Schlagend, aber nicht Treend!

iz Slavoj Z ek

Things look really bad for me in Ernesto Laclaus response (Laclau, Why Constructing a People Is the Main Task of Radical Politics, Critical Inquiry 32 [Summer 2006]: 64680) to my essay Against the PopulistTemptation.1 I have again and again utterly missed the point (p. 654) ; I am entirely unaware (p. 654) of the theoretical consequences of the concepts I use; I have not understood even the ABCs of the theory of hegemony (p. 664); my reproaches are pure invention (p. 658) and do not possess even a tentative plausibility (p. 663), so that against me it is sucient to evoke an argument that any undergraduate knows (p. 660); I systematically distort Lacanian theory (p. 657); I need to go and do [my] homework (p. 680); my concrete political references are pure delirium (p. 680); one nds in several places in my text cheap tricks (p. 649 n. 3); my procedure is dishonest (p. 678 n. 19). Is there not something slightly surprising in this obviously excessive subjective animosity? In academia, a polite way to say that we found our colleagues intervention or talk stupid and boring is to say, It was interesting. So if, instead, we tell a colleague, It was boring and stupid, he would be fully justied to be surprised and ask, But if you found it boring and stupid, why did you not simply say that it was interesting? This unfortunate colleague would be right to take the direct statement as involving something more, not only as a comment about the quality of his paper but as an attack on his very person. So the dierence between Laclau and me is that while Laclau tells me that my text is boring and stupid, I am telling him politely that his is interesting.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. iz 1. See Slavoj Z ek,Against the Populist Temptation, Critical Inquiry 32 (Spring 2006): 55174.
Critical Inquiry 33 (Autumn 2006) 2006 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/06/3301-0009$10.00. All rights reserved.

185

186

iz Slavoj Z ek / Rejoinder to Ernesto Laclau

Not that the tone of Laclaus attack really bothers me. Things are, in a way, much worse since, frankly, in most of the cases the argument against me is so far o the mark (schlagend, aber nicht treend, as the Germans say) that it simply leaves me cold and indierent, with no urge to strike back. I unfortunately cannot claim that I am grateful for the work Laclau has done, that his remarks are provocative and an instigation to furtherthought. Often, while writing this reply, I rather felt that I was engaged in a boring administrative task. So let me begin at the beginning, which eectively conrms that we are here involved in a dialogue of the deaf. Laclau reproaches me for taking a rather indirect and oblique road (p. 646) in replying to iz him: (Z ek) does not answer a single of my criticisms of his work and formulates, instead, a series of objections to my book that only make sense if one fully accepts his theoretical perspective (p. 646). A strange reproach indeed; of course I do not respond to him in Against the Populist Temptation, since this text is not exclusively about his work, but more generally about the problem of populism today. I did address in detail his critique in another text of mine, so that the insinuation that I somehow dishonestly avoid a direct confrontation with his arguments is simply false.2

1. The Subjective and the Objective: Laclau, Luka cs, Lenin The bulk of Laclaus argument is that I do not understand his notion of hegemony; its status is Real, so consequently I do not understand the Lacanian Real; and the source of this misunderstanding is my contamination of Lacan with Hegel, which means that I also do not understand Hegel. In short, I understand nothing. In all these cases, Laclau follows the same monotonous procedure: rst, he recapitulates my position, reducing it to a ridiculously falsied version; then, not arguing but establishing (quite correctly) that my position does not agree with his, he simply restates his own position. Here is an exemplary case of this Laclau machine-for-destroyingthe-enemy at work:
The distinction between the subjective and the objective, on the one iz hand, is vital for Z ek for, following Alain Badious duality between situation and event, he wants to establish a radical discontinuity between
iz iz 2. See Z ek, Concesso non dato, in Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Z ek, ed. Geo Boucher, Jason Glynos, and Matthew Sharpe (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 21955.

iz Slavoj Z e k is codirector of the International Center for Humanities, Birkbeck College, at the University of London. Recent publications include The Parallax View (2006) and How to Read Lacan (2006).

