Dwayne Monroe wrote:
> Yes, national Socialism is, was, bereft of "inner
> truth and greatness" and could not be "articulated
> into a Socialist project."
>
> But the needs which are the foundation and fuel of the
> psychopathology -- the legitimate desires of the
> population which constitute true resistance to
> capitalism -- these can be so articulated.
>
> I believe this is Zizek's focus.
As I understand Marx's version of this project, what is articulated in it is the "idea of humanity" as "freedom," concepts whose content comes in large part from Marx's sublation of Hegel. An "authentically" human community would be one that actualizied this idea; it would be a community of universally developed individuals creating and appropriating beauty and truth within relations of mutual recognition.
Given these premises, the realization of such a community would be in everyone's rational self-interest. Everyone's actual existence involves "self-estrangement" of varying degrees and kinds.
What are required for this realization are individuals with a sufficiently developed degree of rational self-consciousness to be able consciously to desire it and to act as its architects and builders. Though the project is in everyone's interest, certain kinds and degrees of self-estrangement do not satisfy this requirement.
What I was disputing was Zizek's claim that the kind of self-consciousness open to fascism would also be capable of a socialist project of the kind I've just outlined. It seems to me that the psychopathology characteristic of such a consciousness is incompatible with the degree of rational self-consciousness a socialist project requires.
I also don't see how Zizek's idea of human "authenticity" is consistent with Marx's. Like Heidegger, he seems to endorse the idea that "authenticity resides in the act of violent transgression".
"Recalling the trenches of the first world war, Ernst Jünger celebrated face-to-face combat as the authentic intersubjective encounter: authenticity resides in the act of violent transgression, whether in the form of an encounter with the Lacanian real - the thing Antigone confronts when she violates the order of the city - or of Bataillean excess. In the domain of sexuality, the icon of this passion of the real is Oshima's Ai No Corrida, in which the couple's love is radicalised into mutual torture and eventually death - a clear echo of Bataille's Story of the Eye. Another example would be the hardcore websites that allow you to observe the inside of a vagina from the vantage point of a tiny camera at the tip of a penetrating dildo. When one gets too close to the desired object, erotic fascination turns into disgust at the real of the bare flesh. Walking to his theatre in July 1956, Brecht passed a column of Soviet tanks rolling towards the Stalinallee to crush the workers' rebellion. He waved at them and later that day wrote in his diary that, at that moment, he was for the first time in his life tempted to join the Communist party - an exemplary case of the passion of the real. It wasn't that Brecht supported the military action, but that he perceived and endorsed the violence as a sign of authenticity." <http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-seize-the-day-lenins- legacy.html>
This idea of authenticity as violent transgression makes violent political action an end-in-itself.
"Which, then, is the criterion of the political act? Success as such clearly doesn't count, even if we define it in the dialectical way of Merleau-Ponty, as the wager that future will retroactively redeem our present horrible acts (this is how, in his Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty provided one of the more intelligent justifications of the Stalinist terror: retroactively, it will become justified if its final outcome will be true freedom)53; neither does the reference to some abstract-universal ethical norms. The only criteria is the absolutely INHERENT one: that of the ENACTED UTOPIA. In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise which justified present violence - it is rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short-circuit between the present and the future, we are - as if by Grace - for a brief time allowed to act AS IF the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed. Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations, but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow - in it, we ALREADY ARE FREE WHILE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM, we ALREADY ARE HAPPY WHILE FIGHTING FOR HAPPINESS, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merlo-Pontyan wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the present acts; it is as it were ITS OWN ONTOLOGICAL PROOF, an immediate index of its own truth." <http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm>
Zizek also seems to claim that such violence needs as its object a "recognizable IMAGE of the enemy" in which "the transcendental power of imagination" has been employed "'to schematize' the logical figure of the Enemy, providing it with concrete sensible features which make it into an appropriate target of hatred and struggle."
"The lesson to be learned from Carl Schmitt is that the divide friend/enemy is never just the verification of a factual difference: the enemy is by definition always - up to a point, at least - invisible, it looks like one of us, it cannot be directly recognized, which is why the big problem and task of the political struggle is that of providing/constructing the recognizable IMAGE of the enemy. (This also makes it clear why Jews are the enemy par excellence : it is not only that they conceal their true image or contours - it is that there is ultimately NOTHING beneath their deceiving appearances. Jews lack the "inner form" that pertains to any proper national identity: they are a non-nation among nations, their national substance resides precisely in a lack of substance, in a formless infinite plasticity). In short, the "enemy recognition" is always a performative procedure which, in contrast to the deceiving appearances, brings to light / constructs the enemy's 'true face.' Schmitt refers here directly to the Kantian category of Einbildungskraft , the transcendental power of imagination: in order to recognize the enemy, the conceptual subsumption under preexisting categories is not enough; one has 'to schematize' the logical figure of the Enemy, providing it with concrete sensible features which make it into an appropriate target of hatred and struggle." <http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-homo-sacer-in-afghanistan.html>
That the "target" constructed in this way is to be a target of hatred and violence is consistent with a Kleinian conception of the psychology involved as psychotic psychopathology, i.e. as the product of psychotic defenses - splitting and projective identification - against psychotic anxiety - fear of annihilation. This is true as well of the perception of "authenticity" as "violent transgression."
Ted