Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels

by Slavoj Žižek

The “formidably brilliant” Žižek considers sexuality, ontology, subjectivity, and Marxian critiques of political economy by way of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

If the most interesting theoretical interventions emerge today from the interspaces between fields, then the foremost interspaceman is Slavoj Žižek. In Incontinence of the Void (the title is inspired by a sentence in Samuel Beckett's late masterpiece Ill Seen Ill Said), Žižek explores the empty spaces between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the critique of political economy. He proceeds from the universal dimension of philosophy to the particular dimension of sexuality to the singular dimension of the critique of political economy. The passage from one dimension to another is immanent: the ontological void is accessible only through the impasses of sexuation and the ongoing prospect of the abolition of sexuality, which is itself opened up by the technoscientific progress of global capitalism, in turn leading to the critique of political economy.

Responding to his colleague and fellow Short Circuits author Alenka Zupančič's What Is Sex?, Žižek examines the notion of an excessive element in ontology that gives body to radical negativity, which becomes the antagonism of sexual difference. From the economico-philosophical perspective, Žižek extrapolates from ontological excess to Marxian surplus value to Lacan's surplus enjoyment. In true Žižekian fashion, Incontinence of the Void focuses on eternal topics while detouring freely into contemporary issuesfrom the Internet of Things to Danish TV series.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychoanalysis

328 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovene sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic.

He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992).

Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.

In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist". In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist."

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not topical, journalistic Diet Zizek, it is Zizek with all the extra sugar and fat and frenetic sniffing sweating back-to-the-point digressions. The double-coded incontinence is contagious: you cannot touch the Void without leaking.* Listen:

“In the dimension of philosophy, (1) the limit of ontology is first approached through the notion of an excessive element, an element structurally out of place that gives body to radical negativity; (2) this negativity inscribes itself into the order of being as the antagonism of sexual difference, which is why the human subject is constitutively sexualized; (3) a “unified theory” of the four discourses and the formulas of sexuation is outlined; (4) the explosive combination of biogenetics and digitization clearly discernible in today’s global capitalism opens up the prospect of a non-sexual reproduction of life, and thus poses a threat to the very existence of subjectivity.

In the dimension of the critique of political economy, (1) the excess detrimental to every ontology assumes the form of surplus-value, the key Marxian notion that is elaborated in its homology with three other notions of excess: Lacan’s surplus-enjoyment, scientific surplus-knowledge, and political surplus-power; (2) this brings us to a Lacanian reading of the “labor theory of value” and of the self-propelling circulation of capital, and (3) to the question of how the capitalist discourse (social link) fits into Lacan’s matrix of four discourses (Master, University, Hysteria, Analyst). (4) Although, in the Lacanian perspective, alienation is irreducible, constitutive of human subjectivity, this does not mean that alienation is the ultimate horizon of political activity: Lacan posits separation as a move that supplements and overturns alienation, so the question raised is that of a politics of separation. The second part concludes with an appendix which, rejecting the utopian notion of Communist society as one in which tensions such as resentment disappear, deals with the obscure topic of the libidinal paradoxes that would persist in an imagined future Communist society.”

That is the rubric for each chapter, so have at it. Part I is indeed a comradely engagement with Zupancic’s What IS Sex?? whereas Part II tarries with Tomsic’s The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan. This is the kernel, should you wish to choke it down whole, adumbrated at the beginning of Chapter 4:

“The paradox is that, although (human) subjectivity is obviously not the origin of all reality, although it is a contingent local event in the universe, the path to universal truth does not lead through abstraction from it…to some “gray” objective structure—such a vision of a “subjectless” world is by definition just a negative image of subjectivity itself, its own vision of the world in its absence. Since we are subjects, constrained to the horizon of subjectivity, we should instead focus on what the fact of subjectivity implies for the universe and its structure: the event of the subject derails the balance, it throws the world out of joint, but such a derailment is the universal truth of the world. And, insofar as the subject is in its very core sexed, the only access to the Real for us is through the impasse of sexuation—through the impasses of sexuation, which have nothing whatsoever to do with traditional sexualized cosmologies (the universe as the eternal struggle between masculine and feminine principles). What this also implies is that the access to “reality in itself” does not demand from us that we overcome our “partiality” and arrive at a neutral vision elevated above our particular struggles—we are “universal beings” only in our full partial engagements. This contrast is clearly discernible in the case of love: against the Buddhist love of All, or any other notion of harmony with the cosmos, we should assert the radically exclusive love for the singular One, a love which throws out of joint the smooth flow of our lives.”

