A Lacanian Subject

It must be said straight away: Slavoj Žižek is no Lacanian. If he were, not only would he be furnishing the master's text with the sort of commentaries scholars usually give to Biblical exegeses; he would also be unlikely to retain our attention for very long. Rather, Žižek is a Lacanian “subject.” The difference is not negligible. Having long ago activated within himself and then turned outward the peculiar structure of the Lacanian psyche, Žižek seems now in possession of a formidable instrument of cognition, a laser-like intelligence that cuts through layers of ideological tissue, revealing malignant growths, but also unsuspected connections all over the body politic. Another way of putting it is to say that Žižek has honed to a needle point the paranoid dialectic practiced by Jacques Lacan, extending it into two areas the master wisely refrained from occupying, namely philosophy and cultural theory. The latter may not take much courage, though more skill than is usually credited to the practitioners by their detractors, but to have elevated paranoia to a philosophical discourse is no small achievement. Žižek would argue (I think, rightly) that he is simply taking up a tradition, that of the philosophy of mind, consciousness and self-consciousness, which might lead one to identify him first and foremost as a Hegelian, who has come to the teachings of Jacques Lacan via Alexandre Kojève and Louis Althusser. But this could be a misunderstanding.

Of course, it is true that Žižek knows his Hegel (as he knows his Marx), and he makes approving nods in the direction of those who in recent years have tried to re-read Hegel, in order to rescue his notion of “Aufhebung” from its notoriety as the worn-out piston of a 19th-century engine-room historical necessity, reinstating its relevance for a contemporary way out of the collapse of binarisms.