Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 5 No. 17, June 2001
Edward R. O'Neill
The Last Analysis of Slavoj Zizek
_Cogito and the
Unconscious_ Edited by Slavoj Zizek SIC: A series edited by Slavoj Zizek
and Renata Salecl Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 1998 ISBN 0-8223-2097-5 279 pp. OUTLINE I. Introduction. I. A. Theory and Method in the Human
Sciences. I. B. Justification of the Current
Review. I. C. Zizek: Method and
Rhetoric. I. D. The Plan of this
Review. II. The Volume's Topics. II. A. Lacan and Descartes. II. B. Lacan and Kant. II. C. From Malebranche to the
Siren. II. D. The Cogito's
Critics. III. Rhetoric and Method III. A. The Example of Slavoj
Zizek. III. B. Bait and Switch. III. C. Wittgenstein Made
Easy. III. D. Idealism Redux, or the Return
of Vulgar Interpretation. III. E. The Proliferation of Examples
and the Rhetoric of Homology. III. F. The Substitution of Rhetorical
Force for Argument. III. G. Situating Zizek. III. H. Vicious Circularity of
Interpretations. IV. Conclusion. I. INTRODUCTION. '[T]here is really no art
involved at all in being generally intelligible if one
thereby renounces all basic insight, but such a procedure
turns out a disgusting mismash of patchwork observations and
half-reasoned principles in which shallowpates revel because
all this is something quite useful for the chitchat of
everyday life'. -- Immanuel Kant, _Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals_. I. A. THEORY AND METHOD IN THE HUMAN
SCIENCES. If we take the 'human sciences' as the
French do to include both the study of human action and the
symbolic products of these actions -- in other words, to
include what we Americans divvy up into the social sciences
and the humanities -- then the question of method is
probably one of the most important yet most vexed within
this admittedly broad domain. Discrepancies regarding the role of
methodology are indeed striking. In the realm of science, a
theory involves a correlation of cause and effect, and the
experimental method guarantees this correlation.
Interpretations of human actions and symbolic products, by
contrast, lack the same kind of necessary-and-sufficient
correlation: a theory of human action or culture does not
correlate causes and effects but rather provides a means for
linking a proliferation of surface events with an inner
structure. Because a number of depth interpretations are
possible, outsiders may view the results as specious, since
it can never be proven that humans act as they do because of
-- you fill in the blank -- class struggle, repressed
instincts, the thrown-ness of Dasein, etc. Thus when Freud argues that beneath
the symptoms of paranoia (delusions of persecution,
erotomania, egomania) there is a single phantasy -- 'I (a
man) love him (a man)' -- the surface symptoms are
interpreted as transformations of an underlying phantasy: 'I
do not love him, I hate him'; 'I do not love him, I love
her'; 'I do not love him, I love myself'. The translation
cannot be tested in the sense that we cannot find a
paranoiac who lacks these symptoms, for the absence of such
symptoms would mean he wouldn't be a paranoiac. Nor can we
find the underlying phantasy through some kind of direct
observation: the phantasy may motivate other forms of
behavior, but that does not preclude its being the source of
the paranoiac's symptoms. We cannot isolate the phantasy as
a 'cause' nor the symptoms as an 'effect' in order to
demonstrate the correlation. What makes such a theory and its
interpretation credible is thus not the ends, for a sexual
meaning must be taken as given in advance by the theoretical
framework. Rather, it is the means of the interpretation
itself, the extent to which we can demonstrate and justify
the inherent rationality of interpretation, which must take
up the burden of proof. In this situation, the internal
consistency of the interpretation and the ability of the
theory to generate a method for translating the surface
phenomena into their deeper significance becomes
paramount. We reject a theory of human actions
not based on itself alone, since every theory involves the
assumption of a perspective that cannot be questioned: if
you do not accept class struggle, the unconscious, or the
ontological difference, then you cannot accept anything else
that Marx, Freud, or Heidegger have to say. But we reject
these theories at those places where their formulae for
selecting and transforming a surface phenomenon into its
significance become capricious, or the scope of the theory's
application seems unreasonably wide. What is irksome about
Marxism is that for its adherents there is nothing but class
struggle, and anything which denies the centrality of class
struggle is mere 'ideology'. Ditto for Freud: anything can
be traced back to the repression of impulses as long as the
interpretation is long enough to get from one point to the
other. And for Heidegger, Being does not show itself and so
even its very concealment serves as an index of its
(paradoxical) unconcealment. Such theories may be condemned as
'totalizing', since the perspective leaves nothing outside
it, and condemns with its own pejorative terms --
'ideology', 'repression', 'metaphysics' -- any opposition to
it. And it is all too easy to make fun of these excesses
without recognizing that the very fact that one sees them as
excessive often places one outside the realm of the theory's
adherents, rather than the other way around. Indeed, it is
difficult to say whether these sins are evitable. What is
less evitable is the assumption of an orientation which
would grant meaning, and which assumption cannot in itself
be questioned without the adoption of another non-neutral
orientation and assumption of significance. Which is to say
that the opposition to one theory is not non-theory but only
*another* theory. On this view, a method of
interpretation can be said to take the role in the human
sciences that the experimental method plays for the physical
sciences, and, as the human sciences emerged in the 19th
century, theories of interpretation, language, and meaning
took on an increasingly important role, since such theories
of interpretation serve as meta-theories of the human
sciences. A theory of human action requires a theory of
interpretation, and the selection of a theory of
interpretation commits one to an orientation towards
decoding human actions: a theory of class oppression thus
requires a theory of ideology; a theory of the unconscious
requires a theory of dreams; a theory of Being requires a
poetics of dwelling. But since different methods of
interpretation take place within different theoretical
frameworks, these interpretive methods are every bit as
incommensurable as the theories. To some extent, one cannot
argue for a theory outside of its own bounds, since assuming
those bounds is itself the act of adopting the theory.
Although a theory of human action may attempt to make itself
a consistent, closed system by spelling out its protocols
and procedures, there is no single universal framework for
determining what set of standards to adopt, since adopting a
theory itself involves exactly the adoption of such a set of
standards. Nevertheless, there is a general set
of means to which writers can appeal in trying to persuade
readers to adopt their theories. This general set of means
should be called 'rhetoric': the non-technical,
non-specialized means by which we appeal to induce assent.
