).

Keywords atheism ● belief ● big Other ● commodity ● fetishism ●

ideology

rance of chickens

lly ambiguous indicator of our present ideological predica-dcastles: Buddhism and Global Finance, a documentary byey (2005) with commentaries from economist Arnoud Boot,

Saskia Sassen, and the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Dzongzarinpoche. Sassen and Boot discuss the gigantic scope, power, asal and economic effects of global finance: capital markets, now estimated $83 trillion, exist within a system based purely on

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self-interest, in which herd behavior, often based on rumors, can inflateor destroy the value of companies – or whole economies – in a matter ofhours. Khyentse Rinpoche counters them with ruminations about thenature of human perception, illusion, and enlightenment; his philosoph-ico-ethical statement, ‘Release your attachment to something that is notthere in reality, but is a perception’, is supposed to throw a new light onthe mad dance of billion-dollar-speculations. Echoing the Buddhist notionthat there is no Self, only a stream of continuous perceptions, Sassencomments about global capital: ‘It’s not that there are $83 trillion. It isessentially a continuous set of movements. It disappears and it re-appears.’ The problem here is, of course, how are we to read this parallelbetween the Buddhist ontology and the structure of virtual capitalism’suniverse? The film tends towards the humanist reading: seen through aBuddhist lens, the exuberance of global financial wealth is illusory,divorced from the objective reality – the very real human sufferingcreated by deals made on trading floors and in boardrooms invisible tomost of us. If, however, one accepts the premise that the value of materialwealth, and one’s experience of reality, is subjective, and that desire playsa decisive role in both daily life and neoliberal economics, is it notpossible to draw from it the exact opposite conclusion? Is it not that ourtraditional life world was based on the naïve-realist substantialist notionsof external reality composed of fixed objects, while the unheard-ofdynamics of ‘virtual capitalism’ confront us with the illusory nature ofreality? What better proof of the non-substantial character of reality thana gigantic fortune which can dissolve into nothing in a couple of hours,due to a sudden false rumor? Consequently, why complain that financialspeculations with futures are ‘divorced from the objective reality’, whenthe basic premise of the Buddhist ontology is that there is no ‘objectivereality’? The only ‘critical’ lesson to be drawn from the Buddhist perspec-tive about today’s virtual capitalism is thus that one should be aware thatwe are dealing with a mere theatre of shadows, with non-substantialvirtual entities, and, consequently, that we should not fully engageourselves in the capitalist game, that we should play the game with aninner distance. Virtual capitalism could thus act as a first step towardsliberation: it confronts us with the fact that the cause of our sufferingand enslavement is not objective reality itself (there is no such thing), butour Desire, our craving for material things, our excessive attachment tothem; all one has to do, after one gets rid of the false notion of substan-tialist reality, is thus to renounce one’s desire itself, to adopt the attitudeof inner peace and distance – no wonder such Buddhism can function asthe perfect ideological supplement of today’s virtual capitalism: it allowsus to participate in it with an inner distance, with our fingers crossed asit were.

Already for decades, a classic joke has circulated among Lacanians toexemplify this belief with fingers crossed. A man who believes himselfto be a grain of seed is taken to the mental institution, where the doctors

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do their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man;however, when he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed buta man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes backtrembling in fear – there is a chicken outside the door and he is afraidthat it will eat him. ‘Dear fellow,’ says his doctor, ‘you know very wellthat you are not a grain of seed but a man’. ‘Of course I know that,’ repliesthe patient, ‘but does the chicken know it?’ Therein resides the true stakeof psychoanalytic treatment: it is not enough to convince the patientabout the unconscious truth of his symptoms, the Unconscious itself mustbe brought to assume this truth. It is here that Hannibal Lecter, thatproto-Lacanian, was wrong: it is not the silence of the lambs but theignorance of chickens that is the subject’s true traumatic core. Doesexactly the same not hold for the Marxian commodity fetishism? Here isthe very beginning of the famous subdivision 4 of Chapter 1 of Capital,on ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret’: ‘A commodity appearsat first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis bringsout that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtletiesand theological niceties’ (Marx, 1867: 163). These lines should surpriseus, since they turn around the standard procedure of demystifying a theo-logical myth, of reducing it to its terrestrial base: Marx does not claim,in the usual way of Enlightenment critique, that the critical analysisshould demonstrate how what appears to be a mysterious theologicalentity emerged out of the ‘ordinary’ real-life process; he claims, on thecontrary, that the task of the critical analysis is to unearth the ‘meta-physical subtleties and theological niceties’ in what appears at first sightjust an ordinary object. In other words, when a critical Marxist encoun-ters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, the Marxist’sreproach to him is not ‘The commodity may seem to you to be a magicalobject endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reifiedexpression of relations between people’. The actual Marxist’s reproach is,rather, ‘You may think that the commodity appears to you as a simpleembodiment of social relations (that, for example, money is just a kind ofvoucher entitling you to a part of the social product), but this is not howthings really seem to you – in your social reality, by means of your partici-pation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that acommodity really appears to you as a magical object endowed withspecial powers’. In other words, we can imagine a bourgeois subjecttaking a course on Marxism where he is taught about commodityfetishism; however, after the course is finished, he comes back to histeacher, complaining that he is still the victim of commodity fetishism.The teacher tells him ‘But you know now how things stand, thatcommodities are only expressions of social relations, that there is nothingmagic about them!’, to which the pupil replies: ‘Of course I know all that,but the commodities I am dealing with seem not to know it!’ This situ-ation is literally evoked by Marx in his famous fiction of commodities thatstart to speak to each other:

Zizek ● Notes towards a politics of Bartleby 377

If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interestmen, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects,however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. Werelate to each other merely as exchange-values. (Marx, 1867: 176–7)

So, again, the true task is not to convince the subject, but the chicken-commodities: not to change the way we speak about commodities, but tochange the way commodities speak among themselves. Alenka Zupancicgoes here to the end and imagines a brilliant example that refers to Godhimself:

