Zizek Art as a Symptom.pdf

ART AS SYMPTOM

Z ∨ I ∨ EK AND THE ETHICS OF

PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

TIM DEAN

This paper tackles a problem that is exemplified by, but not restricted to, Slavoj Z ∨ i ∨ ek’s

work: the tendency to treat aesthetic artifacts as symptoms of the culture in which they

were produced. Whether or not one employs the vocabulary and methods of

psychoanalysis to do so, this approach to aesthetics has become so widespread in the

humanities that it qualifies as a contemporary critical norm. As a norm, it may be subject

to debate and even contestation. Today it is normative to read literature, film, and other

cultural texts primarily as evidence about the societies that made them—evidence that

necessarily requires our hermeneutic labor in order to yield its significance. This

methodological protocol remains in place whether one inhabits critical perspectives as

ostensibly disparate as historicist, materialist, or psychoanalytic modes of thinking; it is

also a grounding assumption of cultural studies, irrespective of how one defines that

critical practice. Indeed, the issue I want to address is quite as much a Marxist problem

as it is a psychoanalytic one, and therefore the way in which Z ∨ i ∨ ek articulates Lacan

with Marx makes his work especially fertile terrain on which to engage this matter. As

Z ∨ i ∨ ek reminds us in The Sublime Object of Ideology , Lacan claimed that Marx invented

the symptom [ SO 11]—an observation that Z ∨ i ∨ ek has been keen to exploit from the very

beginning of his work.

Z ∨ i ∨ ek’s combining psychoanalysis with Marxism in novel ways has helped make

Lacan more palatable to contemporary critical sensibilities by politicizing psychoanalysis,

demonstrating how it offers less an account of the individual than of society and culture.

In Z ∨ i ∨ ek’s hands psychoanalytic theory appears less vulnerable to the standard criticisms

that it is ahistorical and apolitical. While a number of critiques of Z ∨ i ∨ ek have reiterated

these common objections, nevertheless his politicizing of psychoanalysis has been

particularly important during a period that witnessed the rise of new historicism, the

institutionalization of cultural studies, and the escalating importance of “the political”

as a sign—perhaps the sign—of humanities professors’ seriousness. 1 Z ∨ i ∨ ek’s work has

gone a long way toward making Lacan seem indispensable to cultural studies, just as

Juliet Mitchell’s and Jacqueline Rose’s work a decade earlier made Lacan seem

indispensable to theoretically rigorous feminism. At a moment when the poststructuralist

variant of Lacanian theory was being displaced by historicist modes of thought, Z ∨ i ∨ ek

emerged on the scene to revivify psychoanalysis and make it exciting again. Thus his

work’s appeal has an historical basis quite apart from Z ∨ i ∨ ek’s own personal charisma

and his remarkable productivity. It is his politicizing of psychoanalysis, as much as his

Thanks to Julia Bader and George Starr, in whose house this essay was composed.

1. For significant considerations of the politics of ∨ i ∨ ek’s work, see Bellamy; Chow; Guerra;

Miklitsch; Resch, “Running”; Resch, “Sound.” Whereas these studies focus on the political im-

plications of ∨ i ∨ ekian thinking, the present study concerns the different (though related) question

of the ethical ramifications of his work.

diacritics / summer 2002

diacritics 32.2: 21–41

rendering Lacan newly accessible, that has made ∨ i ∨ ek popular. I want to argue, however,

that his style of politicizing psychoanalysis carries a significant ethical cost, one that

follows partly as a consequence of Z ∨ i ∨ ek’s failure to work through his theoretical relation

to Althusser, from whom he derives the practice of symptomatic reading while claiming

to displace the latter’s version of psychoanalytic Marxism. Thus I shall be arguing for a

significant distinction between a political and an ethical psychoanalysis, suggesting

that we have been cultivating the former at the expense of the latter.

Spaghetti Psychoanalysis

The notion of the symptom is central to Z ∨ i ∨ ek’s thinking about politics and culture.

Although in his work and in psychoanalytic theory more generally the term symptom

carries a range of conceptual meanings, symptomatology remains the governing trope

of Z ∨ i ∨ ek’s oeuvre. Following Lacan, who continued to modify the concept of the symptom

throughout his career, Z ∨ i ∨ ek argues that just about anything can be understood as

symptomatic:

[I]n the final years of Lacan’s teaching we find a kind of universalization of

the symptom: almost everything that is becomes in a way symptom, so that

finally even woman is determined as the symptom of man. We can even say

that “symptom” is Lacan’s final answer to the eternal philosophical question

“Why is there something instead of nothing?”—this “something” which “is”

instead of nothing is indeed the symptom. [ SO 71–72]

If, for reasons to be elaborated, virtually anything can be considered a symptom, then

this conceptual move illuminates how Z ∨ i ∨ ek can write about everything, how he seems

able to render all cultural phenomena as grist to his theoretical mill. Having grasped the

structural logic of the symptom, one may submit practically anything of interest to its

explanatory grid. And while Z ∨ i ∨ ek expounds more than merely one logic of symptom

formation, his structural logics—like his many books—tend to remain variations on a

single theme.

