Confronted with today’s ongoing unrest and inequality that results from global capitalism, Simon Critchley argues that we need to look for an ethics of subversive
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radicality and negativity, which recognize “a moment of rebellious heteronomy” and disrupt the dominant ethics (Ethics 37). To cease supporting the working of global capitalism, the subject needs to stop governments from compromising the public welfare. The subject should reexamine the “core structure of moral selfhood” so as to unlock a motivational force and stop supporting global capitalism (7-9). A true ethical and responsible stance requires “absolute decisions (undecidability) made outside of knowledge and given norms” (Eagleton 248). To reach decisions outside of given norms, the subject will need to take a temporary leap of faith out of its symbolic world by identifying with the outcast. My employment of negativity derives from Hegel’s discussion about the threatening power it holds. This negativity corrodes every firm identity and boundary, and in so doing, generates an abyssal freedom (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit 19). For Hegel, repressed negativity exists secretly within the subject’s identity. Due to its corrosive power, the subject must deny, repress, and exclude negativity, which exists only outside our knowledge and given norms.
To explain the development of negativity, I am reading it from a Lacanian point of view. According to Lancanian psychoanalysis, the subject descends into the world and is first exposed to the chaotic and threatening power called the real. The real indicates an abyssal void, called the traumatic freedom, which is Hegelian negativity (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit 19). In the real, the subject is completely thrown out of order and regulation. Only when the subject enters the world of symbols and language can it find the bearing, meaning, and significance of its life. The subject employs language qua the symbolic order to interpret the world. For the symbolic order to function properly, disruptive and meaningless negativity of the real must be excluded and repressed. Nonetheless, repressed negativity never disappears
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completely. Instead, it exists clandestinely within the symbolic order, waiting to resurface at its weakest point. Once the real surfaces, it disrupts and dissolves the stability of the symbolic order by forcing it into chaos and exposing how the symbolic order has been built upon repressing the real, which is the void. As the real exposes the void of the symbolic order, it also reveals the inconsistency of the symbolic order.
To cope with the void and inconsistency in the symbolic order, the subject creates an ideological fantasy to cover them. By being able to come to terms with negativity, the subject will understand that it builds the fantasy to cover an anxiety of negativity. That is, when we identify with repressed and excluded negativity, the subject is able to take a dangerous leap out of the given law, order, and regulation of the symbolic order, which indirectly allows it to question its presence and take a true ethical responsibility for itself. In global capitalism, people who represent the excluded negativity are harmful to the working of the symbolic order, such as international refugees or illegal immigrants. They create difficulties and obstacles for the definition of legal citizens, and they threaten the efficient working of global capitalism. So, they must be
excluded and marginalized. However, if we can identify with these excluded people, we can take a dangerous leap out of the working of global capitalism and witness the brutal and violent repression that is inherent in global capitalism.
Concerning this subversive act of identifying with excluded negativity, I claim that Žižek’s ethical reflection and critique enable the subject to momentarily suspend the symbolic and recognize excluded negativity. For years, Žižek aimed to uncover the excluded abyss (lack/hole) as radical negativity within both the subject and the symbolic as a way to subvert hegemonic establishments. Žižek asserts that the subject in the post-ideological era of global capitalism is never free from ideology. On the contrary, global capitalism implicitly functions to control the public through
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ideological fantasies. As all kinds of political groups – be they cynics, fetishists, fundamentalists, or multiculturalists – are represented in the name of “capital itself,”
most political subversions and episodes of resistance are complicit with global capitalism and thus “fake” (Žižek, Ticklish 210). To make a real change, the subject needs to think critically before it commits itself to any action. It must not presume any big Other telling it what to do. It needs to traverse its own ideological fantasies by recognizing its own repressed internal negativity. Basically, the Žižekian critical method demands that the subject clears the burden of the symbolic order and starts all over on its own again. Žižek advocates a guerrilla-like revolt: the “Rewriting of the Lacanian real” (Eagleton 260). The real is the element the subject must repress, exclude, and abandon when the subject enters into the symbolic order. Therefore, the ethics of the real refers to the ethical movement in which the subject relocates the repressed and excluded negativity qua the real within the symbolic order. If placed under today’s circumstances, the real stands for the invisible, grotesque, and revolting outcasts, such as the homeless, the unemployed, and international refugees. Those excluded or marginalized outcasts are unwanted and undesired by global capitalism qua the symbolic order since they do not generate any profits. In the ethics of the real, the subject not only looks for a stance to resist its desire in global capitalism, but also to identify with those unwanted and useless outcasts qua the real.