Thus, every theory of human actions requires some set of
rhetorical appeals to persuade readers that this perspective
is the one to adopt, even apart from or prior to the
internal canons of the theory itself. It is this rhetoric
and the relation between it and interpretive method with
which the current review will concern itself. I. B. JUSTIFICATION OF THE CURRENT
REVIEW. While the volume under review *does*
address somewhat the contemporary status of Cartesianism,
and while the volume also appeals at points to films to make
its points, philosophy and film cannot be said to intersect
in a precise and focused way in this volume. Thus from a
certain perspective, the volume would seem inauspicious for
the purposes of the present audience -- those with an
interest in both philosophy and film. But if we take philosophy not merely
as one subject area within the contemporary academy but
rather more broadly as involving a heightened reflexive
concern with details of methodology, then it makes a great
deal of sense to review the current volume in terms of the
philosophical concerns with procedures of interpretation. In
so doing, the volume under review will have to serve as a
stand-in for larger movements or tendencies within the
humanities in general. This burden cannot be entirely fair,
but since I believe these methodological concerns are
genuine, their application to this particular volume and its
contents is not out of order. The volume currently under review is a
convenient place from which to address questions about the
place of method in interpretation, since the volume is part
of a series which claims to have the same theoretical
orientation, since that orientation involves interpreting
cultural artefacts and analyzing human behavior. The
approach in question is that of Lacanian psychoanalysis,
once popular if not dominant in certain sectors of the
academy, especially when combined with French Marxism. Even
if psychoanalytic theories and their attendant
interpretations of popular culture are not central for a
group focused on film and philosophy, the issues of how to
interpret human actions and artefacts are indeed properly
'philosophical' concerns, as I've tried to argue
above. I. C. ZIZEK: METHOD AND
RHETORIC. The volume currently under review is
_Cogito and the Unconscious_ . It is edited by Slavoj Zizek
and is the second in a relatively new series entitled 'SIC'
from Duke University Press. The series is edited by Zizek
and Renata Salecl. Those familiar with the academic scene
right now will probably be aware of Professor Zizek's
contributions. He has authored some ten books in only a few
more years, and he has three more titles listed as
forthcoming in 2001. His essays appear in at least three
other volumes. He has co-authored a volume with Judith
Butler and Ernesto Laclau and has written forewords,
introductions, afterwords and whatnot to three other books.
He has edited or co-edited four more volumes, and he has
another on the way. And, somewhat inexplicably, there is
even _The Zizek Reader_ -- in case people find it hard to
lay their hands on Zizek's work. Indeed, it seems that not
only might readers be aware of Zizek, it would be quite hard
not to be. Further, it is not hard to come across
the chapters of these volumes in the form of journal
articles, as the author is not embarrassed about seeing the
same material published separately in multiple places. The
volumes themselves are not clearly distinguishable from the
collections of individual essays, an impression supported
when the essays get re-combined in other volumes. Rather,
the coherence of Zizek's books lies neither in their
argument nor in their scope but rather, if it may be said,
in the very eclecticism of their method. Whether or not Zizek's methods are
emblematic of the Lacanian school, past evidence is strong
that he will not go away soon and that, moreover, he is
likely to strike again. Given this situation, one might want
to get a sense of the propositions of this school and its
methods, even at the risk of taking this volume as
emblematic when it is not. (I believe it to be, but do not
urge my belief as proof -- a lesson I wish the writers in
the volume would take to heart.) What I will say in what follows is
that this volume presents *no method whatever*. In the absence of any detectable
method, a dizzying array of wildly entertaining and often
quite maddening rhetorical strategies are deployed in order
to beguile, browbeat, dumbfound, dazzle, confuse, mislead,
overwhelm, and generally subdue the reader into acceptance.
Example after example is supplied, but the principle that
makes them examples is not itself given. Appeals are
implicitly made to Lacan's authority but the source of that
authority is never mentioned. The truth of Lacan's theories
is urged by showing how other people's theories support that
truth but without explaining why these theories have the
same object. One concept is defined in terms of another,
which is then defined in the same way, ad infinitum. What's
being explained is mixed in with what's doing the explaining
in a circular fashion so striking that it may well count as
both a novelty and a technical innovation in the practice of
interpretation. Concepts are 'applied' without any
boundaries on either the concepts or the scope of their
application. Arguments and interpretations are hastily
summarized rather than being patiently outlined. Finally,
sheer rhetorical force substitutes for argument. These rhetorical tactics might not all
be problematic in themselves: it is even possible to imagine
that no form of humanistic interpretation could effectively
eschew all of them. But when compounded as they are here,
the difficulties presented seem to me nearly insuperable.
Further, these procedures cannot be dismissed as inessential
to the vital theoretical issues outlined, since, as I will
try to show, the rhetorical procedures which attempt to
convey the theories and to compel assent are closely tied to
the theories themselves and to what I see as their chief
intellectual failing: a collapse into vulgar idealism quite
at odds with the claims made for these theories. I. D. THE PLAN OF THIS
REVIEW. In what follows, I will first address
the volume's topic and the issue of how strongly the
sections and the individual essays which comprise them
relate to the ostensible topic. Here even the justification
of the connections amongst the volume's sections and pieces
will begin to give the reader a sense of the rhetorical
tactics at work in the volume. I will then focus on Zizek's three
entries in the volume he edited: the introduction, an essay
on Welles, and another on Daniel Dennett. (This focus is not
entirely unfair, since these three pieces make up almost one
quarter of the volume.) I will try to delineate the
rhetorical procedures Zizek uses to compel assent from the
reader, and I will try to show that these procedures are not
limited to his essays but also characterize at least
specific moments in other work in the volume. II. THE VOLUME'S TOPICS. The volume's ostensible topic is given
in the title: the cogito and the unconscious. Not all the
entries in the volume, however, nor indeed each of the three
sections into which the volume is divided, bear a clear
relationship to this double focus. While some entries bear a
clear and strong relationship to this framework, the
inclusion of other entries are difficult to comprehend.
Admirable as they may be in themselves, they don't truly
illuminate the issues purportedly addressed by the volume's
existence. II. A. LACAN AND DESCARTES. Part I, 'Cogito as a Freudian
Concept', contains three essays, all of which address
Lacan's understanding of subjectivity in some way, even if
the more narrowly Cartesian concept of the cogito is not
always front and center. Mladen Dolar's essay 'Cogito as the
Subject of the Unconscious' begins by posing Lacan's essay
on the 'mirror stage' as offering an alternative to the
cogito. In Lacan's alternative the ego is a site and effect
of misrecognition rather than thinking: I am (as a subject)
only insofar as I misrecognize myself in the form of an
image (the ego, me *qua* image). Dolar objects to
structuralist and poststructuralist writers -- Levi-Strauss,
Foucault, Althusser, Derrida, Kristeva -- because they offer
non-subjective conceptions of the subject, conceptions which
dissolve the subject into an effect of something else:
structure, discourse, interpellation, writing, the semiotic.
