Monday, December 13, 2004
(8:17 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
St. Paul Week: The first letter of Slavoj Žižek to the Corinthians
Slavoj Žižek, called to be an apostle of Jacques Lacan by objet petit a.To the academic community that is in Corinth and to all those who are called to get off on knowledge and to enjoy their symptom.
May all of you escape the tyranny of the obscene superego injunction to enjoy.
Now I appeal to you, that all of you might be united in the theoretical labor of refounding the emancipatory leftist project. For it has been reported to me that there are quarrels among you. What I mean is that each of you says, "I belong to Derrida," or "I belong to Judith Butler," or "I belong to Habermas," or "I just do philosophy." Is not this division into separate schools, far from being a distraction from the genuine philosophical task, instead the very condition of philosophical insight? Is it not the case that, rather than try to mediate among all these conflicting positions, we should instead insist on a radical partisanship? I am glad that I have never sought "rapprochement" or "dialogue" between two schools of thought. (I did write a book on Deleuze, but that was an encounter, not a dialogue.) For I did not set out to ease division, but to touch upon the Real -- not with postmodern sophistry, lest the offensive, intolerant kernel of Lacanianism be relativized and emptied of its power.
For is not the very excremental, disavowed remainder, the inert, useless left-over, the VERY CONDITION of jouissance? Where is the adherent of the Levinasian Judaism? Where is the propagandist of "identity politics"? Has not all the feverish debate among so-called "radical" intellectuals been revealed as the necessary complement of the universal capitulation to tolerant neo-liberal consensus? For since, through the cunning of reason, the radicals were not able to acknowledge their complicity with the current capitalist order, the very intolerant "rednecks" whom the liberal intellectual elite detests must instruct us in resistance and opposition. The Levinasians demand an idolatry of otherness, while the identitarians blind themselves to the totality of the political situation. And so, I preach Hegel Lacanianized, allied with the subversive kernel of Pauline Christianity: a stumbling block to the tolerant relativists and foolishness to the "enlightened" academic sophists -- but to those who get the pun, the "puppet" is theology and the "dwarf" is now historical materialism.
[Based loosely on 1 Corinthians 1:1-24.]