Žižek’s proponents hold that his critical writing is constructive and subversive when approaching norms, theology and capitalism. Part of Žižek’s focus is to merge German idealism’s perspective of absolute internal negativity with the
psychoanalytical idea of the Freudian and Lacanian death drive. With his focus on negativity in the subject, Žižek reveals that the subject is limited and “non-totalizable”
(Kotsko 119). In other words, the subject is not a completely passive receiver of the
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symbolic order. It possesses the unyielding disruption of abyssal negativity that constantly disrupts and challenges the norms of the symbolic order. Žižekian notions show his readers that this negativity is the ground zero level for transcending
multicultural tolerance of global capitalism.
Žižek takes the idea of the death drive from Freud and Lacan to explain the movement of negativity. The reflection on the death drive enables Žižek to question not only the theology but also the norm of human lives. The death drive is the
uncontrollable unknown in the human mind that explains why people take dangerous and irrational actions. It is not just the unknown gap in the order of being that gives rise to autonomy of the subject, but also the space for the subject to challenge the theology (Gunder 178). Unlike animal instinct, it is a strange drive that persists beyond death. Animals do not take risks for purposeless goals while humans, driven by the death drive, will jump off a cliff into the water merely for fun. The death drive is the “excess of life” that is unpredictable and uncontrollable compared to animals (Žižek, Belief 104). The death drive points not to death, but to a basic and
uncontrollable compulsion. It functions as a “disruptive negativity” that helps the subject question the conformity of the everyday world because the subject itself has
“anti-adaptive” negativity (Johnston 185). In other words, the subject has an adverse tendency of disrupting the rules of quotidian life, which marks its free will.
Critics hold that Žižek’s ethics of the real disrupts and distances the logic of global capitalism. For instance, Mari Ruti states that Žižek’s act of subjective destitution is the outcome of the irrational subject of drive/jouissance3 (Ruti 60).
3 Ruti distinguishes the difference between the subject of desire and that of drive as two different actions. The subject of desire is “the one who stuffs one object (objet petit a) after another into the lack within its being, only to discover that no object can fully make up for the loss of the Thing” while the subject of drive is a that of “uncontrollable jouissance, which is why its emergence results in the undoing of the culturally viable individual” (60). Ruti quotes Lacan’s statement of the subject of drive as the subject that is placed at the level of “a headless subjectification, a subjectification without
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Drive pushes the subject to attain morbid satisfaction that leads to its self-destruction.
In the suicidal act, the subject is unplugged from its own symbolic order and is
plunged into the abyssal jouissance4 of the real as an ethical act. Wu Chien-Heng sees Žižek’s critical thinking as a way of exploring “immanent negativity” in the reality.
Žižek terminates the symbolic order and looks for a “new political sequence” (96).
Žižek’s inclusion of immanent negativity forces the subject to confront social antagonism and assume ethical responsibility for its own action. The subject has to look into itself to find the answer to its own mistakes and problems. Žižek’s ethics directs the subject to place its life, grounded in the symbolic matrices of pleasure and utility, back to ground zero level (Wood 58). It detaches the life of the subject from the call of the supereogic jouissance, clearing the ideological fantasies from our imagination. It takes the subject away from the control of the big Other. Yet, the life without the support of the big Other is unbearable and difficult since the subject must make responsible decisions cautiously. This unbearable zero level is always awaiting its “justice to come” (Fabio 164), transcending the multicultural tolerance of global capitalism (McSweeney 21). The Žižekian ethics of the real are something
unthinkable and terrifying, contributing to the dissolution of the political coordinates.
Žižek’s abstract style of the real poses a challenge to intellectuals to “think of the coordinates within which our activities are situated and work to break through and politicalize those coordinates” (Dean 197). Therefore, Žižek’s thinking is crucial to any effort to shatter the present political predicament. It offers its readers a leap out of the present situation by the momentary suspension of the symbolic order. In Glyn
subject” (60). He relates this headless subjectification of the death drive to the ethical act of erasing the subject’s own identity.
4 Jouissance is the paradoxical satisfaction that pushes the subject to enjoy beyond its limit. It becomes an uncontrollable “painful pleasure” (Lacan, Seminar VII 184). For Žižek, jouissance has a close relationship with the Lacanian real since jouissance is the “nonsymbolic”, and thus abyssal (Žižek, Parallax 188).
