Friday, September 19, 2003
(11:13 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Ethical Dilemmas
Adam Smith gave me a link to this recent article by Slavoj Zizek, entitled "Bring Me My Phillips Full Mental Jacket." Like most of Zizek's writings, it is inconsistent: at times really brilliant and invigorating, and at times appearing to wallow in the most obvious banalities. I am beginning to think that Zizek is a true theorist in the classic continental tradition. Like Foucault, he has shown that he has considerable erudition and can do the scholarly heavy lifting with the best of them -- for instance, The Indivisible Remainder (available in paperback only in Canada, for reasons I can't quite ascertain) was a genuinely good critical introduction to Schelling, even if it did got bogged down in way too much Lacan, and Tarrying with the Negative certainly helped me to understand Kant and Hegel beyond the textbook cliches. Now, however, he seems to have decided that the best way to go is to make sweeping, very interesting assertions -- for instance, "Yes, Christianity is at the root of Marxism, and the two need to work together," as in The Fragile Absolute -- and then write a very bizarre book full of good passages, interesting analyses, and a variety of materials that aren't related in any obvious ways to the deeply subversive thesis. After two or three times through, as I have mentioned before, I did figure out what he was doing in The Fragile Absolute, and it is deeply satisfying, but three times through one short book, just to see the freaking point, seems like a little bit much to ask from non-fanatical readers.
The difference in this article is that the "money quote" comes at the end of an argument that up to this point has seemed to be a rather pedestrian analysis of the ethical dilemmas posed by scientific advances (albeit with hints toward something more subversive):
Reducing my being to the genome forces me to traverse the phantasmal stuff of which my ego is made, and only in this way can my subjectivity properly emerge.
The point is familiar to readers of Zizek, but, to quote the White Stripes, "it bears repeating." There is always a pure determinism at work, primarily (in Lacan) the rules of the symbolic order of language. Bringing this determinism down to the level of brain chemistry doesn't change anything, especially when deep down, we all pretty much knew that there was determinism at that level anyway -- those who advocate an entirely law-governed physical universe cannot possibly fail to see that our bodies, including our brains, are part of that physical universe. There is, however, always an excess produced by this very lockstep determinism, the "indivisible remainder" which is the pure negativity of the subject, that "something else" that we can't account for. We can, and do, ignore that "something else," but that always implies a certain loss of nerve. Even if we argue that our genetic code predisposes us to lose our nerve, we can't escape from the empty space of subjectivity -- after all, where were we standing when we said that our genetic code predisposes us... except in the place of the free subject?
One question to be considered (perhaps Jared Woodward or Anthony Smith could weigh in on this one): for Zizek, is there any way to get at subjectivity except psychoanalysis? Parallel to the familiar C. S. Lewis argument according to which salvation comes only through Christ, even if the saved person does not know Christ is doing the saving, is it the case that every path toward true subjectivity is analysis by other means, whether the subject recognizes it as such or not? Is there an ethical obligation to undergo psychoanalysis, by whatever means necessary?