By contrast, the notion of a subject is central for Lacan --
but obviously a different kind of subject than Descartes
imagined. Thus, the first entry in the volume
strikes deeply at the volume's core issues, and the
extensive references to Lacan give the reader the
opportunity to test the arguments offered against the work
which supposedly authorizes those arguments. But the
author's sheer faith that Lacan is saying something and,
further, that Lacan got it right, together with the method
used to explain Lacan's reading of Descartes (more on this
below), may not satisfy readers who do not share these
assumptions, since the work of grounding these assumptions
is simply not done. II. B. LACAN AND KANT. In 'The Subject of the Law' Alenka
Zupancic analyzes the displacements effected on Kantian
ethics by Freud and Lacan. Explaining these displacements,
particularly those effected by Lacan, requires reference to
the concept of jouissance -- the French word which means
enjoyment in both the sexual and legal senses but which is
put to frankly idiomatic use by Lacan to the point of
becoming a technical term. In brief, Zupancic argues that Kantian
ethics seeks to produce a universality which cannot be
reconciled with the particularly of the subject upon which
this ethics also depends, even if we attempt to think the
subject in abstract terms. That is: when the subject tries
to think his relation to the law, there must always be
leftover some particularity to each and every subject which
cannot be assimilated to the law or to this ethical thinking
in their abstract character. Here one can appeal to Freud to
support Zupancic's reading in the sense that Freud can be
said to have given us a kind of phenomenology of the
individual's experience in the learning the law of the
family -- namely, the Oedipal double imperative both to be
like the father and not to have what he has. On this view,
Lacan formalizes this relation between the subject and the
law in such a way that the generality of the subject
devolves upon that subject's very particularity, and hence a
recourse to Kant seems like a justifiable
project. Zupancic's essay thus deals with
psychoanalysis, if not the unconscious per se, and with
Kant's conception of subjectivity, if not the cogito
precisely. (Already the volume has begun to wander from its
titular topic.) And since Zupancic's analysis deals with
Kant's ethics in some specific detail, students of Kant will
be able to use Zupancic's essay to get some sense of Lacan's
argument and may then decide to debate with either Lacan or
Zupancic. In any case, the essay is relevant to the topic
and provides the basis for engaging with it. The third essay in the first section
is one of Zizek's, and I will discuss it in detail below.
Interested readers will discern then whether or to what
extent the essay takes up the topics of the cogito and the
unconscious. II. C. FROM MALEBRANCHE TO THE
SIREN. If most of first section of _Cogito
and the Unconscious_ bears an evident relation to the
volume's topic, the second section, entitled 'Cogito's
Body', bears no appreciable relation either to the cogito or
to the unconscious. Encountering it within the pages of this
volume thus produces a surreal effect, though not an
entirely unpleasant one. In his introduction, Zizek claims that
this section 'focuses on Nicolas Malebranche, the Cartesian
philosopher and theologist who, with an unheard of audacity,
tackled the deadlocks in which the Cartesian project gets
involved apropos of the enigmatic status of the human body .
. .' (7). Thus the slim excuse for this section involves
analyzing a 'monstrous' body as an embodiment or side effect
of the construction of human consciousness in terms on a
function of pure thinking. If the first section of the
volume slides from the cogito to subjectivity more broadly
construed, the second section slides yet further. Thus 'the
cogito' has become 'subjectivity'; Descartes has become
Malebranche by way of Cartesianism, and subjectivity is then
traded in for 'monstrosity'. While it is true that the three essays
in this section examine either monstrosity (Polyphemus or
the Siren) or Malebranche -- this is already a wide enough
berth -- the connections to Descartes or the cogito remain
implicit rather than explicit, and the editor's rhetorical
strategies for compelling the reader's belief in these
essays' relatedness to the topic at hand must become more
naked. Writing of Alain Grosrichard's essay, 'The Case of
Polyphemus, or, a Monster and Its Mother', Zizek writes: 'Is
the monster with a phallic protuberance above his one eye .
. . not a kind of obscene double of the Cartesian cogito,
its impossible spectral embodiment?' (7). The reader cannot
answer 'No', since then there's nothing else to connect the
essay in question with the volume's supposed topic.
Grosrichard's essay itself provides a fascinating account of
Malebranche's theology, but the relation to Lacan is
indirect at best. Grosrichard does at one point (134) bring
in concepts like 'the gaze of the Other', and by means of
this transition the writer is able to bring two or three
pages on Descartes. But Cartesians are likely to be
disappointed. The second essay in the section, Miran
Bozovic's essay 'Malebranche's Occasionalism, or, Philosophy
in the Garden of Eden', is a detailed discussion of
Malebranche, and it should prove rewarding to specialists.
But, replete as it is with detailed references to
Malebranche, neither Descartes nor Lacan seemed to crop up
in the 100 footnotes, and I was not able to discern
connections either to the cogito or the
unconscious. The third essay, Renata Salecl's 'The
Silence of Feminine Jouissance', does, by contrast, give a
Lacanian explanation: what's being explained is the Greek
myth of the siren. But whatever one thinks of this
discussion -- I say somewhat more about it below -- the one
thing left unexplained is the relation to Malebranche: he
does not seem to be mentioned in the essay, and if he is
mentioned on its pages, the reference is left out of the
index. Enlightening though this essay might be, it doesn't
seem to belong where it is now. Scanning Zizek's
introduction for a clue as to the connection, one finds the
following: 'In the concluding essay of this part, Renata
Salecl tackles the lethal *jouissance* of the siren's
voice.' (7) I suppose that to the author this topic
automatically calls to mind a direct connection to
Malebranche or to Descartes, but the connection is obscure
at best. II. D. THE COGITO'S
CRITICS. The collection's final section -- Part
III, 'Cogito and Its Critics' -- concerns what the editor
calls 'three paradigmatic contemporary critiques of the
Cartesian subjectivity' (7): Bataille, Althusser and
Dennett. If one had to list 'three paradigmatic contemporary
critiques of the Cartesian subjectivity' I'm not sure that
these three would come immediately to mind. Bataille in
particular seems an odd choice, and the choice is not
justified in a strong way in Marc de Kessel's essay, 'A
Sovereign's Anatomy: The Antique in Bataille's Modernity and
Its Impact on His Political Thought'. Again, if Descartes is
mentioned, I missed it. But one cannot blame the author for
the inclusion of his work in an edited volume. Robert Pfaller's 'Negation and Its
Reliabilities: An Empty Subject for Ideology' openly
acknowledges itself as something of a footnote. Pfaller
begins by declaring Zizek's interpretation of the movie
_Blade Runner_ to be 'brilliant' (225), and then goes on to
a expand upon Zizek's juxtaposition of Ridley Scott and
Descartes. But this expansion deals more with Althusser,
Lacan, and Zizek than with Descartes. A note (241) explains
to the reader that the essay began as a letter to Zizek, and
it retains some of the 'fan' quality that this implies.