In the enlightened society of, say, revolutionary terror, a man is put in prisonbecause he believes in God. With different measures, but above by means ofan enlightened explanation, he is brought to the knowledge that God does notexist. When dismissed, the man comes running back, and explains how scaredhe is of being punished by God. Of course he knows that God does not exist,but does God also know that? (Zupancic, 2006: 173)

And, of course, this, exactly, is what happened (only) in Christianity,when, dying on the cross, Christ utters his ‘Father, father, why did youforsake me?’ – here, for a brief moment, God Himself does not believe inhimself – or, as G.K. Chesterton put it in emphatic terms:

When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at thecrucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that Godwas forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from allthe creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all thegods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not findanother god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows toodifficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. Theywill find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religionin which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist. (Chesterton, 1908: 145)

It is in this precise sense that today’s era is perhaps less atheist than anyprior one: we are all ready to indulge in utter scepticism, cynical distance,exploitation of others ‘without any illusions’, violations of all ethicalconstraints, extreme sexual practices, etc. etc. – protected by the silentawareness that the big Other is ignorant about it:

the subject is ready to do quite a lot, change radically, if only she can remainunchanged in the Other (in the symbolic as the external world in which, toput it in Hegel’s terms, the subject’s consciousness of himself is embodied,materialized as something that still does not know itself as consciousness). Inthis case, the belief in the Other (in the modern form of believing that theOther does not know) is precisely what helps to maintain the same state ofthings, regardless of all subjective mutations and permutations. The subject’suniverse would really change only at the moment when she were to arrive atthe knowledge that the Other knows (that it doesn’t exist). (Zupancic, 2006:174)


Of course, an obvious counter-argument imposes itself here: the Othereffectively doesn’t exist, all that exists is our activity – or, in a more directand simple way: commodities do not talk among themselves, it is only wewho impute them this magic property; God doesn’t exist and, conse-quently, cannot know or not know that he is dead. True, but thereinresides the point: as Hegel would have put it, the big Other (the social-spiritual Substance) has no existence in itself, it only exists as a point ofreference animated by the chaotic activity and interaction of numerousindividuals. Which is why the split we are taking about – the splitbetween the subject’s knowledge and the Other’s knowledge – is inherentto the subject itself: it is the split between what the subject knows andwhat the subject presupposes/imputes to the Other to know (which is whyit has such a shattering impact on the subject when he learns that theOther knows what it was supposed not to know). Niels Bohr, who gavethe right answer to Einstein’s ‘God doesn’t play dice’ (‘Don’t tell God whatto do!’), also provided the perfect example of how a fetishistic disavowalof belief works in ideology: seeing a horse-shoe on his door, a surprisedvisitor said that he didn’t believe in the superstition that it brings luck,to which Bohr snapped back: ‘I also do not believe in it; I have it therebecause I was told that it works also if one does not believe in it!’ Whatthis paradox renders clear is the way a belief is a reflexive attitude: it isnever a case of simply believing – one has to believe in belief itself. Whichis why Kierkegaard was right to claim that we do not really believe (inChrist), we just believe to believe – and Bohr just confronts us with thelogical negative of this reflexivity (one can also not believe one’s beliefs).

At some point, Alcoholics Anonymous meets Pascal: ‘Fake it until youmake it.’ However, this causality of the habit is more complex than it mayappear: far from offering an explanation of how beliefs emerge, it itselfcalls for an explanation. The first thing to specify is that Pascal’s ‘Kneeldown and you will believe!’ has to be understood as involving a kind ofself-referential causality: ‘Kneel down and you will believe that you kneltdown because you believed!’ The second thing is that, in the ‘normal’,cynical functioning of ideology, belief is displaced onto another, onto a‘subject supposed to believe’, so that the true logic is: ‘Kneel down andyou will thereby make someone else believe!’ One has to take this liter-ally and even risk a kind of inversion of Pascal’s formula: ‘You believe toomuch, too directly? You find your belief too oppressing in its raw im-mediacy? Then kneel down, act as if you believe, and you will get rid ofyour belief – you will no longer have to believe yourself, your belief willalready exist, objectified in your act of praying!’ That is to say, what ifone kneels down and prays not so much to regain one’s own belief but,just the opposite, to get rid of one’s belief, of its over-proximity, to acquirea breathing space of a minimal distance from it? To believe – to believe‘directly’, without the externalizing mediation of a ritual – is a heavy,oppressing, traumatic burden, which, through ritual, one has a chance oftransferring onto an Other. If there is a Freudian ethical injunction, it is


that one should have the courage of one’s own convictions: one shoulddare to fully assume one’s identifications. And exactly the same goes formarriage: the implicit presupposition (or, rather, injunction) of thestandard ideology of marriage is that, precisely, there should be no lovein it. The Pascalean formula of marriage is therefore not ‘You don’t loveyour partner? Then marry him or her, go through the ritual of shared life,and love will emerge by itself!’, but, on the contrary: ‘Are you too muchin love with somebody? Then get married, ritualize your love relation-ship, in order to cure yourself of the excessive passionate attachment, toreplace it with the boring daily custom – and if you cannot resist thepassion’s temptation, there are extra-marital affairs’.

Biopolitics and permissivity

The first political consequence of such a conviction-less ideology is theconjoined rise of biopolitics and permissivity. In March 2005, the USA wasin the grip of the Terri Schiavo case: she suffered brain damage in 1990when her heart stopped briefly from a chemical imbalance believed tohave been brought on by an eating disorder; court-appointed doctorsclaimed she was in a persistent vegetative state with no hope of recovery.While her husband wanted her disconnected to die in peace, her parentsargued that she could get better and that she would never have wantedto be cut off from food and water. The case reached the top level ofthe US government and judicial bodies, with the Supreme Court and thePresident involved, Congress passing fast-track resolutions, etc. Theabsurdity of the situation, when put in the wider context, is breath-taking: with tens of millions dying of AIDS and hunger all around theworld, public opinion in the USA focused on a single case of prolongingthe run of naked life, of a persistent vegetative state reduced of all specifi-cally human characteristics. This is the truth of what the Catholic Churchmeans when its representatives talk about the ‘culture of life’ as opposedto the ‘culture of death’ of contemporary nihilistic hedonism. What weencounter here is effectively a kind of Hegelian infinite judgment whichasserts the speculative identity of the highest and the lowest: the Life ofthe Spirit, the divine spiritual dimension, and the life reduced to inertvegetation. These are the two extremes we find ourselves in today withregard to biopolitics: on the one hand those ‘missed by the bombs’(mentally and physically full human beings, but deprived of their elemen-tary rights), on the other hand a human being reduced to bare vegetativelife, but bare life protected by the entire state apparatus.