I compose this spiel from a very particular position. What Adorno and Benjamin were to my late 20s, Zizek and Lacan are becoming for my late 30s (N.B. the monolithic shadow of Hegel). No one can learn anything approaching psychoanalysis disinterestedly, despite its conscription and strategic containment in University discourse. Freud wrote that “people” become “patients” when they acknowledge the repeated disturbances of a symptom, and they seek out the therapeutic effects of analytical interpretation to dissolve it. By and large, the original swarm of analysands suffered from “psychical impotence,” a relative catastrophe of sexuality which prevented them from performing although they had proven and experienced the physical possibility. I don’t wish to repeat the well-intentioned heresies of Fromm and Horney so perspicuously denounced by Adorno and Marcuse, but it is undeniable that in the ongoing morbid protraction of zombie capitalism, psychical impotence is a specialized term in libidinal economy—an analogue—for the generalized phenomenon of soul-sucking powerlessness—modernist meaninglessness infinitely reflected in the postmodernist panopticon. Zizek has joked about how monstrous are confident people, and Freud likewise insisted that although the go-getters were just as delusional as those paralyzed by neurotic obsessions, their real actions resulted in real effects which appeared to affirm their bloated self-image. Lacan adds that it is not that desire is a problem only for neurotics, it is that neurotics experience desire precisely as THE problem. Any sane [sic] person can see that insanity is rampant. The recent centuries provided a nauseating abundance not only of the insane and unjustifiable, but also the curiosity that religious apostates make for ardent revolutionaries. Religion correctly creates the space for a truth higher than the individual, but it errs in filling it with doctrines easily debunked. For some, this hypocrisy forever ruins any notion of truth; for others, it intensifies the desire to know. Back when the collapse of religious mores was a big deal, Adorno lamented how for many people this precipitated a fall into the most vulgar materialism, egoism, and hedonism, the prerequisites for the culture industry: nothing matters but now, nobody matters but you—enjoy!

To conclude: psychoanalysis defines the framework for a discourse on truth in which the personal, the political, and the philosophical are mutually illuminated. When Zizek critiques object oriented ontology using Lacanian concepts, it is not a sectarian dispute because those authors are unfaithful to the Master, it is that their debilitating blindspots are obvious from the psychoanalytical perspective. I have no academic allegiances to defend, no online persona to maintain, and no pressure or obligation to advocate anything. I independently study the Hegel-Marx-Lacan trinity because it provides the most complete response to a need/demand/desire for awareness while offering no easy answers and in fact making the questions more tenacious. It exemplifies truth as cold comfort, hard to achieve, harder to swallow, hardest to do without. I find myself in it, literarily. It may not be for you, but it concerns you.
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* “In other words, to say that the great Outside is a fantasy does not imply that it is a fantasy of a Real that does not really exist; rather, it implies that it is a fantasy in the strict psychoanalytic sense: a screen that conceals the fact that the discursive reality is itself leaking, contradictory, and entangled with the Real as its irreducible other side. That is to say: the great Outside is the fantasy that conceals the Real that is already right here.” -AZ

[Javier Gil Jaime · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Incontinencia del vacío’ o de la incompresibilidad de las aporías (enjundias) de la realidad

Nota: un libro complejo, a momentos espeso, otros de una lucidez fulminante; un viaje lisérgico hacia el corazón del pensamiento žižekiano.

Al respecto podemos extraer alguna ideas/ apuntes de forma desordenada.

(1) El problema del ser y del no-ser, o de porqué hay algo en vez nada (o de la nada y realmente ¿qué es eso de la Nada?). La nada como una potencia del ser. El cero tiene contenido todos los unos (y el Uno, es decir, la Potencia [en Platón la Idea]). Las aporías que propone Parménides a Platón respecto a su Teoría de las Formas (o de las Ideas). ¿Qué es la realidad? ¡Eh, venga dime! ¡Qué carajo es lo Real! (Si es que podemos decir si tenemos acceso a lo Real; la tesis central es que no).

(2) ¿Hay un sustrato debajo de lo Real? Platón, Kant, Hegel, Marx, etc. Filosofía continental o de la necesidad de fundamental el principio de realidad (sexualizado). Contra los postulados de Badiou; aka contra los seguidores de los postulados de Badiou. No se puede escapar a la regencia del yo: las percepciones internas (respiración, ritmo cardíaco, parpadeo, dolores, etc.) y las sensaciones externas: lo visto, lo oído, lo obtenido por la experiencia/ los sentidos. Poner de relieve el salto entre la filosofía kantiana (en física la teoría de Einstein) y la filosofía hegeliana (la teoría cuántica de Bohr). El salto entre la cosa-en-sí kantiana y la Totalidad del Absoluto hegeliano.

(3) Las aporías de la material: la función latente de la realidad. Todo lenguaje tiene sus límites (apuntes lejanos de Wittgenstein). Todo lenguaje deja un interrogante por desvelar (algo que no podemos (re)coger). Litros de cerveza que caen sobre la frente de Žižek. (Pausa dramática) Paradigmas de la función latente, seguido del chiste bajo la óptica del inconsciente (lectura de Freud, Lacan y Zupančič). El inconsciente del deseo, los interrogantes de una teoría sexual avanzada (todavía por definir) y los anhelos de la función deseante. Mutilaciones para un yo sobrevivido. Los cuatro puntos cardinales lingüísticos propuestos por Lacan. Teoría lacaniana de los afectos (vol. 1).

(4) Enfrentamientos cotidianos con la realidad virtual, del Pokemon Go como marco de representación para un teoría del antisemitismo aumentada. Lenin como reformador moral, incitador de la revolución proletaria: el proletario como sujeto capacitador de la transformación histórica post-hegeliana. Teoría reformada de la alienación (de la cual parece imposible poder escapar). La alienación como condición a priori del sujeto en el capitalismo y del capital como flujo inconsciente predominante: mitología de la conversación del dinero a capital. Es decir, en un sistema comunista (o plenamente comunista porque el experimento soviético fracaso tras la entrada de Stalin en el poder) también produciría alienación pero menos. En Marx el proletario es la plusvalía de valor que le aporta a la mercancía (la venta de fuerza de trabajo). La fuerza de trabajo como mercancía.

(5) El yo es un enfrentamiento (intersubjetividad). La imagen de la cinta de Möbius. Apuntes a la teoría del yo en Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Marx (y aquí también incluiría a) Levinas.


Epílogo (sensaciones).
El extrañamiento que siente el lector al no poder alcanzar el nivel de satisfacción hermenéutica con la incesante verborrea de Žižek (¡Socorro!); se juega con el paradigma de que algunos momentos es muy frustrante, se empuja al lector a abandonar el libro (en repetidas veces). Solo un lector de músculo puede aguantar las embestidas (que otros dirían empujones del filósofo esloveno).

[Matthew Osborn · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's not so much that "I liked it" or "I really liked it," etc., but that, having finished the book, I am finding it to be valuable to me. I didn't enjoy reading it so much, but "I really like" the ideas and observations that I am finding myself aware of because I read the book. I didn't love reading it, but I'm very glad that I read it.

Like so many of Zizek's books, it takes a while before I start realizing in the days and weeks after I'm done with the book before I start realizing that I'm thinking about something I learned from the book. For instance, I've noticed a lot about "surplus enjoyment" in and around me since I finished this book. I think it helps me understand myself and other people better.

One thing about Zizek - he manages to shake up my thinking. It's very hard to look at my own ideology, and he has helped me do that over the past ten years. I think that I have been able to let go of some concepts I used to be wedded to, and able to look at things in different ways, since I started reading him.

As for the spandrels -- while I was reading this book it seemed to me that he didn't write anything about spandrels, but that the writing is itself a matter of spandrels. That is, a lot of what he wrote seemed to me to be the structure of the arches, with his real points being in the spaces between what he was writing. It seems to me that the stuff that's going to end up meaning the most to me from this book will be what I find in the KHORA, in the place of possibility, that is a byproduct of the text itself.

[Iben Bollaert · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The true art of politics is thus no to avoid mistakes and to make the right choice, but to make the right mistake, to select the right (appropriate) wrong choice.” p. 253

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Perhaps, however, we should turn the big question around: why is there (also) nothing and not (just) something? More precisely: how could nothing arise out of something? Insofar as “something” stands for the brute Real, and “nothing” for negativity at the core of subject, the negativity proper to the symbolic order (as Lacan repeats again and again, negativity is introduced into the Real only through the rise of the symbolic order), the question is thus, in Hegelese: how can subject arise out of substance? Here we encounter the first paradox: while subject arises through the symbolization of the Real (subject is by definition subject of the signifier), it is strictly correlative to the failure of symbolization: subject’s objectal counterpart is a remainder of the Real that resists symbolization. In other words, complete symbolization would have realized a structure without subject, a structure that would no longer be symbolic. The key to this paradox is that symbolization is as such, in its very notion, incomplete, non-all, failed; it is a structure of its own failure. And here things get really interesting."

And indeed they do ...

I can't think of any writings in which Zizek does a better job squeezing Marx through the sphincter of Lacan.

[Francesc Brunés]

Cada vegada que llegeixo Žižek és com si pugés a una muntanya russa. Aquest cop han estat sis mesos de pujades i baixades, abandonaments i retrobaments. Però, al capdavall, sempre és una experiència intel·lectual incomparable. Aquest cop el filòsof provocador busca el buit en les escletxes que ofereixen Kant, Kierkegaard, Deleuze, Sade, Lenin, Mao, Wagner, Tarkovski, Orson Welles…
Trobareu més recomanacions al blog «Mirades»:
https://agorafrancesc.wordpress.com/l...

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am frequently underwhelmed by Zizek. But this book is well written and structured, rather than reframing of arguments configured in journalism. He will never convince me about the value and scholarship of Lacan, but this book offers incisive presentations of the dead ends in contemporary leftist theories and political agendas.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I put this in the top 1/3 of my Slavoj stack.
A lot of crystal moments and several argument lines that are prescient and helpful.

[Eloy Rhöwenta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gelatina filosófica tremenda pero oportuna.