Indeed, references to Zizek and his school far outnumber
references to Lacan, let alone references to poor old Freud,
who seems quite lost by the wayside. Pfaller is interested in adding some
niceties to Althusser's conception of ideology, and so those
interested in that topic may find this essay useful, but the
entire status of the document depends upon one already
accepting the worth of what's being commented on, so those
who find Zizek on Ridley Scott and Descartes less than
'brilliant', or Althusser on ideology unappealing, may not
have much use for a commentary on these. In short, the effect one gets is that
the volume targets a genuine issue in the relationship
between psychoanalysis and philosophy, but that not enough
material directly addressing this issue was available, and
so the volume was filled out with interesting contributions
from the friends and admirers on subjects somewhat
tangential to the stated topic. While some of these entries
might seem more meritorious in other contexts, being in the
wrong context deprives them of much of their potential
force. In any case, the reader should be forewarned that the
volume's entries are not tightly integrated. III. RHETORIC AND METHOD. III. A. THE EXAMPLE OF SLAVOJ
ZIZEK. In order to appreciate the rhetorical
tactics of this volume, it is helpful to delve into Zizek's
own 'Four Discourses, Four Subjects', since the opening of
this essay displays much of what is good and bad about both
his work and this volume. Zizek reprises Lacan's
'definition' of a signifier: that which 'represents the
subject for another signifier' (74). This 'definition' is
what Zizek will then explain. But one might justly wonder:
how is this a 'definition'? And what is it going to mean to
'explain' it? Zizek has no such concerns: he's going to
provide an example of a definition whose truth is already
assured. The medical chart resting at the foot
of an old-fashioned hospital bed provides an 'example': the
subject is inscribed in the chart as a series of signifiers
themselves inscribed in a chain of other signifiers. The
example retrospectively gives the 'definition' an embodiment
which makes the definition more user-friendly than it might
seem at first glance. But to the extent that the example
succeeds, it does so too well: it covers up a certain lack
in what was being exemplified. Namely, how is the reader
assured that this is indeed what Lacan meant? And what
procedure was used to get from a Lacan's definition to this
example? Thus, right from the outset in Zizek's
essay one can find the entire problem and, to be fair, the
entire interest, of Zizek's procedure: the author presents a
splendid series of examples, each fascinating in its on
right, each tied to the next by a logic which is here half
obscure, there half evident, but without the author ever
thereby shedding light on the *status* of the text which
authorizes his own discourse (Lacan's, that is) or shedding
light on the very process of moving from the abstract
concepts to the concrete examples. III. B. BAIT AND SWITCH. Sometimes the very process of giving
examples is itself interrupted by a strange process of
substitution in which what's going to be explained gets
switched with something else -- just as Descartes gets
swapped out for Malebranche midway through the volume. Thus,
in order to explain the way Lacan conceives the relation
between the subject and the 'Other', Zizek instead explains
Lacan's scheme of the 'four discourses', structures which
relate the subject to yet other terms -- a master signifier,
knowledge, and surplus enjoyment. Then, instead of defining
each of these terms and drawing the implication for their
possible relations, Zizek explains the whole thing at once
-- how else? -- by giving examples. One discourse is
exemplified by Churchill, another by a Woody Allen movie.
Another involves what Zizek calls 'medical discourse', yet
another Romeo and Juliet, and yet another Racine. Then there
are ethnic jokes and Rossini's attitude towards
Mozart. At each turn, as the Lacanian insignia
are being explained, yet other terms pop-up which are not
themselves explained. The reader finds herself caught in an
infinite regress of things which need to be explained being
explained by things which themselves need to be explained:
hence the Alice-in-Wonderland feeling one gets from reading
Zizek -- a feeling not entirely unenjoyable but not entirely
profitable either. All and anything, it seems, can be
brought in to exemplify Lacan's theories. On this plane,
Zizek is the ultimate postmodern theorist -- not because of
anything he says about postmodernity, but rather because of
the way he exemplifies the postmodern dissolution of the
barrier between high culture and popular culture, between
art and commodity. Not that I am complaining about these
examples. For thank goodness, in a way, for the examples:
they are easy enough to comprehend. Indeed, Zizek's examples
bring the theories he claims to be explaining down to the
level of witty anecdotes, suitable for being repeated at
cocktail parties. Some recap jokes, while others detail the
plots of novels -- sometimes at length and with minimal
interpretation. But we must take it on faith that
these anecdotes do indeed explain the opaque ideas which
they are offered to exemplify. It is even possible that
readers of Zizek turn the pages to read the witty anecdotes
and are gratified to feel that this form of amusement
embodies a higher form of knowledge. Doubtless many copies
of these volumes are sold on just such a pleasure --
together with the promise that the reader will find
enlightenment about the nature of opaque foreign theories.