It can be easily demonstrated that the two features of today’s ideo-logico-political constellation – the rise of biopolitical control andregulation; the excessive narcissistic fear of harassment – effectively arethe two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, the very developmentof the narcissistic personality bent on ‘self-realization’ leads to growing


self-control (jogging, a focus on safe sex and healthy food, etc.), that is,on subjects treating themselves as objects of biopolitics; on the otherhand, the stated goal of the state’s biopolitics is the individuals’ happi-ness and pleasurable life, the abolition of any traumatic shocks that couldprevent their self-realization – happiness is ‘a commodity that wasimported from America in the Fifties’, as Francesca Annis put it.

Which is why the notion of evaluation is crucial for the biopoliticalfunctioning of democratic society: if, at the level of their symbolicidentity, all subjects are equal, if, here, un sujet vaut l’autre, if they canbe indefinitely substituted with each other, since each of them is reducedto an empty punctual place ($), to a ‘man without qualities – properties’(to recall the title of Robert Musil’s magnum opus) – if, consequently,every reference to their properly symbolic mandate is prohibited, howthen are they to be distributed within the social edifice, how can theiroccupation be legitimized? The answer is, of course, evaluation: one hasto evaluate – as objectively as possible, and through all possible means,from quantified testing of their abilities to more ‘personalized’ in-depthinterviews – their potentials. The underlying ideal notion is to producetheir characterization deprived of all traces of symbolic identities.Furthermore, egalitarianism itself should never be accepted at its facevalue: the notion (and practice) of egalitarian justice, insofar as it issustained by envy, relies on the inversion of the standard renunciationaccomplished to benefit others: ‘I am ready to renounce it, so that otherswill (also) not (be able to) have it!’

It is fashionable to complain how, today, when one’s extreme personalintimacies, including details of one’s sex life, can be exposed in the media,private life is threatened, disappearing even . . . true, on condition thatwe turn things around: what is effectively disappearing in the publicdisplay of intimate details is public life itself, the public sphere proper, inwhich one operates as a symbolic agent who cannot be reduced to aprivate individual, to a bundle of intimate properties, desires, traumas,idiosyncrasies. What this means is that the ‘deconstructionist’/‘risksociety’ commonplace according to which the contemporary individualexperiences himself as thoroughly denaturalized, that he experienceseven his most ‘natural’ features (from his ethnic identity to his sexualpreferences) as something chosen, historically contingent, to be learned,is profoundly deceiving: what we are effectively witnessing today is theopposite process of an unheard-of renaturalization: all big ‘public issues’are (re)translated into questions about the regulation and stances towardsintimate ‘natural’/‘personal’ idiosyncrasies. This is also why, at a moregeneral level, the pseudo-naturalized ethnico-religious conflicts are theform of struggle which fits global capitalism: in our age of ‘post-politics’,when politics proper is progressively replaced by expert social adminis-tration, the only remaining legitimate sources of conflicts are cultural(religious) or natural (ethnic) tensions. And ‘evaluation’ is precisely theregulation of social promotion that fits this massive renaturalization. So,


perhaps, the time has come to reassert, as the truth of evaluation, theperverted logic to which Marx refers ironically in his description ofcommodity fetishism, when he quotes Dogberry’s advice to Seacoal fromShakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (Act 3, Scene 3) which concludesChapter 1 of Capital: ‘To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune;but reading and writing comes by nature’ (Marx, 1867). Today, in ourtimes of evaluation, to be a computer expert or a successful manager is agift of nature, while to have beautiful lips or eyes is a fact of culture.

The first insight that imposes itself out of this constellation is that ourlate capitalism is characterized by an unheard-of permissiveness. One ofthe standard topoi of today’s conservative cultural critique is that, in ourpermissive era, children lack firm limits, prohibitions – this lack frus-trates them, driving them from one to another excess. It is only a firmlimit set up by some symbolic authority that can guarantee not onlystability, but even satisfaction itself – satisfaction brought about by wayof violating the prohibition, of transgressing the limit. Would today’sanalysand’s reaction not be the opposite of the one reported by Freud?‘Whoever this woman in my dream was, I am sure it has something to dowith my mother!’ (see Zizek, 2006). However, what this topos misses isthe true paradox at work here: far from frustrating us because it simplysets no limitation, the absence of explicit limitation confronts us with theLimit as such, the inherent obstacle to satisfaction; the true function ofthe explicit limitation is thus to sustain the illusion that, through trans-gressing it, we can attain the limitless.

Today’s subjectivity is characterized by a shift from desire to demand:demand, insisting on a demand, is the opposite of desire which thrives inthe gaps of a demand, in what is in a demand more than a demand – say,a child’s demand for food can articulate a desire for love, so the mothercan sometimes meet the demand by simply giving a warm hug to thechild. Furthermore, desire involves Law and its transgression; the placeof desire is sustained by the Law, while demand is addressed to anomnipotent Other outside Law, which is why satisfying demands suffo-cates desire (as in spoiled children). (This is also what is false in the logicof financial retributions which transpose a justified grievance into ademand for restitution.)

Traditionally, psychoanalysis was expected to allow the patient toovercome the obstacles which denied him or her the access to ‘normal’sexual enjoyment. Today, however, when we are bombarded from all sidesby the different versions of the superego-injunction ‘Enjoy!’ – from directenjoyment in sexual performance to enjoyment in professional achieve-ment or in spiritual awakening – one should move to a more radical level:psychoanalysis is today the only discourse in which you are allowed notto enjoy (as opposed to ‘not allowed to enjoy’). And, from this vantagepoint, it becomes retroactively clear how already the traditional prohibi-tion to enjoy was sustained by the implicit opposite injunction. The desirethat no longer needs to be sustained by the superego injunction is what


Lacan calls the ‘desire of the analyst’; it appeared already before psycho-analysis proper – Lacan discerns it in different historical figures, fromSocrates to Hegel. It answers a key question, and it best encapsulates theanti-Buddhist spirit of psychoanalysis: is desire only an illusion? Is itpossible to sustain desire even after one gains full insight into the vanityof human desire? Or, at that radical point, is the only choice the onebetween serene Wisdom and melancholic resignation?

When truth no longer has the structure of a fiction

From this vantage point, one should return to the diagnosis of the 20thcentury proposed long ago by William Butler Yeats, that arch-conserva-tive: ‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / the ceremonyof innocence is drowned; / the best lack all conviction, while the worst /are full of passionate intensity’ (‘The Second Coming’, 1920). The key tothis diagnosis is contained in the phrase ‘ceremony of innocence’, whichis to be taken in the precise sense of Edith Wharton’s ‘age of innocence’:Newton’s wife, the ‘innocent’ her title refers to, was not a naïve believerin her husband’s fidelity – she knew well of his passionate love forCountess Olenska, she just politely ignored it and staged the belief in hisfidelity. In one of the Marx brothers’ films, Groucho Marx, when caughtin a lie, answers angrily: ‘Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?’This apparently absurd logic renders perfectly the functioning of thesymbolic order, in which the symbolic mask-mandate matters more thanthe direct reality of the individual who wears this mask and/or assumesthis mandate. This functioning involves the structure of fetishistdisavowal: ‘I know very well that things are the way I see them, that thisperson is a corrupt weakling, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully,since he wears the insignia of a judge, so that when he speaks, it is theLaw itself which speaks through him.’ So, in a way, I effectively believehis words, not my eyes: I believe in Another Space (the domain of puresymbolic authority), which matters more than the reality of its spokes-men. The cynical reduction to reality thus falls short: when a judgespeaks, there is in a way more truth in his words (the words of theInstitution of law) than in the direct reality of the person of the judge –if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses the point.

This paradox is what Lacan aims at with his ‘les non-dupes errent’:those who do not let themselves be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction and continue to believe their eyes are the ones who err most. Whata cynic who ‘believes only his eyes’ misses is the efficiency of the symbolicfiction, the way this fiction structures our experience of reality. The samegap is at work in our most intimate relationship to our neighbors: webehave as if we do not know that they also smell bad, secrete excrement,etc. – a minimum of idealization, of fetishizing disavowal, is the basis ofour co-existence. And doesn’t the same disavowal account for the sublime


beauty of the idealizing gesture discernible from Anne Frank to Americancommunists who believed in the Soviet Union? Although we know thatStalinist communism was an appalling thing, we nonetheless admire thevictims of the McCarthy witch-hunts who heroically persisted in theirbelief in communism and support for the Soviet Union. The logic is herethe same as that of Anne Frank, who, in her diaries, expresses belief inthe ultimate goodness of man in spite of the horrors accomplished by menagainst Jews in the Second World War: what renders such an assertionof belief (in the essential goodness of Man; in the truly human characterof the Soviet regime) sublime is the very gap between it and the over-whelming factual evidence against it, that is, the active will to disavowthe actual state of things. Perhaps therein resides the most elementarymetaphysical gesture: in this refusal to accept the real in its idiocy, todisavow it and to search for Another World behind it. The big Other isthus the order of a lie, of lying sincerely. And it is in this sense that ‘thebest lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity’:even the best are no longer able to sustain their symbolic innocence, theirfull engagement in the symbolic ritual, while ‘the worst’, the mob, engagein (racist, religious, sexist . . .) fanaticism. Is this opposition not a gooddescription of today’s split between tolerant but anaemic liberals and thefundamentalists full of ‘passionate intensity’?

‘The truth has the structure of a fiction’ – is there a better exempli-fication of this thesis than cartoons in which the truth about the existingsocial order is rendered with a directness that would never be allowedin narrative cinema with ‘real’ actors? Recall the image of society weget from aggressive cartoons in which animals fight: ruthless strugglesfor survival, brutal traps and attacks, exploitation of others as suckers. . . if the same story were to be told in a feature film with ‘real’ actors,it would undoubtedly be either censored or dismissed as ridiculouslyover-pessimistic. Is not the ultimate confirmation of this paradox thatof the Nazi concentration camps? The standard notion is that we escapeinto fiction when a direct confrontation with reality is too traumatic tobe sustained – however, does the fate of the artistic depictions of theHolocaust not support the opposite view? Horrible as they are, we areable to watch documentaries about the Holocaust, to look at the docu-ments of this catastrophe, while there is something fake in all attemptsto provide a ‘realistic’ narrative fiction of the events in the extermina-tion camp. This fact is more mysterious than it may appear: how is itthat it is easier to watch a documentary about Auschwitz than toproduce a convincing fictional portrait of what went on there? Why areall the best films about shoah comedies? One should here correctAdorno: it is not poetry but, rather, prose which is impossible afterAuschwitz. Documentary realism is thus for those who cannot sustainfiction – the excess of fantasy operative in every narrative fiction. It isrealistic prose which fails, while the poetic evocation of the unbearableatmosphere in a camp is much more to the point. That is to say, when


Adorno declares poetry impossible after Auschwitz, this impossibility isan enabling impossibility: poetry is always, by definition, ‘about’ some-thing that cannot be addressed directly, only alluded to. And one shouldnot be afraid to go here a step further and refer to the old saying thatmusic enters when words fail: what if there is some truth in the commonwisdom that, in a kind of historical premonition, the music of Schoenbergarticulated the anxieties and nightmares of Auschwitz before the eventtook place?