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006

187

the revolutionary break and what had preceded it. The corollary is that the revolutionary act should have nothing in common with the situa iz tion within which it takes place. Z ek has also insisted, on the other hand, ad nauseam, on the centrality of the anticapitalist economic struggle, which means that something in the existing situationthe economic as particular location within a social topographyhas a transcendental structuring role of sorts, determining a priori the events that can actually take place. So the situation would have ontological primacy over the event, whose chasm with that situation could not, as a re iz sult, be radical. So Z ek is confronted with an exclusive alternative, and it is rather comic that he does not realize it and continues asserting both options in a perfectly contradictory way. [Pp. 66061] The problem is that both hands are Laclaus here; the corollary according to which the revolutionary act should have nothing in common with the situation within which it takes place and the opposite claim that the situation would have ontological primacy over the event both totally misrepresent my position. It was Badiou who elaborated the notion of the evental site as the crack in the existing situation, the opening of the possibility of the intervention of an act. The link between the situation and the act is therefore clear; far from being determined by the situation (or from intervening in it from a mysterious outside), acts are possible on account of the ontological nonclosure, inconsistency, or gaps in a situation. In a homologous way, Laclau constructs the opposition between his and my position with regard to the relationship between the political and the economic: For me the political has a primary structuring role because social relations are ultimately contingent, and any prevailing articulation results from an antagonistic confrontation whose outcome is not decided be iz forehand. For Z ek, instead, socioeconomic data always signal the outcome of a political strugglethat is, if there is a logical transition from the economic data to the political outcome, the political is simply an internal category of the economy. It is not, perhaps, an epiphenomenon, in the sense that its ontological status is not merely reective of a substantial reality but part of the latter, but precisely because of that it lacks any autonomy. While my analysis leads to a politicization of the econ iz omy, Z eks ends in an economization of politics. [P. 664] Again, blinded by his animosity, Laclau has me saying the exact opposite of what I say. It is more than clear that I am talking precisely about the politicization of the economy, not the economization of politics. This is to

188

iz Slavoj Z ek / Rejoinder to Ernesto Laclau

say, Laclau reads my claim that socioeconomic data always signal the outcome of a political struggle as there is a logical transition from the economic data to the political outcome, that socioeconomic data determine the outcome of a political struggle, while what I am saying is exactly the opposite: that socioeconomic data are a signal (sign) of a political struggle, that their apparent objectivity is the outcome of a political struggle.3 The problematic nature of Laclaus reproachesin other words, the way these reproaches rely on a ridiculously simplied image of his opponent becomes palpable in his standard, almost ritualized, rejection of Georg Luka css History and Class Consciousness as the purest version of Hegelian Marxism (the proletariat as the universal class, the embodied subject-object of History whose role as the agent of revolutionary change is inscribed into its very objective social position; the concept of reication as false consciousness [p. 650] that, as such, presupposes the possibility of true consciousness [p. 654]; the proletarian class consciousness in which historical process becomes totally transparent to itself). However, there is a fundamental feature of Luka css theory that does not t this image of the Hegelian historicist-determinist Luka cs, namely, his insistence on the utter undecidability and contingency of the revolutionary process. This is why History and Class Consciousness is profoundly Leninist. When, in the April Theses of 1917, Lenin discerned the Augenblick, the unique chance of a revolution, his proposals were rst met with stupor or contempt by the large majority of his party colleagues. Within the Bolshevik party, no prominent leader supported his call to revolution, and Pravda took the extraordinary step of dissociating the party, and the editorial board as a whole, from the April Theses. Far from being an opportunist attering and exploiting the prevailing mood of the populace, Lenins views were highly idiosyncratic. Bogdanov characterized the April Theses as the delirium of a madman, and Nadezhda Krupskaya herself concluded that Lenin had gone crazy. No wonder that, in his writings of 1917, Lenin saves his most acerbic irony for those who engage in the endless search for some kind of guarantee for the revo3. Against my claim that Marx distinguishes between working class and proletariat, Laclau categorically states: Now, to start with, Marx never made such a distinction (p. 660). Marx as a Hegelian historicist holds that the politically revolutionary potential of the working class is directly inscribed into its objective socioeconomic situation, so the distinction between social ontology and ethics is inoperative. Unbelievable: of course I know there is no such explicit distinction in Marx. What I am doing here is giving Marx the same reading that Lacan gave to Freud with regard to (among other examples) ideal-ego (Idealich) and ego-ideal (Ich-Ideal ). Although Freud, as a rule, confuses the two terms by sometimes using them interchangeably, Lacan demonstrates how the distinction between the two is in fact implicit and crucial in Freuds work. In the same way, I claim that the distinction between working class and proletariat is implicitly at work in Marx.