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Daly’s terms, Žižek’s ethics of the real shows the subject the approach to “subverting the logic of subversion” (15) in capitalism via his own dialectical triangulation of Hegel, Marx, and Lacan.
Opponents of Žižek stress the problematic aspect of his efforts to question global capitalism. They consider it untenable and impalpable. Ernsto Laclau argues that Žižek’s analysis of global capitalism lacks other political viewpoints as Žižek restricts himself within Lacanian psychoanalysis (Laclau 289). His analytic studies of
capitalism work with insufficient consideration and research. Žižek’s political
argument fails to expand beyond philosophical and psychoanalytical spectra to cover a more meticulous and detailed strategy of fighting against capitalism. Though he thinks that we need to change the capitalist ideological order that constrains our thinking today, Saul Newman emphasizes that Žižek’s insistence on radical change through the ethical act, and his willingness to “get one’s hand dirty,” will only result in a catastrophic end (Newman, Unstable Universalities 190-91). Newman posits that Žižek’s willingness to follow the “old Lenin style of politics” cannot trigger radical politics today (190). Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher claim that Žižek’s ethical effort to subvert capitalism only risks “reversing the value of judgment on the opposed terms, ‘liberalism versus terrorism’” without “generating a new politics capable of animating or guiding progressive political movements . . .” (Sharpe, Žižek
and Politics 166). For them, Žižek’s much-orchestrated yet problematic theoretical
illustration simply directs us to another hegemony. Adrian Johnston designates Žižek’s combination of Marx and Lacan as a critique on capitalism. It can create a“theoretical fetish object” (Johnston, Badiou, Žižek 109-10) and make Žižek himself a cynic. Johnston writes that Žižek maintains a cynical distance away from the ideology of capitalism. Žižek’s contradiction lies in his cynical emphasis. He knows that
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displacing capitalism is impossible, but he still continues to claim the possibility of the act as an intervention to change capitalism. For Sharpe, the insalubrious difficulty of Žižek comes from his Kantian interpretation of Hegel presented via Lacan, which he applies to the social issues (Sharpe, Slavoj Žižek 210). Because of his problematic application of Kant, Hegel, and Lacan, Žižek always circles around “haughty
indifference to ‘empirical’ matters” (210).
Although these critics have revealed different aspects of Žižek’s theoretical problems and contributions, few scholars address the situation of global capitalism and offer a credible alternative reflection on the problems of global capitalism after the fall of Eastern bloc-style socialism. Today, the society that functions under the capitalist system shows how commodity infiltrates and colonizes our lives. Almost everything in our lives is commodified and incorporated into capitalism, from birth to death and from a local to a global scale. Nothing escapes the reach of global
capitalism. Žižek’s principal dedication to critical theory is “his detailed elaboration of the subject” (Myers 11) and his critique on the official culture, especially the interpellation of the ideological fantasies of liberal capitalism. The problems of today’s society are not only the demand of enjoyment from the obscene father but also, most of all, a certain fetishistic split of the subject: I know the situation very well, but I don’t care about changing the society since nothing can be changed. That is, the subject knows that global capitalism today involves fake democracy and corruption. It knows very well that democracy today allows governments to profit multinational companies by sacrificing the welfare of the public, but still it can do nothing to change the situation. The subject has no choice but to stick to this fake democracy because it believes that there is no better way to replace capitalism after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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In what follows, I will employ Žižek’s critical thinking methods to elucidate the radical aspect of negativity. Premising his critical insights upon Kant, Hegel and Lacan, Žižek merges negativity in German idealism with the psychoanalytical death drive and concentrates on the repressed void of the subject and the symbolic order. By drawing on Kant and Hegel, Žižek develops a significant insight into abyssal
negativity. With Freud and Lacan, Žižek combines the negativity of German idealism with the concept of the undead in psychoanalysis, which eventually contributes to the possible autonomy of the subject. On the one hand, by recognizing its own negativity as undead, the subject comes to realize that this abyssal negativity can enable it to have an autonomous status away from the influence of the big Other and superego.
On the other, as it senses its unknown negativity and incompleteness, the subject starts to sympathize and accept the external excluded outcast. Only then can the subject take the side with the uncomfortable and revolting outcast in its society. Therefore, to offer a detailed development of negativity, I need to examine Kant, Hegel, and Lacan separately to expound how the existence of negativity is important to the formation of the subject and how negativity offers the subject a space for critical freedom and autonomy.