This is no mean feat. Nor do I mean to belittle Zizek's
achievement. But this approach can be taken to do a
disservice to the ideas being proffered, since the nature,
source, and status of the ideas gets hidden as much as
revealed by the examples. One could easily get the feeling that
Lacanian psychoanalysis can 'explain' anything, and this
seems essentially correct, except for the small caveat that
'explain' means providing an amusing example. There are no
limits to what can be brought in as an example, and hence
the feeling of the theory's explanatory power. But one might
also insist that it is rather a question of no limits having
been placed on what precisely stands in need of explanation
and how precisely it should be explained. This is 'theory'
in the negative sense: an idea articulated in such general
terms without specifying either a scope of application or
canons of explanation to be followed. III. C. WITTGENSTEIN MADE
EASY. It is in the process of explaining
these 'four discourses' that Zizek addresses questions of
gender, and it is in this context that the book comes
closest to discussing film and that Zizek gives an extended
analysis of Orson Welles. To understand what Zizek says
about Welles, however, one needs understand what Zizek is
purportedly explaining -- namely, the relation of gender to
subjectivity. Thus, in order to explain Lacan's concept of
the subject, Zizek needs to refer to Lacan's four
discourses, and in order to explain those, he needs to
explain Lacan's theory of gender. Lacan's 'formulas of sexuation' turn
out to be embodied in the shift from Wittgenstein's early to
late works. Perhaps you don't know what that might be, or
perhaps it might be many things to you, but to Zizek it's
this: 'in the early Wittgenstein of
_Tractatus_, the world is comprehended as a self-enclosed,
limited, bounded whole of 'facts', which precisely as such
presupposes an exception: the ineffable mystical that
functions as its limit. In late Wittgenstein, on the
contrary, the problematic of the ineffable disappears, yet
for that very reason the universe is no longer comprehended
as a whole regulated by the universal conditions of
language: all that remains are lateral connections between
partial domains.' (83) The point is that Zizek 'explains'
Lacan's 'formulas of sexuation' by reference to something
else which is not itself patently self-explanatory but which
rather calls for yet another gloss. Zizek gives the gloss,
and one might well accept it: it's a sort of deconstructive,
more-Hegelian-than-thou exercise. No one could seriously
think this gloss on Wittgenstein should be taken as a
full-blown reading of Wittgenstein, and there's no
impression that Zizek offers it as such. Indeed, it's *only
an example*, and therein lies the rub. Namely, the meaning
and value of the example needs to be assumed in order for
the example to play its role as an explanation of something
else -- Lacan's 'formulas of sexuation' -- which was the
ostensible topic being explained and exemplified. Lacan Made Simple thus turns out to be
Everything Else Made Very, Very Easy: the meaning of
everything else which is brought in as examples needs to be
assumed in order that it might 'explain' Lacan, which is
apparently not self-evident. But what is it that authorizes
this reading of Wittgenstein -- since it's too brief to be
supported by its own evidence or patent appeal? One needs to
have accepted the reading, but that reading itself is never
performed, only summarized in a bored and hasty
tone. There's a sort of intellectual
blackmail here: to understand Lacan, which any
self-respecting intellectual would apparently want, you must
already have read Wittgenstein, which no self-respecting
intellectual will admit he hasn't done. The reader is
expected not to quibble over the details of Wittgenstein,
since that's not the ostensible topic of the text. Rather,
the reader gets a dollop of both Lacan and Wittgenstein --
two for the price of one. III. D. IDEALISM REDUX, OR THE RETURN
OF VULGAR INTERPRETATION. Meanwhile, back at the formulae of
sexuation, Zizek summarizes: 'In short, what sustains the
difference between the two sexes is not the direct reference
to a series of symbolic oppositions (masculine reason versus
feminine emotion, masculine activity versus feminine
passivity, etc.), but a different way of coping with a
necessary inconsistency involved the act of assuming and the
same universal symbolic feature (ultimately that of
'castration'). It is not that man stands for logos as
opposed to be feminine emphasis on emotions; it is rather
that, for man, logos as the consistent and coherent
universal principle of all reality relies on the
constitutive exception of some mystical, ineffable X ('there
are things one should not talk about'), while, in the case
of a woman, there is no exception, 'one can talk about
everything', and, for that very reason, the universe of
logos becomes inconsistent, in coherent, dispersed, 'non --
all' (84). The underlying assumption in this
passage seems to be that it is *not* all right to reduce
masculine and feminine to certain kinds of concepts
(oppositions, for example), but it is just fine to reduce
them to better, more complex (or more entertaining)
concepts. Masculinity *cannot* be understood in terms of
reason and femininity in terms of emotion, but it's fine to
understand gender difference in terms of a 'constitutive
exception'. We are not told whether oppositional concepts
shouldn't be used to understand gender or are just
illegitimate in general. Instead, a highly deconstructive
concept is brought in, but it is reduced from the level of a
concept to an explanation of a whole series of concrete
phenomena -- gender difference in all its sundry
manifestations. If the passage starts out treating
masculine and feminine as signifiers -- of reason and
emotion, activity and passivity, etc. -- it then reduces
'the difference between the . . . sexes' to ' a different
way of coping' with a certain 'universal symbolic feature'.
That is: the concepts brought in have been reduced to coping
strategies in order to define gender roles psychologically.
But we are never told why this kind of reductive definition
is preferable to the ones it replaces. This form of Lacanianism thus reduces
concepts to principles governing concrete behavior: in other
words, it's a form of vulgar idealism, since here ideas (but
only the good ones) purportedly drive human behavior (i.e.
masculinity is just a certain attitude towards
universality). The distance between this Lacanian approach
and identity politics then becomes more clear: taking
particular identities seriously means exactly *not* reducing
them to abstract concepts. This explains why Zizek does not
introduce particular forms of identity into his arguments:
they would muck up the vast generalizations whose 'truth'
consists of their very form. A similar vulgar idealism plague's De
Kessel's reading of Bataille. De Kessell focuses on
Bataille's peculiar understanding of the concept of
sovereignty. It is on the basis of this concept that De
Kessel explains what a critique of Stalinism and the
Holocaust would look like, although the author gives no
explanation of why existing criticisms of Stalinism and the
Holocaust are insufficient and why one derived from Bataille
might be needed. De Kessel's essay has the virtue of
making explicit the kind of Hegelianism which is used with
greater dexterity and by Zizek. This Hegelianism has two
parts. The first involves giving negativity a central role:
''Being' *is* its own transience, and, as such, it *is* its
own negation' (201). (I don't think one can get more
Hegelian than that.) The second part involves Ideas
replacing on the one hand psychological explanations for
human behavior and on the other hand material explanations
for historical events. De Kessel interprets an apparent set
of motives as a screen behind which another one hides: 'The
ideals one fights for are never more than a *secondary*