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006

189

lution. This guarantee assumes two main forms: either the reied notion of social necessity (one should not risk premature revolution; one must wait for the right moment, when the situation is mature with regard to the laws of historical development; it is too early for the Socialist revolution, the working class is not yet mature) or normative (or democratic)legitimacy (the majority of the population is not on our side, so the revolution would not really be democratic), as Lenin repeatedly put it, as if before the revolutionary agent risks the seizure of state power it should get permission from some gural big Other (organize a referendum that might ascertain whether or not the majority supports the revolution). With Lenin, as with Lacan, the point is that the revolution ne sautorise que delle-me me; one should assume the revolutionary act is not covered by the big Other; the fear of taking power prematurely, the search for the guarantee, is the fear of the abyss of the act. Therein resides the ultimate dimension of what Lenin incessantly denounces as opportunism, and his wager is that opportunism is a position that is in itself inherently false, masking the fear of accomplishing the act withobjective facts, laws, or norms, which is why the rst step in combating it is to announce it clearly. What, then, is to be done? Lenins answer (one must state the facts [aussprechen was ist], admit the truth that there is opinion in the Central Committee) is not a reference to a dierent set of objective facts, but the repetition of an argument made one decade earlier by Rosa Luxembourg, against Kautsky: those who wait for the objective conditions of the revolution to arrive will wait forever. The objective observers position (and not that of an engaged agent) is itself the main obstacle to the revolution. Can Luka css History and Class Consciousness eectively be dismissed as a caricature of Hegelian Marxism, as the assertion of the proletariat as the absolute subject-object of History? The art of what Luka cs called Augenblick confronts us with a Luka cs who is much more Gramscian and conjecturalist/contingentian than is usually assumed. The Luka csean Augenblick is unexpectedly close to what Badiou developed as Eventan intervention that cannot be accounted for in the terms of its preexisting objective conditions. The crux of Luka css argument is to reject the reduction of the act to its historical circumstances; there are no neutral objective conditions, or, in Hegelese, all presuppositions are already minimally posited. Exemplary here is Luka css analysis of the objectivist enumeration of the causes of the failure of the Hungarian revolutionary council/dictatorshipin 1919 (the treason of the ocers in the army, the external blockade that caused hunger, and so on). Although these were undoubtedly facts that played a crucial role in this failed attempt at revolution, it is nonetheless methodologically wrong to evoke them as raw facts without taking into ac-

190

iz Slavoj Z ek / Rejoinder to Ernesto Laclau

count the way they were mediated by the specic constellation of subjective political forces. Take the blockade; why was it that the Russian Soviet state, in contrast, did not succumb to an even stronger imperialist and counterrevolutionary blockade? Because in Russia the Bolshevik party made the masses aware of how such a blockade was the result of foreign and domestic counterrevolutionary forces, while in Hungary the party was not ideologically strong enough; the working masses succumbed to anti-Communist propaganda that claimed the blockade was a product of the antidemocratic nature of the regime, the logic of lets return to democracy and the foreign aid will start to ow in. Treason of the ocers? Yes, but why did the same treason not lead to the same catastrophic consequences in Soviet Russia? And when the traitors were discovered, why was it not possible to replace them with reliable cadres? Because the Hungarian Communist party was not strong and active enough, while the Russian Bolshevik party properly mobilized the soldiers who were ready to ght to the end to defend the revolution. Of course, one can claim that the weakness of the Communist party was again an objective component of the social situation; however, behind this fact, there are again other subjective decisions and acts, so we never reach the zero level of a purely objective state of things. The ultimate point is not objectivity but social totality as the process of global mediation between subjective and objective aspects. To take an example from a dierent domain: the way an ideology posits its presuppositions is also easily discernible in the standard (pseudo) explanation of the growing acceptance of Nazi ideology in the Germany of the 1920s. The Nazis deftly manipulated ordinary middle-class peoplesfears and anxieties generated by an economic crisis and abrupt social change. The problem with this explanation is that it overlooks the self-referential circularity at work here. Yes, the Nazis certainly did deftly manipulate fears and anxieties; however, far from being simple preideological facts, these fears and anxieties were already the product of a certain ideological perspective. The Nazi ideology itself (co)generated fears and anxieties against which it then proposed itself as a solution. The crucial point to bear in mind here is that there is no contradiction between the Hegelian-Marxist Luka cs of the proletariat as the subject-object of history and this conjecturalist Luka cs. They are two sides of the same coin.

