Thursday, July 17, 2003
(6:47 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Lack in the Other
I only discovered Slacktivist through Atrios a few weeks ago, but I've been very consistently impressed, particularly with the sample post in the link above. A crucial point in that post is that the social justice group he is talking about focusses on building relationships with the poor, without necessarily having a program or a forecast of a particular end product.
As you might have guessed from the abstruse title of this post, I have a Zizekian axe to grind on this issue. To greatly simplify his theory for the sake of the blogosphere, there's a certain gap, or a certain opacity, that is a necessary part of how things are. It goes under many different names (the subject, jouissance, the Lacanian term object a, das Ding) and is covered over by various other phenomena (primarily the Lacanian phallus or the "master signifier"). This lack is experienced as a deadlock or obstacle, and the key thing for most people is to get rid of it, get past it, get it off me.
I'd say there are at least two ways of going about this. The first is to imagine the other (a particular other person, or the "big other" of the symbolic order) is complete in itself (not lacking) and that the other possesses the necessary means to fill in my lack. Often someone in this situation will feel as though the other has stolen her most precious possession and keeps trying to do whatever it takes to get the other to get it back. The second is to imagine that I am already complete and that the other is the one who needs the deadlock removed. The pervert (in psychoanalytic terms) attempts to remove the lack in the other by giving the other exactly what she wants. The racist or anti-Semitist becomes more malevolent and sees the lacking other (the Jews, blacks, whomever) as the real deadlock in society that must be either strictly policed or destroyed.
What's the solution? Well, first I have to become a hysteric who constantly asks the other why I'm not happy, then I have to get "cured" -- that is, I have to recognize the lack in the other. What you have in common with the other is not a positive set of interests or characteristics, but it is ultimately simply the lack, the deadlock. (This is illustrated by foreign exchange students: what they have in common is not so much that the experience of Kenya and Russia and India are all uniformly the same, but rather that they are not Americans.)
To enter into relationship with the other, a real relationship not based on some fantasy, is to enter my lack into relationship with the other's lack. For example, it is to go out to the poor as a broken, divided person who is never going to get it right. I don't think I do violence to Zizek's work to connect it to Christ, since he does so himself -- the Christian tradition gives us a God, a Savior, who ends his life as a broken failure. We have a God who becomes one particular, "miserable" (Zizek's constant adjective for Christ) person, who not only doesn't make the world a better place, but arguably makes it worse, at least for those who cannot forget the profit and the loss. (See Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity.)
I write so much about Zizek right now because I'm thinking I need to rewrite my Zizek Trinity paper and try to get it published, since now I actually feel like I know what I'm talking about.