revolutionary mainspring; their role is to veil, behind
rational and ideological reasons, the principal purpose man
seeks, and which lies in this 'moment' of lethal
negativity.' (202) Here apparent motives cover 'real' ones,
and that's not the Lacanian 'real' we're talking about but a
vulgar one. In this framework, the death camps and
the gulags are then just historical expressions of an Idea
(here sovereignty) which has been malformed by alienation
and repression but which only needs a better outlet, greater
access to self-consciousness, in order to avoid these
horrors. Calling such an understanding of history
'idealist', or such a conception of how to avoid repeating
the past 'armchair', seems to me altogether too
gentle. III. E. THE PROLIFERATION OF EXAMPLES
AND THE RHETORIC OF HOMOLOGY. In the same paragraph where Zizek
spells out the proper logical understanding of the relation
between the sexes, he goes on to give two further
explanations of gender: men identify with their symbolic
titles while at the same time believing there is something
else beyond this 'social mask', where for women there's only
a play of masks; love for man is unconditional yet can be
sacrificed, where for women love is all and yet leaves women
strangely indifferent. Zizek brings along this set of
differences right after the prior set (reason vs emotion,
etc.), and yet it is doubtful that these examples are really
'the same' as the prior ones. A new set of instances are
offered as if in further support of 'the same' concept. The
transition is in fact the word 'or' (84), which suggests
that whatever lies on either side of the 'or' might somehow
be interchangeable. The procedure here, then, is to yoke
examples together as if related but without explaining the
nature of the relationship. Further examples include the
films _No Sad Songs for Me_ and _A Guy Named Joe_, and an
Emily Dickinson poem. While the incongruities that pile up
can certainly be amusing, the reason a Spencer Tracy film
and an Emily Dickinson poem should illuminate the same topic
is never spelled out. The piling up of disparate examples
suggests an underlying formal homology amongst the examples:
masculinity is to femininity as this is to that. Once an
underlying formal structure has been found, an almost
indefinite amount of 'content' can be found to fill the same
'form'. But as the 'contents' grow increasingly disparate,
you can't help but wonder what the rationale is that allows
one structure to be transformed into another. Here the writers in the volume play
fast and loose. Thus when Dolar explains the meaning of
Lacan's concept of alienation through Lacan's own examples,
'I think, therefore I am' turns out to bear the same formal
structure as 'Your money or your life'. This obviously takes
some doing. The lack of explanation for each particular
model offered and the relentless proliferation of such
models makes the reader feel that no one particular model is
terribly reliable, since each needs to be replaced with
another with such rapidity. Similarly, when Grosrichard brings
Descartes into his essay on Malebranche, it is only possible
because Malebranche has provided 'mutatis mutandis, a tragic
version' of Descartes (134). Even in the absence of a
reference to Lacan, we can recognize a hallmark Lacanian
rhetorical gesture: *mutatis mutandis*, the magic words
which allow different things to be *versions of* each other
without the exact relation being spelled out. Lacan's name
here comes to signify the fields within which these
presentations take place, but the boundaries of the field or
the precise logic of permutations need never be made
explicit. (The case is different, I would argue,
in the present review. If I can claim to find formal
homologies among the writers, it is because these homologies
are of rhetorical structure, which is the object of my
argument, and because the writers are -- avowedly -- of the
same school. This is quite different from finding formal
homologies between otherwise unconnected texts -- Emily
Dickinson and _A Guy Named Joe_, for example.) It is in the context of analyzing
gender and subjectivity that Zizek introduces the oeuvre of
Welles. Mind you, it's not this or that Welles film that
Zizek wants to analyze, but rather the entire work -- and
the man, too. It turns out that Welles will provide an
example of 'the inherent deadlock of *male* subjectivity'
(91-92, emphasis in the original). Here Zizek leans heavily
on James Naremore's _The Magic World of Orson Welles_, as
elsewhere in the volume Zizek and others rely heavily on the
work of other writers for material they can re-shape into
what we are told is a Lacanian mold. For both Naremore and Zizek, Welles's
work is split between two styles: a critical social realist
orientation toward politics functions as a backdrop which
gives rise to the depiction of a character of grotesque and
even tragic proportions whose failure caps the films. It is
not difficult to follow Zizek in taking the split as
referring to Welles himself: between his Democratic
political leanings on the one hand and his own grandiose
ambitions on the other. Zizek then links this split to one
in Welles's visual style, around the use of deep focus: the
antithesis between the objective properties of the device
(in being able to show a wide visual field) and its
subjectivizing ability to impart a dream-like feeling of
entrapment created by the distortion of a wide-angle lens.
(The opposition is already inscribed, I believe, in Andre
Bazin's discussion of deep focus.) Zizek mentions Bazin but
places him -- wrongly, I think -- on the objective side of
understanding deep focus. Zizek then reads this split by
using Truffaut's analysis of a moral antagonism, one between
humanistic and anti-humanistic, moral, and immoral
attitudes. Zizek's analysis of Welles is thus (a)
extremely condensed, telegraphed even, and (b) borrowed from
other writers. Both strike me as problematic. Since the
other writers' work (that of Naremore, Bazin, Truffaut) is
not analyzed in detail, the reader is not given the
opportunity to situate Zizek's interpretation in relation to
those he borrows. Zizek positions himself as re-shaping
existing material into something more complex, but the
difference between what Zizek is saying and what the writers
he relies on say is never made clear. The same kind of heavy reliance on
others' interpretations is evident in Salecl's
interpretation of the Greek myth of the siren. There what
needs to the explained, apparently, is the meaning of the
sirens' song within the context _The Odyssey_. Salecl has
the strange idea -- left unexplained in the text -- that
this song must have words, while Homer's text does not to
provide them. Here Salecl draws on arguments made by Pietro
Pucci and Tzvetan Todorov but re-interprets them along
Lacanian lines: 'in other words, the Sirens' song is
the point in the narrative that has to remain unspoken for
the narrative to gain consistency. It is an empty point of
self-referentiality that a story has to omit in order to
attain the status of a story. From the Lacanian perspective,
this empty point is another name for the real, the
unsymbolizable kernel around which the symbolic forms
itself' (177). The sirens, then, are just another
pretext for explaining something else -- the Lacanian
concept of the real. The sirens themselves get read by means
of other critics whose work is disposed of when it is no
longer needed. The actual concept provided by the Lacanian
interpretation, however, does not seem radically different
from the concept of a 'blind spot' to which writers as
diverse as Louis Althusser and Paul de Man appeal. Since the
writer does not locate the Lacanian analysis in relation to
any others, there's nothing to recommend replacing a
familiar concept with another variant. If the reader wishes
to understand Lacan, this analysis will probably make Lacan
easier to understand, since the analysis itself can already
be understood according to perfectly non-Lacanian methods.