2. Hegemony as Martianization Laclaus basic political argument against me is that due to my rigid classreductionist, pseudorevolutionary vision, I am reduced towaiting for the Martians (p. 652), as the conditions I set for revolutionary agents are specied within such a rigid geometry of social eects that no empirical actor can t the bill (p. 657). However, in order to sustain the appearance that

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006

191

I am talking about real agents, I must have recourse to the process of martianization; I have toattribute to actually existing subjects the most absurd features, while keeping their names so that the illusion of a contact with reality is maintained (p. 680). Three things should be added here. First, one cannot help but note how close this process mockingly described by Laclau as martianization resembles his own theory of hegemony; when an empirical event is elevated to the dignity of the Thing (p. 671), it starts to function as the embodiment of the impossible fullness of society. Referring to Joan Copjec, Laclau compares hegemony to the breast-value attached to partial objects; so, mutatis mutandis, is not his thesis that since Martians are impossible but necessary, in the process of hegemony an empirical social element is invested with Martian value? The dierence between us must be that I (supposedly) believe in real Martians, while he knows that the place of Martians is forever empty, meaning that all we can do is invest empirical agents with Martian value. Second, Laclaus own history of political engagements oers a nice example of such martianization. After the rst victory of the New Labor party, he ecstatically supported (for a period of time) the Blair government as oering a model case of the renewal of the Left; one or two years later, disappointed, he had to concede that he martianized the wrong particular political subject (and one can safely predict that, in a couple of years, the same will happen with his latest martianized agents, the new Latino-American populists). Finally, the way Laclau ridicules my reference to Third World slums (the Brazilian favelas, among others) is a sad example of how personal animosity leads him to simplied descriptions that equal political slander: This is pure delirium. The favelas are shanty towns of passive poverty submitted to the action of totally nonpolitical criminal gangs that keep the population terried, to which one has to add the action of the police who carry out executions regularly denounced by the press. As for the assertion that the favelas keep alive the memory of Canudos, it involves being so grotesquely misinformed that the only possible answer isgo and do your homework. [P. 680] Well, I did my homework and I can say that Laclaus description of the favelas is an aront to the people who live there. As it is clear from my text, at the very moment to which Laclau here refers, I am far from idealizing slums into sites of revolutionary struggle. All that I am claiming is that they are an evental site (to use Badious term) or a site where something new may emerge.4 I am well aware that there are multiple forms of social organization
4. See Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London, 2005).