‘Fundamentalism’ thus concerns neither belief as such nor its content;what distinguishes a ‘fundamentalist’ is the way he relates to his beliefs;its most elementary definition should focus on the formal status of belief.In the case of so-called ‘fundamentalists’, the ‘normal’ functioning ofideology, in which the belief is transposed onto the Other, is disturbed bythe violent return of the immediate belief – they ‘really believe it’. Thefirst consequence of this is that the fundamentalist becomes the dupe ofhis fantasy (as Lacan put it, vis-à-vis the Marquis de Sade), immediatelyidentifying himself with it. From my own youth, I remember a fantasyconcerning the origin of children: after I learned how children are made,I still had no precise idea about insemination, so I thought one had tomake love every day for the whole nine months: in the woman’s belly, thechild is gradually formed through sperm – each ejaculation is like addingan additional brick. One plays with such fantasies, not ‘taking them seri-ously’; it is in this way that they fulfill their function – and the funda-mentalist lacks this minimal distance from his fantasy.

The obverse of his turning into a dupe of his fantasy is that he loseshis sensitivity towards the enigma of the Other’s desire. In a recent caseof analytic treatment in the United Kingdom, the patient, a woman whowas a victim of rape, remained deeply disturbed by an unexpected gestureof the rapist: after already brutally enforcing her surrender, and just priorto penetrating her, he withdraw a little bit, politely said ‘Just a minute,lady!’ and put on a condom. This weird intrusion of politeness into abrutal situation perplexed the victim: what was its meaning? Was it astrange concern for her, or a simple egotistic protective measure on thepart of the rapist (making sure that he would not get AIDS from her, andnot the other way round)? This gesture, much more than explosions ofraw passion, stands for the encounter of the ‘enigmatic signifier’, of thedesire of the Other in all its impenetrability.

One should appreciate the strict symmetry between ideological funda-mentalism and liberal hedonism: they both focus on the Real; the differ-ence being that, while liberal hedonism elevates into its Cause theextra-symbolic Real of jouissance (which compels it to adopt a cynicalattitude of reducing language, the symbolic medium, to a mere secondaryirrelevant semblant, instrument of manipulation or seduction, the only‘real thing’ being jouissance itself), ‘fundamentalism’ enacts a short-circuit between the Symbolic and the Real, that is, in it, some symbolicfragment (say, the sacred text, the Bible in the case of Christian


fundamentalists) is itself posited as real (to be read ‘literally’, not to beplayed with; in short, exempted from all dialectic of reading).

Jouissance as a political category

Today, the ideological manipulation of obscene jouissance has entered anew stage: our politics is more and more directly the politics ofjouissance, concerned with the ways of soliciting or controlling and regu-lating jouissance. Is the entire opposition between the liberal/tolerantWest and fundamentalist Islam not condensed in the opposition between,on the one hand, the woman’s right to free sexuality, inclusive of thefreedom to display/expose oneself and provoke/disturb man, and, on theother, the desperate male attempts to eradicate or, at least, keep undercontrol this threat? (Recall the ridiculous Taliban prohibition on metalheels for women – as if, even if women are entirely covered with cloth,the clicking sound of their heels would still provoke men.) Both sides, ofcourse, ideologically/morally mystify their position: for the liberal West,the right to provocatively expose oneself to male desire is legitimized asthe right to freely dispose of one’s body and to enjoy it as one wants, whilefor Islam, the control of feminine sexuality is, of course, legitimized asthe defense of woman’s dignity against the threat of being reduced to anobject of male sexual exploitation. So while, when the French stateprohibited women wearing veils in schools, one can claim that, in thisway, they were enabled to dispose of their bodies, one can also point outhow the true traumatic point for the critics of Muslim ‘fundamentalism’was that there were women who did not participate in the game ofmaking their bodies disposable for sexual seduction, for the social circu-lation/exchange involved in it. In one way or another, all other issuesrelate to this one: gay marriage and the right to adopt children, divorce,abortion. . . .

In some ‘radical’ circles in the USA, a proposal to ‘rethink’ the rightsof necrophiliacs (those who desire to have sex with dead bodies) recentlystarted to circulate – why should they be deprived of it? So the idea wasformulated that, in the same way people sign permission for their organsto be used for medical purposes, in the case of their sudden death, oneshould also allow them to sign the permission for their bodies to be givento necrophiliacs to play with. Is this proposal not the perfect exemplifi-cation of how the PC stance realizes Kierkegaard’s old insight into howthe only good neighbor is a dead neighbor? A dead neighbor – a corpse –is the ideal sexual partner of a ‘tolerant’ subject trying to avoid anyharassment: by definition, a corpse cannot be harassed; at the same time,a dead body does not enjoy, so the disturbing threat of the excess-enjoy-ment for the subject playing with the corpse is also eliminated. What thetwo opposite attitudes share is thus the extreme disciplinary approach,which is in each case differently directed: ‘fundamentalists’ regulate in


detail the feminine self-presentation to prevent sexual provocation; PCfeminist liberals impose a no less severe regulation of behavior aimed atcontaining different forms of harassment.

The drive to pure autistic jouissance (through drugs or other trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when the emanci-patory sequence of 1968 exhausted its potentials. At this critical point (themid-1970s), the only option left was a direct, brutal, passage à l’acte,push-towards-the-Real, which assumed three main forms: the search forextreme forms of sexual jouissance; leftist political terrorism (RAF inGermany, Red Brigades in Italy, etc.) whose wager was that, in an epochin which the masses are totally immersed in the capitalist ideologicalsleep, the standard critique of ideology is no longer operative, so that onlya resort to the raw Real of direct violence – l’action directe – can awakenthe masses); and, finally, the turn towards the Real of an inner experience(Oriental mysticism). What all three options share is the withdrawal fromconcrete socio-political engagement into a direct contact with the Real.

Nowhere is this constellation staged in a more clear way than in theMatrix trilogy. The unique impact of the films resides not so much in itscentral thesis (what we experience as reality is an artificial virtual realitygenerated by the ‘Matrix’, the mega-computer directly attached to all ourminds), but in its central image of millions of human beings leading aclaustrophobic life in water-filled cradles, kept alive in order to generateenergy (electricity) for the Matrix. So when (some of the) people ‘awaken’from their immersion into the Matrix-controlled virtual reality, thisawakening is not an opening into the wide space of the external reality,but principally a horrible realization of this enclosure, where each of usis effectively just a fetus-like organism, immersed in the pre-natal fluid.This utter passivity is the foreclosed fantasy that sustains our consciousexperience as active, self-positing subjects – it is the ultimate perversefantasy, the notion that we are ultimately instruments of the Other’s(Matrix’s) jouissance, having our life-substance sucked out as if we weremere batteries. This brings us to the true libidinal enigma: why does theMatrix need human energy? The purely energetic solution is, of course,meaningless: the Matrix could have easily found another, more reliable,source of energy which would not have demanded the extremely complexarrangement of the virtual reality coordinated for millions of humanunits. The only consistent answer is: the Matrix feeds on the humans’jouissance – so we are here back at the fundamental Lacanian thesis thatthe big Other itself, far from being an anonymous machine, needs theconstant influx of jouissance. Therein resides the correct insight of TheMatrix: in its juxtaposition of the two aspects of perversion – on the onehand, reduction of reality to a virtual domain regulated by arbitrary rulesthat can be suspended; on the other hand, the concealed truth of thisfreedom, the reduction of the subject to an utter instrumentalized passiv-ity. And the ultimate proof of the decline in quality of the followinginstallments of the Matrix trilogy is that this central aspect is left totally


unexploited: a true revolution would have been a change in how humansand the Matrix itself relate to jouissance and its appropriation. Whatabout, say, individuals sabotaging the Matrix by refusing to secretejouissance?

The de-sublimated object of post-ideology

How is this predominance of jouissance linked to (grounded in, even) globalcapitalism? Badiou (2003) recently claimed that our time is devoid of world– how are we to grasp this strange thesis? Even Nazi anti-Semitism openedup a world: by way of describing the present critical situation and namingthe enemy (‘Jewish conspiracy’), a goal and the means to achieve it, Nazismdisclosed reality in a way which allowed its subjects to acquire a global‘cognitive mapping’, inclusive of the space for their meaningful engage-ment. Perhaps, it is here that one should locate the ‘danger’ of capitalism:although it is global, encompassing all worlds, it sustains a stricto sensu‘worldless’ ideological constellation, depriving the large majority of peopleof any meaningful ‘cognitive mapping’. The universality of capitalismresides in the fact that capitalism is not a name for a ‘civilization’, for aspecific cultural-symbolic world, but the name for a neutral economico-symbolic machine which operates with Asian values as well as with others,so that Europe’s worldwide triumph is its defeat, self-obliteration, thecutting of the umbilical link to Europe. The critics of ‘Eurocentrism’ whoendeavor to unearth the secret European bias of capitalism fall short here:the problem with capitalism is not its secret Eurocentric bias, but the factthat it really is universal, a neutral matrix of social relations.

What is capitalist globalization? Capitalism is the first socio-economicorder which de-totalizes meaning: it is not global at the level of meaning(there is no global ‘capitalist world view’, no ‘capitalist civilization’proper – the fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capital-ism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hinduand Buddhist); its global dimension can only be formulated at the level oftruth-without-meaning, as the ‘real’ of the global market mechanism.Consequently, insofar as capitalism already enacts the rupture betweenmeaning and truth, it can be opposed at two levels: either at the level ofmeaning (conservative reactions to re-enframe capitalism into somesocial field of meaning, to contain its self-propelling movement within theconfines of a system of shared ‘values’ which cement a ‘community’ in its‘organic unity’), or through questioning the Real of capitalism with regardto its truth-outside-meaning (what, basically, Marx did).

And this brings us back to jouissance: in contrast to previous modes ofideological interpellation, the capitalist injunction to enjoy opens up no‘world’ proper – it just refers to an obscure Unnameable. In this sense –and in this sense only – we effectively live in a ‘post-ideological universe’:what addresses us is a direct ‘desublimated’ call of jouissance, no longer


coated in an ideological narrative proper. In what, more precisely, doesthis ‘worldlessness’ consist? As Lacan points out in his Seminar XX:Encore, jouissance involves a logic strictly homologous to that of theontological proof of the existence of God. In the classic version of thisproof, my awareness of myself as a finite, limited being immediately givesbirth to the notion of an infinite, perfect, being, and since this being isperfect, its very notion contains its existence; in the same way, ourexperience of jouissance accessible to us as finite, located, partial,‘castrated’, immediately gives birth to the notion of a full, achieved,unlimited jouissance whose existence is necessarily presupposed by thesubject who imputes it to another subject, his/her ‘subject supposed toenjoy’.

Our first reaction here is, of course, that this absolute jouissance is amyth, that it never effectively existed, that its status is purely differen-tial, that it exists only as a negative point of reference with regard towhich every effectively experienced jouissance falls short (‘pleasurableas this is, it is not that!’). However, the recent advances of brain studiesopen up another approach: one can (no longer only) imagine the situationin which pain (or pleasure) is not generated through sensory perceptions,but through a direct excitation of the appropriate neuronal centers (bymeans of drugs or electrical impulses) – what the subject will experiencein this case will be ‘pure’ pain, pain ‘as such’, the real of pain, or, to putit in precise Kantian terms, the non-schematized pain, pain which is notyet rooted in the experience of reality constituted by transcendentalcategories.

In order to grasp properly what takes place here, one has to take adetour through what Lacan called la jouissance de l’Autre – what is thismysterious jouissance? Imagine (a real clinical case, though) two sexualpartners who excite each other by verbalizing, telling each other, theirinnermost sexual fantasies to such a degree that they reach full orgasmwithout touching, just through the effect of ‘mere talking’. The result ofsuch excess of intimacy is not difficult to guess: after such a radicalmutual exposure, they will no longer be able to maintain their amorouslink – too much was being said, or, rather, the spoken word, the big Other,was too directly flooded by jouissance, so the two are embarrassed byeach other’s presence and slowly drift apart, start to avoid each other’spresence. This, not a full perverse orgy, is the true excess: not ‘practicingyour innermost fantasies instead of just talking about them’, but,precisely, talking about them, allowing them to invade the medium of thebig Other to such an extent that one can literally ‘fuck with words’, thatthe elementary, constitutive, barrier between language and jouissancebreaks down. Measured by this standard, the most extreme ‘real orgy’ isa poor substitute.