It may be implied that the Lacanian reading is superior, but
we are not necessarily told why, nor given the means to
discern either the difference or the relative merits for
ourselves. To return to Zizek reading of Welles,
after relying on Naremore, Zizek brings in Truffaut, but
only in order to contrast this reading with a more
Nietzschean one. The Nietzschean reading then gets replaced
by a 'simplified Heideggerian' reading of Welles, which in
turn gives way to a reading of Dostoyevsky and Wagner's _The
Twilight of the Gods_, and the Old Testament story of Noah
and his sons. Zizek then contrasts Welles with Ayn Rand's
novels _The Fountainhead_ and _Atlas Shrugged_ -- as
providing a 'feminine counterpoint to the tension of the
male subjectivity' (100). At this point Zizek's tendency toward
the homology and compressed summary goes into overdrive, and
the reader can feel distant stars turning into streaks of
light -- whoosh! -- jetting past: 'what Pascal and Racine
were to Jansenism, what Kleist was to German nationalist
militarism, what Brecht as to Communism, Rand is to American
capitalism' (101). All of which is very easy to follow, so
long as you assume that it's easy to know what relation
Pascal and Racine -- all of them? -- bear to Jansenism, and
what relation Kleist and Brecht bear to various other
movements. And if the reader cannot discern the nature of
these parallels, Zizek telegraphs it -- but in Lacanian-ese:
Rand 'formulate[s] directly the fantasmatic kernel
of American capitalist ideology' (101). The condensed quality of the
arguments, the fact that no interpretation is worked out but
is instead telegraphed, goes hand in hand with both the
borrowing from existing work and the formal structure of
homology. The Lacanian method, if it can be called that,
seems to rely on the fact that anything can be related to
anything else -- no matter who wrote it -- by being plugged
into the matrix A is to B as C is to D. There is no limit to
what can be 'explained' in this fashion, as long as the
elements can be summarized briefly enough, and as long as
'explanation' is taken to mean giving 'examples' and
relating them in this fashion. But the writer must in a
sense assume that the reader already (a) knows what the
argument or interpretation being summarized is and (b)
agrees with it -- since if one disagreed with one part of
the analogy, the analogy as a whole would
collapse. III. F. THE SUBSTITUTION OF RHETORICAL
FORCE FOR ARGUMENT. Thus for Zizek Welles is to Rand as
the deadlock of masculine subjectivity is to the tension of
feminine subjectivity. And then each of the main characters
in _The Fountainhead_ turns out to embody one particular
Lacanian concept, but only by in turn reducing _The
Fountainhead_ to *something else* -- namely to Wagner's
_Parsifal_. Since this reduction cannot itself be justified,
it is introduced only through a rhetorical question: 'Is
then, *in ultima analisi*, the scenario of _The
Fountainhead_ not that of Wagner's _Parsifal_? [W]
is Parsifal the saint, the being of pure drive; [X]
is Kundry in search of her delivery; [Y] is
Amfortas, the failed saint; [Z] is Klingsor, the
impotent evil magician' (105-106). I've left out the names
of Rand's characters, since it's not relevant in this
context: I'm not disagreeing with the substance of Zizek's
reading, if indeed there is some. Rather, I am underlining
the procedure which seems to me hasty, indeed, based on
haste, and which also seems to pose the question of its own
status, even if this question goes unarticulated and
unaswered in Zizek's text. Namely, what precisely is the *ultima
analisi* -- the last analysis that Slavoj Zizek wants to
offer us? And why not just call it 'the last analysis' -- if
not because calling it that might invite the reader to ask
*why* it is the last analysis, and it is only the last
analysis because sheer rhetorical force -- here the
rhetorical question and the reliance upon Latin -- would
make it so. Zizek gives the impression that in
order to understand Lacan, all you need to do is to read
_The Fountainhead_, but in order to understand _The
Fountainhead_ you really need to understand _Parsifal_, and
in order to understand _Parsifal_ you really need to be able
to understand Lacan. Yet all these understandings must be
*assumed without demonstration and must proceed without a
method*. Apparently, the reader has no right to know just
*why* this analysis is so very ultimate. Or in the chain of
circular concepts, explanations, and examples, there is
simply no way out, no way to tether the free-floating
structure to something like an argument or a justification.
All of which might be perfectly 'Lacanian' but it is not
terribly helpful. III. G. SITUATING ZIZEK. Since I've now pointed out that Zizek
borrows much of the substance of his interpretations from
other writers, the question of the difference between what
Zizek is saying and what those he comments on say is
pressing. The essay that closes the volume, 'The Cartesian
Subject versus the Cartesian Theater', turns out to be a
good place to examine this question. Zizek begins by appealing to Lenin's
call to understand one's ideological enemies. Thus it seems
as if Zizek might situate himself in an ideological struggle
and thus give us a clue to how he situates himself. When the
'enemy' chosen is Dieter Henrich and his followers, and the
enemy's enemy is 'deconstruction' or 'postmodernism', Zizek
situates himself amongst those whose ideas he often
criticizes even while appropriating their arguments:
'Heidegger, . . . Foucault, Derrida, Rorty'
(247). Readers of Zizek will recognize in his
sketch of Henrich's work features of Zizek's own project:
the 'endeavor to prove that the notion of the subject as it
was elaborated in German Idealism, in no way precludes the
subject's 'decenterment'' (247). Since a recent volume by
Zizek centers on Schelling, the reader has reason to believe
that Henrich's project may not be entirely removed from
Zizek's own. Very quickly, then, it's no longer
clear on which side Zizek sees himself. Is Henrich and his
school's work on German Idealism the enemy? If so, why? What
is the difference between what Henrich says about German
Idealism and what Zizek says? All we find out is that for
Zizek the work of Henrich and his school 'often misses the
mark', and he says it would be 'easy to demonstrate' this,
but he doesn't (247). Instead, after the first paragraph
setting out the significance of German Idealism, Zizek
quickly displaces the ground to cognitive science: 'Instead
of engaging in a direct dialogue with Henrich's school, it
seems more promising to confront it with contemporary
endeavors by cognitive sciences to provide an . . . account
of the emergence of consciousness.' (248) No explanation is
offered as to why this indirect dialogue promises more,
unless it's because this displacement will allow Zizek to
appropriate the German Idealistic argument from which he
cannot differentiate himself. The sheer rhetorical force of
the author's assertion -- 'it seems more promising' -- must
take the place of an argument. Zizek's account of Dennett runs to
several pages, during which Zizek translates Dennett into
Hegelian terms: 'immediacy itself is mediated' (250), etc.
Examples of Dennett's argument can be found in Bertrand
Russell's letters, Patricia Highsmith's _Strangers on a
Train_, and early Kieslowski. But why there and not
elsewhere? Is the reader really supposed to think: 'Well
then Dennett must surely be right if 'his' idea can be
'found' in all these places'? Dennett's argument about consciousness
does away with the place of the subject as a central watcher
in a Cartesian Theater. But it turns out that if we read
Descartes through German Idealism, especially Schelling, we
can re-interpret Hegel as already having said what Zizek
makes Dennett say. But that says nothing about the status of
Dieter Henrich's reading of German Idealism, nor really
about the relation of Schelling and Hegel to Dennett.