192

iz Slavoj Z ek / Rejoinder to Ernesto Laclau

that are operative there: criminal gangs, religious fundamentalists, wildcapitalists (far from being only passive, favelas are often the sites for half-illegal capitalist ventures). But there are also community kitchens, illegal electricity distribution networks, and other (limited, true) forms of potentially emancipatory self-organization. Laclaus description of slums as places in which the passive poor submit to the terror of criminal gangs is a ridiculous reactionary simplication. Laclau, who tends to praise Latino-American populism, should of all people remember how, after the short-lived coup detat against the Chavez regime in Venezuela, it was mostly the mobilization of the masses from suburban slums that brought him back to power, proof enough that we are not dealing here with passive poverty submitted to the action of totally nonpolitical criminal gangs (p. 680). As for the ideological link between slums and Canudos, or the fact that Canudos is retroactively perceived as the mythic ancestor of the favelas, this is a simple fact of popular ideology, used and manipulated even by the mainstream media. Here is more of my pure delirium on Canudos, where I clearly warn against the kind of misunderstanding at issue: And, to avoid a boring misunderstanding, this does not entail the claim that those excluded are totally outsideif one examines the situation more closely, one can, of course, immediately establish how the two levels interpenetrate and echo each otherhow, for example, the space of the excluded often reproduces the most brutal authoritarian features of the State; or, on the other side, how the legitimate state is often sustained by excluded (publicly disavowed) practices. These echoes and interpenetrations, however, concern the positive content which lls in the two dierent structural places. To return to the example of the Canudos community: of course, many of its features were borrowed from the premodern regime (they dened themselves as royalists, as protectors of the public role of the Church against the republican drive for modernization of the Brazilian state), but what really mattered was that all these elements were transgured (even transubstantiated) by the space in which they (re)appeared.5 iz And yet, in his Z ek-is-waiting-for-the-Martians argument, Laclau claims that there is no valid emancipatory struggle except one that is fully and directly anticapitalist. In his words: I believe in the central structuring
iz 5. Z ek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (New York, 2004), p. 91.

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006

193

role of the anticapitalist struggle. The problem, however, is this: he iz gives no indication of what an anticapitalist struggle might be. Z ek quickly dismisses multicultural, antisexist, and antiracist struggles as not being directly anticapitalist. Nor does he sanction the traditional aims of the Left, linked more directly to the economy: the demands for higher wages, for industrial democracy, for control of the labor process, for a progressive distribution of income, are not proposed as anticapi iz talist either. . . . Not a single line in Z eks work gives an example of what he considers an anticapitalist struggle. One is left wondering whether he is anticipating an invasion of beings from another planet.6 When I read passages like these, I cannot but think that the two of us eectively live in parallel universes; if I am waiting for Martians, then he must be from a strange Venus. First, there is his ridiculous equation of my thesis on the central structuring role of class struggle with the claim that every valid emancipatory struggle should be fully and directly anticapitalist. As someone who has written abundantly on overdetermination and articulation, he should know what structuring role means, namely, that class struggle is the overdetermining principle of articulation of the multitude of emancipatory struggles, not their actual content. (I myself give a clear, although, for Laclau and many others, problematic example of it when, in my work on Lenin, I claim that in todays constellation the primary focus should not be on anticapitalism but on undermining the fetishist status of democracy as our master-signier;7 as Badiou recently put it, Today, the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. Its called Democracy.)8 Then comes the strange accusation that after ohandedly dismissing all existing forms of emancipatory struggle (from antisexist and multiculti struggles to traditional workers trade unionist actions) as not truly anticapitalist I do not provide even a minimal hint of how a true anticapitalist struggle should look today. This is the same as asking,Where is the fruit . . . apart from the apples and oranges? (Although, signicantly, there is something missing in Laclaus series of all possible candidates for emancipatory struggles today, namely, violent revolutionary politics.) Far from compelling us to dismiss all kinds of antisexism, antiracism, and so on, the structuring role of class struggle functions as a device that enables us (1) to account for the very changes in focus of emancipatory struggles (in my view, the very shift from the central role of the classic working-class economic
6. Laclau,The Populist Reason, Umbr(a) 1 (2004): 34. 7. See Vladimir Illich Lenin, Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to iz October 1917, trans. Peter Hallward, ed. Z ek (London, 2002). 8. Badiou,Prefazione alledizione italiana, Metapolitica (Naples, 2002), p. 14.

194

iz Slavoj Z ek / Rejoinder to Ernesto Laclau

struggle to an identity politics of recognition should be explained through the dynamics of class struggle) and (2) to analyze and judge the concrete political content and stakes of dierent struggles. While professing solidarity with the poor, liberals encode their part in the culture war with an oppositional class message; more often than not, their ght for multicultural tolerance and womens rights marks the counterposition to the alleged intolerance, fundamentalism, and patriarchal sexism of the so-called lower classes. The paradox here is that it is populist fundamentalism that retains this logic of antagonism, while the liberal Left follows the logic of recognition of dierences, of defusing antagonisms into coexisting dierences; in their very form, the conservative-populist grassroots campaigns took over the old leftist-radical stance of popular mobilization and struggle against upperclass exploitation. We should therefore not only refuse the easy liberal contempt for the populist fundamentalists (or, even worse, the patronizing regret of how manipulated they are); we should reject the very terms of the culture war. Although, of course, as to the positive content of most of the debated issues, a radical leftist should support the liberal stance (for abortion, against racism and homophobia, and so on), one should never forget that it is the populist fundamentalist, not the liberal, who is, in the long term, our ally. In all their anger, the populists are not angry enough, not radical enough to perceive the link between capitalism and the moral decay they deplore.