The presentation of the sexual act in Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful rendersperfectly the logic of the feminine jouissance de l’Autre: after the couple(the married Diane Lane and the young Frenchman) embraces in his


apartment, there is a direct cut to Diane Lane returning home on thesuburban train, sitting alone and reminiscing. Her remembering(rendered through a wonderful display of embarrassed smiles, tears,gestures of incredulity at what happened, etc.) is interspersed with shortfragmented flash-backs of the couple making love – we thus only see thelove act as it were in futur anterieur, as it is recollected. The direct sexualjouissance is immediately ‘sublated’ in the jouissance of the Other; thetwo magically overlap. The lesson is that the ‘true’ jouissance is neitherin the act itself nor in the thrill of the expectation of the pleasures tocome, but in the melancholic remembrance of it. And the enigma is: isit possible to imagine the sexual act in which the participants, while‘really doing it’, already adopt the imagined position of remembering it,from which they now enjoy it? Furthermore, can one say that thismelancholic position of futur anterieur is feminine, while the jouissanceengendered by the thrill of pleasures to come is masculine? Recall thefamous scene in Bergman’s Persona of Bibi Andersson reminiscing abouta beach orgy and the passionate lovemaking in which she participated:we see no flashback pictures, and nonetheless the scene is one of themost erotic in the entire history of cinema – the excitement is in howshe tells it, and this excitement which resides in speech itself isjouissance feminine.

And it is this dimension of the jouissance of the Other that is threat-ened by the prospect of ‘pure’ jouissance. Is such a short-circuit not thebasic and most disturbing feature of consuming drugs to generate experi-ence of enjoyment? What drugs promise is a purely autistic jouissance, ajouissance accessible without the detour through the Other (of thesymbolic order) – jouissance generated not by fantasmatic representa-tions, but by directly attacking our neuronal pleasure-centers? It is in thisprecise sense that drugs involve the suspension of symbolic castration,whose most elementary meaning is precisely that jouissance is onlyaccessible through the medium of (as mediated by) symbolic representa-tion. This brutal Real of jouissance is the obverse of the infinite plastic-ity of imagining, no longer constrained by the rules of reality.Significantly, the experience of drugs encompasses both these extremes:on the one hand, the Real of noumenal (non-schematized) jouissancewhich by-passes representations; on the other hand, the wild prolifera-tion of fantasizing (recall the proverbial reports on how, after taking adrug, you imagine scenes you never thought you were able to access –new dimensions of shapes, colors, smells . . .).

One should thus learn to discern the lesson of recent bio-technologicalbreakthroughs. In 2003, Japanese telecom carriers came up with theworld’s first mobile phone that enables users to listen to calls inside theirheads – by conducting sound through bone. The phone is equipped witha ‘Sonic Speaker’ which transmits sounds through vibrations that movefrom the skull to the cochlea in the inner ear, instead of relying on theusual method of sound hitting the outer eardrum. With the new handset,


the key to better hearing in a noisy situation is thus to plug your ears toprevent outside noise from drowning out bone-conducted sounds. Herewe encounter the Lacanian distinction between reality and the Real: thisspectral voice which we hear in our interior, although it has no place inexternal reality, is the Real at its purest.

In a further step, in 2003, at the Center for Neuroengineering at DukeUniversity, monkeys with brain implants were trained to move a robotarm with their thoughts: a series of electrodes containing tiny wires wereimplanted into the brains of two monkeys; a computer then recordedsignals produced by the monkeys’ brains as they manipulated a joystickcontrolling the robotic arm in exchange for a reward – sips of juice. Thejoystick was later unplugged and the arm, which was in a separate room,was controlled directly by the brain signals coming from the implants.The monkeys eventually stopped using the joystick, as if they knew theirbrains were controlling the robot arm. The Duke researchers have nowmoved onto researching similar implants in humans: in the summer of2004 it was reported that they had succeeded in temporarily implantingelectrodes into the brains of volunteers; the volunteers then playedvideogames while the electrodes recorded the brain signals – thescientists trained a computer to recognize the brain activity correspon-ding to the different movements of the joystick. This procedure of ‘eaves-dropping’ on the brain’s digital crackle with electrodes (where computersuse zeros and ones, neurons encode our thoughts in all-or-nothing elec-trical impulses) and transmitting the signals to a computer that can readthe brain’s code and then use the signals to control a machine already hasan official name: brain–machine interface. Further prospects include notonly more complex tasks (say, implanting the electrodes into the languagecenters of the brain and thus wirelessly transmitting a person’s innervoice to a machine, so that one can speak ‘directly’, bypassing voice orwriting), but also sending the brain signals to a machine thousands ofmiles away and thus directing it from afar. And what about sending thesignals to somebody standing nearby, with electrodes implanted in hishearing centers, so that he can ‘telepathically’ listen to my inner voice(Zimmer, 2004: 73)? The Orwellian notion of ‘thought control’ will thusacquire a much more literal meaning.

Even the proverbial Stephen Hawking’s little finger – the minimal linkbetween his mind and the outside reality, the only part of his paralysedbody that Hawking can move – will thus no longer be necessary: with mymind, I can directly cause objects to move, that is, it is the brain itselfwhich will directly serve as the remote control machine. In the terms ofGerman Idealism, this means that what Kant called ‘intellectual intuition/intelektuelle Anschauung’ – the closing of the gap between mind andreality, a mind-process which, in a causal way, directly influences reality,this capacity that Kant attributed only to the infinite mind of God – is nowpotentially available to all of us, that is, we are potentially deprived ofone of the basic features of our finitude. And since, as we learned from


Kant as well as from Freud, this gap of finitude is at the same time theresource of our creativity (the distance between ‘mere thought’ and causalintervention into external reality enables us to test the hypotheses in ourmind and, as Karl Popper put it, let them die instead of ourselves), thedirect short-circuit between mind and reality implies the prospect of aradical closure.