If, according to Lacan at the end of his career, the symptom has become a condition

of subjective existence rather than a contingent problem, then there can be no possibility

of curing symptoms in the manner that Freud envisioned when he invented

psychoanalysis. Yet while this universalizing of symptomatology sidelines the question

of cure, it does nothing to diminish the psychoanalytic zeal for diagnosis and

interpretation. Instead, the opposite is true: universalizing the symptom fuels the motive

for diagnosis and interpretation, since symptoms are no longer localized and self-evident

but lurking everywhere. A hermeneutic operation becomes necessary before we can see

how, for example, woman is the symptom of man. 2 By shifting symptoms from the

category of the exception to that of the rule, Z ∨ i ∨ ek to some extent depathologizes the

symptom, converting it into a subjective norm. But to the degree that his method requires

a diagnostic stance (insofar as it encourages an intensified hermeneutic vigilance vis-à-

vis the cultural field), Z ∨ i ∨ ek’s symptomatology raises questions about the ethics of

diagnosis. While Lacan’s universalizing of the symptom provokes fundamental

2. Z ∨ iz ∨ ek elaborates this particular example in Enjoy Your Symptom! [31–67]. The charac-

terization of woman as the symptom of man may be understood as a heterosexist correlate of the

Lacanian axiom that there is no sexual relation (“il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel”). Although space

prevents me from taking up this example of the symptom, I have pursued some of the issues it

raises for sexual politics in Dean, “Homosexuality.”

epistemological questions too, my primary concern lies with the ethical implications of

a critical approach that regards the universe as perpetually in need of interpretation.

Reading one’s world in terms of symptoms positions one as a hermeneut with a particular

relation to the world—a relation of suspicion and putative mastery. Although Z ∨ i ∨ ek

repeatedly points out that one can never master one’s “own” symptom (but only enjoy

it), his method nonetheless situates the critic in a position of hermeneutic mastery over

the social and cultural symptoms he or she diagnoses. One cannot help noticing that in

his dozen or so books no cultural artifact poses any resistance to Z ∨ i ∨ ek’s hermeneutic

energy; there is no social system or movie or opera or novel that he cannot interpret. We

might say that there seems to be no cultural phenomenon that, with his Lacanian schema,

Z ∨ i ∨ ek cannot master. 3

Z ∨ i ∨ ek’s hermeneutic voracity—what Tom Cohen characterizes as his approaching

“the vast samples of American popular culture with vampirelike urgency” [356]—could

be understood as but one more instance of psychoanalysis’s imperialism, its tendency to

find exemplifications of its principles everywhere it turns [see Derrida; Meltzer]. I would

suggest, however, that viewing cultural phenomena through the lens of symptomatology

points to a larger problem, one that pertains to not only psychoanalytic criticism but

also Marxism, historicism, and cultural studies. The problem lies in the way that treating

aesthetic artifacts as cultural symptoms elides the specificity of art, making cultural

forms too readily apprehensible as what Z ∨ i ∨ ek, in one definition of the symptom, calls

“the point of emergence of the truth about social relations” [ SO 26]. Of course, the

category of art—and, more broadly, that of aesthetic experience—does not appear in

Z ∨ i ∨ ek’s work; speaking of “art” when discussing post-Lacanian ideology critique may

appear as quaintly anachronistic. But that is exactly my point. Despite his interest in

Kantian philosophy and his evocation of the sublime, Z ∨ i ∨ ek’s approach to culture and

society leaves little conceptual space for any consideration of aesthetic effects or their

significance. 4

This is an ethical problem because it eradicates dimensions of alterity particular to

art, making any encounter with the difficulty and strangeness of aesthetic experience

seem beside the point. Rather than finding any moments of opacity or resistance to his

hermeneutic schemes when engaging aesthetic artifacts, Z ∨ i ∨ ek finds only a familiar

scenario—one that his readers now recognize quickly too. Although he speaks almost

continuously about otherness, no actual instances of otherness are permitted to interrupt

his interpretive discourse. And while Z ∨ i ∨ ek’s approach exemplifies this problem especially

strikingly, it is far from limited to his work. Business as usual throughout the humanities

proceeds as if thinking about art symptomatically—as a “point of emergence of the

truth about social relations”—were the only credible alternative to thinking about art as