3. Why Capital Is Real The next focal point of Laclaus critique of my notion of the logic of capital as Real is that my nonsensical attribution to the Real of a formaltranscendental content is at odds with the most elementary notions of Lacans theory (p. 669):
only if the logic of capital is self-determined can it operate as an infrastructure determining what goes on in social reality. But the Real, in the Lacanian sense, does exactly the opposite; it establishes a limit that prevents any self-determination by the Symbolic. All this cheap metaphoric use of the reality/Real duality to refer to something that is no more than the old base/superstructure distinction is entirely out of place; it is evident that the logic of capital is as symbolic as the social reality that it is supposed to determine. [P. 658] Consequently, my notion of the Real is purely and simply, a misrepresentation of the Lacanian notion of the iz Reala good example of how Z ek systematically distorts Lacanian

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006

195

theory to make it compatible with a Hegelianism that is, in most respects, its very opposite. The Real cannot be an inexorable spectral logic and even less something that determines what goes on in social reality for the simple reason that the Real is not a speciable object endowed with laws of movement of its own but, on the contrary, something that only exists and shows itself through its disruptive eects within the Symbolic. [P. 657] Here, it is Laclau who should do his homework. As Lacan repeats again and again, the Real is a complex notion; it has, in his theory, at least three main dimensions. First, there is the imaginary Real: the Thing beyond representation in its monstrosity, which nonetheless remains within the domain of the Imaginary, although as a kind of image that endeavors to stretch the imagination to the very border of the unrepresentable. This Real (from Maupassants Horla, to Poes maelstrom, to the alien from its namesake lm) occupies the intersection of the Imaginary and the Real. It stands for the Real in its most terrifying imaginary dimension as the primordial abyss that swallows everything, dissolving all identities. Second, there is the symbolic Real: the real as consistency, with the signier reduced to a senseless formula, like quantum physics formulas that can no longer be translated back intoor related tothe everyday experience of our lifeworld. In Freud, we nd both of these Reals in his dream on Irmas injection; if the imaginary Real is the view into Irmas throat, the palpitating raw esh in it, the symbolic Real is the chemical formula (of trimethylamine) that concludes the dream, the scientic Real, the Real of a formula that renders natures automatic and senseless functioning. The dierence hinges on dierent starting points: if we start with the Imaginary (the mirror confrontation of Freud and Irma), we get the Real in its imaginary dimension, the horrifying primordial image that cancels the imagery itself; if we start with the Symbolic (the argument between the three doctors), we get language deprived of the wealth of its human sense transformed into the Real of a meaningless formula. And, nally, there is the real Real (to which Laclau reduces the notion of the Real), the purely formal gap/limitation that thwarts or dislocates every symbolic identity. The Real is thus eectively all three dimensions at the same time: the abyssal vortex of the Thing, the mathematized consistent structure of reality, the purely formal limit of every objectivity. One should focus on the way the three terms of the triad Real-Imaginary-Symbolic are inherently interwoven; the entire triad reects itself within each of its three elements. There are not only three modalities of the Real. In a strictly homologous way, there are also three modalities of the Symbolic: the real (the signier reduced to a senseless

196

iz Slavoj Z ek / Rejoinder to Ernesto Laclau

formula), the imaginary (Jungian symbols), and the symbolic (speech, meaningful language). There are even three modalities of the Imaginary, too: the real (fantasy, which is precisely an imaginary scenario occupying the place of the Real), the imaginary (the image as such in its fundamental function as a decoy), and the symbolic (again, Jungian symbols or New Age archetypes). This multidimensionality of the Real makes it clear why Lacan always insists that modern scientic discourse, in its mathematized formulas, articulates a knowledge in the Real and is not merely another symbolic narrative. Along the same lines, I claim that the status of the logic of capital is that of a Real; but along what lines precisely? When, in his recent Logique des mondes, Badiou proposes the concept of point to describe the moment when pure subjective choice stabilizes a world, a situation where one must make the simple decision of yes or no, he implicitly refers to Lacans point de caption. Does this not imply that there is no world outside language, no world whose horizon of meaning is not determined by a symbolic order? The passage to truth is therefore the passage from language (the limits of my language are the limits of my world) to letters to mathemes that run diagonally across a multitude of worlds. Postmodern relativism is precisely the idea of an irreducible multitude of worlds, each sustained by a specic language game, so each world is the narrative its members are telling themselves about themselves, with no shared terrain, no common language between them. And the problem of truth is precisely how to establish something that, to refer to terms popular in modal logic, remains the same in all possible worlds. Why did Badiou start to explore this topic of world, the logic of worlds? What if the impetus came from his deeper insight into capitalism? What if the concept of world was necessitated by the need to conceive the capitalist universe as worldless? Badiou recently claimed that our time is devoid of world; how are we to grasp this strange thesis? Even Nazi anti-Semitism opened up a world; by way of describing the present critical situation, the goal and the means to achieve it, and by naming the enemy (a Jewish conspiracy), Nazism disclosed reality in a way that allowed its subjects to acquire a global cognitive mapping, inclusive of the space for their meaningful engagement. Perhaps it is here that one should locate the danger of capitalism; although it is global, encompassing the whole world, it sustains a stricto sensu worldless ideological constellation, depriving the large majority of people of any meaningful cognitive mapping. The universality of capitalism resides in the fact that capitalism is not a name for a civilization, for a specic cultural-symbolic world, but the name for a truly neutral econo-symbolic machine that operates with Asian values as well as with

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006

197

others, so that Europes worldwide triumph is its defeat, self-obliteration, the cutting of the umbilical link to Europe. The critics of Eurocentrism who endeavor to unearth the secret European bias of capitalism fall short here; the problem with capitalism is not its secret Eurocentric bias but the fact that it really is universal, a neutral matrix of social relations. What is capitalist globalization? Capitalism is the rst socioeconomic order that detotalizes meaning. It is not global at the level of meaning (there is no global capitalist worldview, no capitalist civilization properthe fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu and Buddhist); its global dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth-withoutmeaning, as the real of the global market mechanism.

4. The People Doesnt Exist This, nally, brings us to the central topic of the debate, the notion of populism. Here is how Laclau dismisses my claim that the populist agents identity is perceived as preexisting the enemys onslaught: Of course, I never said that populist identity preexists the enemys onslaught, but exactly the opposite: that such an onslaught is the precondition of any popular identity. I have even quoted, to describe the relation I had in mind, SaintJust as saying that the unity of the Republic is only the destruction of what is opposed to it (p. 648). The confusion here is truly mind-boggling; of course I am well aware of Laclaus thesis that the onslaught (antagonistic struggle) is the precondition of any popular identity. But my point is precisely that the populist agent itself is not aware of it, that it perceives its own substantial identity as preexisting. So what about Saint-Just who was aware of it? For this very reason, I dont count Jacobins (or Bolsheviks) as populists. The very thrust of my argument gets lost in Laclaus critical rendering. I agree with Laclaus attempt to dene populism in a formal-conceptual way, also taking note of how, in his last book, he clearly shifted his position away from radical democracy and towards populism (he now reduces democracy to the moment of democratic demand within the system). However, as is clear to him, populism can also be very reactionary; so how are we to draw a line here? Heres my proposal: every construction and action on behalf of a people as a political subject is not eo ipso populism. In the same way that Laclau claims that society doesnt exist, the people also doesnt exist; the problem with populism is that, within its horizons, the people does exist. The peoples existence is guaranteed by its constitutive exception, by the externalization of the enemy into a positive intruder/obstacle. The nonpopulist reference to the people should thus be a paraphrase of Kants denition of