Happily, however, Dennett is saying no more than what the
Lacanian reading of Kant and Hegel tell us about the
subject. Ultimately, one can't help but wonder
why Zizek needs to read Dennett at all, since Lacan already
said what Dennett says. And if Lacan already said what
Dennett says, it seems surprising that no one noticed it
before. In the end, Dennett turns out to be a pretext for
explaining something else -- Lacan's relation to German
Idealism -- which then itself conveniently never gets
explained, since that other thing can (already) be found in
the first thing, which was itself never more than a
pretext. In this process the possibility
arises, however, that Lacan did *not* say what Dennett says
and that Dennett is *not* saying what Lacan said. Instead,
Dennett is already being read so as to make his argument
Lacanian -- or, more accurately, neo-Hegelian/Schellingian.
And then Dennett, whom the reader might believe and
understand, gets offered as *an example* of what Lacan
*meant*, without the hermeneutic labor or reasoning being
conducted which would show how Dennett's conclusions can be
derived by a series of reasonable transformations from
Lacan's texts. To do such would be to produce an argument,
not an 'example' which is merely an assertion substituting
for an argument. III. H. VICIOUS CIRCULARITY OF
INTERPRETATIONS. In other words, by summarizing and
abbreviating the arguments they discuss, by yoking them
together, and by using others' arguments to explain Lacan,
Zizek and the writers of his school produce a kind of
vicious circularity of interpretations or explanations in
which what is to be explained or interpreted cannot be
separated from what's doing the explaining and
interpreting. For example, Dolar translates
Descartes into Lacanian-ese: the cogito is the subject;
Descartes's certainty is underwritten by God, and God turns
out to be the Other (with a Big 'O'): no mere small 'o'
object but rather a figure for a culture's symbolic system
insofar as the latter guarantees meaning. But insofar as the
interpretation is comprehensible as a reading of Descartes,
it doesn't have need for the Lacanian theory but is rather
patently demonstrable from Descartes's text itself.
Descartes is being explained or interpreted, explicated, by
reference to Lacan, but this process says nothing about the
relation between Descartes and Lacan. Thus it would be a
mistake to conclude from the fact that one can translate
Descartes into Lacanian terms that Descartes was Lacanian
*avant la lettre*, nor indeed that Lacan is himself
Cartesian. Indeed, the translation says nothing about the
status of either writer, or about their relation to each
other. Rather, the procedure obscures the relation it is, I
assume, meant to clarify. Similarly, in Zupancic's essay on
Kant, the fit between Kant and Lacan is too close for
comfort: one can't help but feel that not only is Kant being
read in a Lacanian fashion, but Lacan is himself being
tailored to fit the reading of Kant. A sort of sleight of
hand trick is being operated where what should be explained
-- Lacan -- is instead used as an explanation of something
else -- Kant. But, like the rabbit-in-the-hat trick, the
Lacanian reading has already been smuggled into Kant's
text. Too much is at stake in Kant's already
being Lacanian (or in Lacan being Kantian) to disentangle
the extent to which each both is and is not. The reader
never learns precisely what would constitute a Lacanian
reading -- of Kant or of Emily Dickinson or of anything
else. If Lacan were simply a given, then the reader would be
able to discern what changes were being wrought upon him to
bring him in line with Kant. But since the purpose is at
least in part to explain Lacan or to offer a Lacanian
reading of Kant, we have no way of knowing how this reading
is different from some putatively non-Lacanian reading of
Kant. IV. CONCLUSION. It would be hasty to assume that the
ideas propounded by authors who class themselves as
partisans of a Lacanian school are without value, even if
one concludes that the rhetorical strategies employed to
propound them are suspect, just as it would be naive to
search for a theory 'without rhetoric' -- as if that could
be subtracted off like so much butterfat. But when so many
of the 'examples' given to explicate and to justify the
theory are borrowed from other sources, it is possible to
wonder whether the ideas being presented necessitate a
reference to Lacan without which the ideas would no longer
be 'Lacanian'. The reader begins to suspect that Lacan is
being explicated through interpretations arrived at without
the aid of Lacan's theories, which in turn causes one to
wonder about the value of the theories being
proffered. One gets the distinct impression that
the writers collected in this volume, chief among them its
editor, borrow the interpretations of others and then refine
them and re-christen them as 'Lacanian', all the while
claiming to set themselves apart from their academic rivals.
But the difference seems in so many cases mostly nominal.
Doubtless that is a 'performative' effect, and thus in
itself Lacanian, since J. L. Austin's performative is
probably itself already Lacanian. Despite consistent appeals
to a the speech act model in Lacanian writing, the gesture
of appealing to authority relies on an authority the gesture
cannot itself confer but rather must depend upon, and so the
very pronouncement of specific statements in this case does
not produce the effects the statements describe, however
much the authors might wish it were so. Being for or against a certain author
or school should in principle be distinguishable from the
ability to analyze the arguments presented, the terms into
which they are cast, and their method of argumentation. I do
not think the standards I have suggested above are so
terribly constraining that they discourage serious
discussion. Nor do I think the theories currently presented
by means which are suspect are therefore themselves to be
discarded. But to judge the ideas at issue would require
better arguments being made, and by better means too. The
arguments presented in this volume do not take many steps in
that direction. To return at last to the question of
method in the humanities under the banner of which I began
this review, I am trying to say that it is not the
conclusions which determine the validity of the theory but
rather the procedures, since the conclusions in the human
sciences tend to be simply the theoretical premises
re-stated as if they were conclusions. If procedures without
apparent method or rationale are used to reach a conclusion
which as been determined in advance, we tend to feel the
'procedures' are a tissue of rationalizations. Such is often
the case with the argumentative writing in the current
volume. A more difficult exercise would be to
disentangle, to the extent possible, the exact place of
Lacan as a reader of Kant and Hegel, rather than collapsing
Kant and Hegel into prefigurations of Lacan. The fact that
this latter strategy is closer to what patient readers of
Lacan like Mikkel Borch-Jacobson and Samuel Weber have done
is proof that Lacan *does* have something significant to
say, or in any case that he can be read as part of a
tradition, as a reader of other texts. But assuming in advance that what
Lacan said is both true and universally applicable is an
entirely different project from either *determining* exactly
what Lacan said or *applying* it, either of which would
require a method. Assuming Lacan was correct may be a
condition for being a Lacanian, but as a rhetorical strategy
for convincing others that Lacan is a writer to be read, the
strategy leaves much to be desired, since it assumes what it
might instead set out to demonstrate, and demonstration is
in the end a far more effective rhetorical tack than
assumption. Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania,
USA Copyright © Edward R. O'Neill
2001 Edward R. O'Neill, 'The Last Analysis
of Slavoj Zizek', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 5 no. 17, June
2001
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n17oneill>.
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