Of eggs and omelettes

How, then, are we to break the hold of this imperative of jouissance? Thetemptation is great to opt for what appears its ‘natural’ opposite, theviolent renunciation of jouissance. Is this not the fundamental underly-ing motif of all so-called ‘fundamentalisms’? Do they all not endeavor tocontain (what they perceive as) the excessive ‘narcissistic hedonism’ ofcontemporary secular culture with the call to reintroduce the spirit ofsacrifice? However, a psychoanalytic perspective immediately enables usto see why such an endeavor goes wrong: the very gesture of renouncingenjoyment (‘Enough of decadent pleasures! Renounce and sacrifice!’)generates a surplus-enjoyment of its own. Do all ‘totalitarian’ universeswhich demand of their subjects violent (self)sacrifice to the Cause notexert the bad smell of the fascination with a lethal obscene jouissance?(And vice versa: a life oriented towards pleasures cannot but end up inthe utmost discipline needed to guarantee the maximum of pleasures:‘healthy life style’ from jogging to dieting and mental relaxation, respectfor others, etc.) The superego injunction to enjoy is immanently inter-twined with the logic of sacrifice: the two form a vicious cycle, eachextreme supporting the other.

This, of course, in no way implies that we should dismiss violence assuch. In every authentic revolutionary explosion, there is an element of‘pure’ violence, that is, an authentic political revolution cannot bemeasured by the standard of servicing the good (to what extent ‘life gotbetter for the majority’ afterwards) – it is a goal-in-itself, an act whichchanges the very standards of what ‘the good life’ is, and a different(higher, eventually) standard of living is a by-product of a revolutionaryprocess, not its goal. Usually, revolutionary violence is defended by wayof evoking proverb-platitudes like ‘you cannot make an omelette withoutbreaking some eggs’ – a ‘wisdom’ which, of course, can easily be renderedproblematic through boring ‘ethical’ considerations about how even thenoblest goals cannot justify the murderous means used to achieve them.Against such compromising attitudes, one should directly admit revol-utionary violence as a liberating end-in-itself, so that the proverb shouldrather be turned around: ‘You cannot break eggs (and what is revolution-ary politics if not an activity in the course of which many eggs arebroken?), especially in the heat of (revolutionary) passion, withoutmaking some omelettes!’


This excess is what even the most ‘tolerant’ liberal stance is unable tocome to terms with – witness the uneasiness of ‘radical’ post-colonialistAfro-American studies concerning Frantz Fanon’s fundamental insightinto the unavoidability of violence in the process of effective decoloniza-tion. One should recall here Fredric Jameson’s idea that violence plays thesame role in a revolutionary process as worldly wealth in the Calvinistlogic of predestination: although it has no intrinsic value, it is a sign ofthe authenticity of the revolutionary process, of the fact that this processis effectively disturbing the existing power relations – the dream of therevolution without violence is precisely the dream of a ‘revolutionwithout revolution’ (Robespierre, 1792).

And, to add a final twist, this violent breaking of the eggs should notbe immediately identified with outbursts of violence. Violence is needed– but which violence? There is violence and violence: there are violentpassages a l’acte which merely bear witness to the agent’s impotence;there is a violence the true aim of which is to prevent effective change –in a fascist display of violence, something spectacular should happen allthe time so that, precisely, nothing would really happen; and there is theviolent act of effectively changing the basic coordinates of a constellation.In order for the last kind of violence to take place, this very place shouldbe opened up through a gesture which is thoroughly violent in its impas-sive refusal itself, through a gesture of pure withdrawal in which, toquote Mallarmé, ‘rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu’ – nothing takes place butthe place itself (Mallarmé, 1945: 21).

And this brings us to Melville’s Bartleby. His ‘I would prefer not to’is to be taken literally: it says ‘I would prefer not to’ and not ‘I don’tprefer (or care) to do it’ – we are thereby back at Kant’s distinctionbetween negative and infinite judgment. In his refusal of the Master’sorder, Bartleby does not negate the predicate, he rather affirms a non-predicate: what he says is not that he doesn’t want to do it; he says thathe prefers (wants) not to do it. This is how we pass from the politics of‘resistance’ or ‘protestation’, which parasitizes upon what it negates, toa politics which opens up a new space outside the hegemonic positionand its negation. We can imagine the varieties of such a gesture intoday’s public space: not only the obvious ‘There are great chances fora new career here! Join us!’ – ‘I would prefer not to’, but also ‘Discoverthe depth of your true self, find inner peace!’ – ‘I would prefer not to’,or ‘Are you aware how our environment is endangered! Do somethingfor ecology!’ – ‘I would prefer not to’, or ‘What about all the racial andsexual injustices that we witness all around us? Isn’t it time to do more?’– ‘I would prefer not to’. This is the gesture of subtraction at its purest,the reduction of all qualitative differences to a purely formal minimaldifference.



References

Badiou, Alain (2003) ‘The Caesura of Nihilism’, lecture delivered at theUniversity of Essex, 10 September.

Chesterton, G.K. (1995 [1908]) Orthodoxy. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.Mallarmé, Stéphane (1945) Œuvres complètes, eds Henri Mondor and

G. Jean-Aubry. Paris: Gallimard.Marx, Karl (1990 [1867]) Capital, Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.Robespierre, Maximilien (1792) ‘Réponse à J.-B. Louvet’, speech at the National

Convention, 5 November.Zimmer, Carl (2004) ‘The Ultimate Remote Control’, Newsweek 14 June, p. 73.Zizek, Slavoj (2006) ‘Freud Lives’, London Review of Books 28(10), 25 May.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n10/contents.html (accessed 1 August 2006).Zupancic, Alenka (2006) ‘The “Concrete Universal” and What Comedy Can Tell Us

About It’, in Slavoj Zizek (ed.) Lacan: The Silent Partners, pp. 171–97.London: Verso Books.

Slavoj Zizek, dialectical-materialist philosopher and psychoanalyst,is Co-Director of the International Center for Humanities, BirkbeckCollege, London. Recent publications include The Parallax View(MIT Press, 2005) and How to Read Lacan (Granta, 2006). Address:Metelkova 7b, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia. [email: [email protected]]

zizek - notes towards a politics of bartleby - the ignorance of chicken

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