3. See, for example, Z ∨ iz ∨ ek’s analysis of September 11, which began circulating online merely

weeks after the event [ Welcome ]. As Louis Menand points out apropos of Z ∨ iz ∨ ek and others, the

intellectual certainty manifested on the Left in the wake of 9/11 is itself rather troubling:

The initial response of most cultural and political critics to the attacks of September

11th—a completely unanticipated atrocity carried out by an organization that few people

in the West had ever heard of and whose intentions are still not entirely comprehen-

sible—was: It just proves what I’ve always said. . . . The surprising thing about most of

the published reflections on September 11th is how devoid of surprise they are. They

are so devoid of surprise as to be almost devoid of thought. [98]

4. Rey Chow notes, in passing, this feature of Z ∨ iz ∨ ek’s work: “Whether he is reading litera-

ture, film, jokes, comics, science fiction, philosophy, or anything else, Z ∨ iz ∨ ek is seldom interested

in the problem of aesthetic form and its relation to (the construction of) subjectivity as such” [7].

diacritics / summer 2002

the creation of transcendent genius. I find both of these alternatives unsatisfactory because

both effectively make art transparent, reducing its alterity to more familiar terms. In

what follows, I elucidate the epistemological implications of Z ∨ i ∨ ek’s notion of the

sociocultural symptom, before pursuing its ethical implications and suggesting how

psychoanalysis might provide some conceptual resources for a more ethically defensible

approach to aesthetics.

Arguing for the Real

Thus far my critique of Z ∨ i ∨ ek has argued that his combining Hegelian Marxism with

Lacanian psychoanalysis conduces to a critical perspective on cultural matters that makes

aesthetic forms overly familiar, rendering them instantly recognizable as the products

of ideological conflict. Were it not that symptomatic reading constitutes the approach I

wish to critique, I would say that Z ∨ i ∨ ek’s work itself stands as the symptom of a much

larger critical problem. In other words, I have suggested that ∨ i ∨ ek makes art too familiar

and that this critical tendency itself can be seen as dispiritingly familiar. But it must be

acknowledged that the appearance, in 1989, of The Sublime Object of Ideology

inaugurated an innovative approach in the history of psychoanalytic criticism. It was

not something familiar but a wonderfully strange new critical voice that we heard when

we began reading Z ∨ i ∨ ek. He revivified psychoanalytic criticism by making it more

political, more philosophical, and ultimately more popular; and he achieved all this by

shifting the emphasis from analyses of imaginary and symbolic representations to an

engagement with that which resists representation: the real.

Following Jacques-Alain Miller’s systematic periodization of Lacanian thought,

Z ∨ i ∨ ek focuses his sharpest attention on the “late Lacan,” wherein the concept of the

real—along with the notions of drive, jouissance , Thing, and objet petit a associated

with it—comes to the fore. Lacan’s insistence throughout the 1950s on the subjective

importance of the signifier gave way (circa 1960) to a growing interest in what the

signifier could not accommodate and, indeed, what animates the symbolic universe in

the first place. 5 With the waning of structuralism and its emphasis on the quasideterminist

role of symbolic structures in human life, Lacan began expending greater speculative

energy on the under determination of subjectivity by symbolic forms. Whereas the concept

of overdetermination derived from psychoanalytic hermeneutics (specifically, The

Interpretation of Dreams ) had promised a theory of subject formation that seemed

compatible with Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, in fact the multiply determining relations

created by chains of signifiers connected in a symbolic network could never completely

determine the subjective effects they were invoked to explain. There is always something

left over, something unexplained by symbolic determination. Hence Freud’s observations

about the enigmatic “navel of the dream”; hence, too, Lacan’s attempts to theorize this

subjective underdetermination via a range of terms and concepts (principally that of

l’objet petit a ).

Paradoxically the Freudian understanding of overdetermination leads to a radically

nondeterminist theory of subjectivity; Lacan’s account of the symbolic order’s constitutive

effects does not revoke all notions of subjective agency, as often has been assumed in

Anglo-American debates about the ideological consequences of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

5. Z ∨ iz ∨ ek locates this shift in Lacan’s seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60

[Z ∨ iz ∨ ek, “Undergrowth” 7]. The publication of this seminar in 1986 and its translation into En-

glish in 1992 provide dates that circumscribe the period during which Z ∨ iz ∨ ek was in the process of

emerging as the intellectual figure that we know today.

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: