Introduction: A Spectre Is Haunting Western Academia ...
... the spectre of the Cartesian subject. All academic powers have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize this spectre: the New Age obscurantist (who wants to supersede the 'Cartesian paradigm' towards a new holistic approach) and the postmodern deconstructionist (for whom the Cartesian subject is a discursive fiction, an effect of decentred textual mechanisms); the Habermasian theorist of communication (who insists on a shift from Cartesian monological subjectivity to discursive intersubjectivity) and the Heideggerian proponent of the thought of Being (who stresses the need to 'traverse' the horizon of modern subjectivity culminating in current ravaging nihilism); the cognitive scientist (who endeavours to prove empirically that there is no unique scene of the Self, just a pandemonium of competing forces) and the Deep Ecologist (who blames Cartesian mechanicist materialism for providing the philosophical foundation for the ruthless exploitation of nature); the critical (post-)Marxist (who insists that the illusory freedom of the bourgeois thinking subject is rooted in class division) and the feminist (who emphasizes that the allegedly sexless cogito is in fact a male patriarchal formation). Where is the academic orientation which has not been accused by its opponents of not yet properly disowning the Cartesian heritage? And which has not hurled back the branding reproach of Cartesian subjectivity against its more 'radical' critics, as well as its 'reactionary' adversaries?
Two things result from this:
1. Cartesian subjectivity continues to be acknowledged by all academic powers as a powerful and still active intellectual tradition.
2. It is high time that the partisans of Cartesian subjectivity should, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Cartesian subjectivity with the philosophical manifesto of Cartesian subjectivity itself.
This book thus endeavours to reassert the Cartesian subject, whose rejection forms the silent pact of all the struggling parties of today's academia: although all these orientations are officially involved in a deadly battle (Habermasians versus deconstructionists; cognitive scientists versus New Age obscurantists ... ), they are all united in their rejection of the Cartesian subject. The point, of course, is not to return to the cogito in the guise in which this notion has dominated modern thought (the selftransparent thinking subject), but to bring to light its forgotten obverse, the excessive, unacknowledged kernel of the cogito, which is far from the pacifying image of the transparent Self. The three parts of the book focus on today's three main fields in which subjectivity is at stake: the tradition of German Idealism; postAlthusserian political philosophy; the 'deconstructionist' shift from Subject to the problematic of multiple subjectpositions and subjectivizations.[1] Each part starts with a chapter on a crucial author whose work represents an exemplary critique of Cartesian subjectivity; a second chapter then deals with the vicissitudes of the fundamental notion that underlies the preceding chapter (subjectivity in German Idealism; political subjectivization; the 'Oedipus complex' as the psychoanalytic account of the emergence of the subject).[2]
Part I begins with a detailed confrontation with Heidegger's endeavour to traverse the horizon of modern Cartesian subjectivity. Again and again, the inherent logic of their philosophical project compelled the authentic philosophers of subjectivity to articulate a certain excessive moment of 'madness' inherent to cogito, which they then immediately endeavoured to 'renormalize' (the diabolical Evil in Kant, the 'night of the world' in Hegel, etc.). And the problem with Heidegger is that his notion of modern subjectivity does not account for this inherent excess - it simply does not 'cover' that aspect of cogito on account of which Lacan claims that cogito is the subject of the Unconscious. Heidegger's fatal flaw is clearly discernible in the failure of his reading of Kant: in his focus on transcendental imagination, Heidegger misses the key dimension of imagination: its disruptive, anti-synthetic aspect, which is another name for the abyss of freedom; this failure also casts new light on the old question of Heidegger's Nazi engagement. So, after this confrontation, the second chapter encleavours to elaborate the status of subjectivity in Hegel, focusing on the link between the philosophical notion of reflexivity and the reflexive turn that characterizes the (hysterical) subject of the Unconscious.
Part II contains a systematic confrontation with the four philosophers who, in one way or another, took Althusser as their starting point, but later, via a criticism of Althusser, developed their own theory of political subjectivity: Laclau's theory of hegemony, Balibar's theory of égaliberté, Rancière's theory of mésentente, Badiou's theory of subjectivity as fidelity to the Truth-Event. The first chapter focuses on Badiou's attempt to formulate a 'politics of truth' that could undermine today's deconstructionist and/or postmodernist stance, with a special emphasis on his pathbreaking reading of St Paul. Although I am in solidarity with Badiou's attempt to reassert the dimension of universality as the true opposite of capitalist globalism, I reject his criticism of Lacan - that is, his thesis that psychoanalysis is not able to provide the foundation of a new political practice. The next chapter analyses the ways in which the four authors tackle the predominant 'post-political' liberal-democratic stance which is the political mode of today's global capitalism, each of them deploying his own version of political subjectivization.
Part III deals with those tendencies of today's 'postmodern' political thought which, against the spectre of the (transcendental) Subject, endeavour to assert the liberating proliferation of the multiple forms of subjectivity - feminine, gay, ethnic.... According to this orientation, one should abandon the impossible goal of global social transformation and, instead, focus attention on the diverse forms of asserting one's particular subjectivity in our complex and dispersed postmodern universe, in which cultural recognition matters more than socioeconomic struggle that is to say, in which cultural studies have replaced the critique of political economy. The most representative and persuasive version of these theories, whose practical expression is multiculturalist 'identity politics', is Judith Butler's pcrformative theory of gender formation. So the first chapter of this part engages in a detailed confrontation with Butler's work, focusing on those of its aspects which make possible a productive dialogue with Lacanian psychoanalysis (her notions of 'passionate attachments' and the reflexive turn constitutive of subjectivity). The last chapter then directly confronts the key issue of 'Oedipus today': is the so-called Oedipal mode of subjectivization (the emergence of the subject through the integration of the symbolic prohibition embodied in the paternal Law) today really in decline? And if so, what is replacing it? In a confrontation with the proponents of the 'second modernization' (Giddens, Beck), it argues for the continuous actuality of the 'dialectic of Enlightenment: far from simply liberating us from the constraints of patriarchal tradition, the unprecedented shift in the mode of functioning of the symbolic order that we are witnessing today engenders its own new risks and dangers.
While this book is philosophical in its basic tenor, it is first and foremost an engaged political intervention, addressing the burning question of how we are to reformulate a leftist, anti-capitalist political project in our era of global capitalism and its ideological supplement, liberal-democratic multiculturalism. One of the photos of 1997 was undoubtedly that of members of some indigenous tribe from Borneo carrying water in plastic bags to put out gigantic fires which were destroying their habitat, the ridiculous inadequacy of their modest effort matched by the horror of seeing their entire life-world disappear. According to newspaper reports, the gigantic cloud of smoke covering the entire area of northern Indonesia, Malaysia and the southern Philippines derailed nature itself, its normal cycle (because of the continuous darkness, bees were unable to accomplish their part in the biological reproduction of plants). Here we have an example of the unconditional Real of global Capital perturbing the very reality of nature - the reference to global Capital is necessary here, since the fires were not simply the result of the 'greed' of local wood merchants and farmers (and of corrupt Indonesian state officials allowing it), but also of the fact that because of the El Niño effect, the extraordinary drought did not end in the rains which regularily quench such fires, and the El Niño effect is global.
This catastrophe thus gives body to the Real of our time: the thrust of Capital which ruthlessly disregards and destroys particular life-worlds, threatening the very survival of humanity. What, however, are the implications of this catastrophe? Are we dealing merely with the logic of Capital, or is this logic just the predominant thrust of the modern productivist attitude of technological domination over and exploitation of nature? Or furthermore, is this very technological exploitation the ultimate expression, the realization of the deepest potential of modern Cartesian subjectivity itself? The author's answer to this dilemma is the emphatic plea of 'Not guilty!' for the Cartesian subject.
In her careful editing of my manuscripts for Verso, Gillian Beaumont regularly catches me with my (intellectual) pants down: her gaze unerringly discerns repetitions in the line of thought, moronic inconsistencies of the argumentation, false attributions and references that display my lack of general education, not to mention the awkwardness of style ... how can I not feel ashamed, and thus hate her? On the other hand, she has every reason to hate me I constantly bombard her with late insertions and changes of the manuscript, so that I can easily imagine her possessing a voodoo doll of me and piercing it in the evenings with a gigantic needle. This mutual hatred, as they would have put it in the good old days of classic Hollywood, signals the beginning of a beautiful friendship, so I dedicate this book to her.
Notes
1. For a detailed confrontation with the critical rejection of the Cartesian subjectivity in cognitive sciences, see Slavoj Zizek, 'The Cartesian Subject versus the Cartesian Theatre in Cogito and the Unconscious ed. Slavoj Zizek, Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1998.
2. Interestingly enough, the three parts also correspond to the geographic triad of German/French/Anglo-American tradition: German Idealism, French political philosophy, Anglo-American cultural studies.