198

iz Slavoj Z ek / Rejoinder to Ernesto Laclau

beauty as Zweckma igkeit ohne Zweck, the popular without people, in other words, the popular that is cut through, thwarted, by a constitutive antagonism that prevents it from acquiring the full substantial identity of a people. Thats why populism, far from standing for the political as such, always involves a minimal depoliticization, naturalization, of the political. This accounts for the fundamental paradox of authoritarian fascism. It almost symmetrically inverts what Moue calls the democratic paradox. If the wager of (institutionalized) democracy is to integrate the antagonistic struggle itself into the institutional/dierential space, transforming it into regulated agonism, fascism proceeds in the opposite direction. While fascism, in its mode of activity, brings the antagonistic logic to its extreme (talking about the struggle to death between itself and its enemies and always maintainingif not realizinga minimum of an extrainstitutional threat of violence, of a direct pressure of the people bypassing complexlegalinstitutional channels), it posits as its political goal precisely the opposite, an extremely ordered hierarchic social body (no wonder fascism always relies on organicist-corporatist metaphors). This contrast can be nicely rendered in the terms of the Lacanian opposition between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the enunciated (content); while democracy admits antagonistic struggle as its goal (in Lacanese: as its enunciated, its content), its procedure is regulated-systemic; fascism, on the contrary, tries to impose the goal of hierarchically structured harmony through the means of an unbridled antagonism. In a homologous way, the ambiguity of the middle class, this embodied contradiction (as Marx said apropos Proudhon), is best exemplied in the way it relates to politics. On the one hand, the middle class is against politicization; it just wants to sustain its way of life, to be left to work and lead a peaceful life (which is why it tends to support the authoritarian coups that promise to put an end to the crazy political mobilization of society, so everybody can return to his or her proper work). On the other hand, the middle classin the guise of the threatened, patriotic, hard-working moral majorityis the main instigator of grassroots mass mobilization (in the guise of rightist populismtake, for example, France today, where the only force truly disturbing the postpolitical, technocratic-humanitarian administration is Le Pens National Front). Furthermore, it is not only that todays political eld is polarized between postpolitical administrations and populist politicization; phenomena like Berlusconi demonstrate how the two opposites can even coexist in the same political force. Is Berlusconis Forza Italia! not a case of postpolitical populismin other words, a mediatic-administrative government legitimizing itself in populist terms? And does the same not hold to some degree

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006

199

even for the Blair government in the U.K. or for the Bush administration in the U.S.? In other words, is populism not progressively replacing multiculti tolerance as the spontaneous ideological supplement to the postpolitical administration, as its pseudoconcretization, its translation into a form that appeals to the individuals immediate experience? The key fact here is that pure postpolitics (a regime whose self-legitimation isthoroughly technocratic, presenting itself as competent administration) is inherently impossible; any political regime needs supplementary populist selflegitimation.

5. The Cunning of Reason Back to Laclau, where he addresses the distinguishing feature, in my view, of populism proper. His criticisms are based on my supposed confusion about pseudoconcreteness and hegemonythat is to say, he claims that my argumentation is based on two unargued assumptions:
(1) any incarnation of the universal in the particular should be conceived as reication; (2) such an incarnation is inherently fascist. To these postulates we will oppose two theses: (1) that the notion of reication is entirely inadequate to understand the kind of incarnation of the universal in the particular that is inherent in the construction of a popular identity; (2) that such an incarnationrightly understoodfar from being a characteristic of fascism or of any other political movement, is inherent to any kind of hegemonic relationthat is, to the kind of relation inherent to the political as such. [P. 650] What is wrong and totally misleading here is Laclaus claim that for me any incarnation of the universal in the particular should be conceived as reication. Quite to the contrary, from a properly Hegelian perspective the particular that exemplies the universal is its truth. Here Hegel is, in his practice of philosophizing, eectively a kind of materialist. In the Platonicidealist approach, examples are always imperfect; they never perfectly render what they are supposed to exemplify. So we should take care not to take them too literally, while, for a materialist, there is always more in the example than in what it exemplies; to put it another way, an example always threatens to undermine what it is supposed to exemplify since it gives body to what the exemplied notion itself represses and is unable to cope with. Therein resides Hegels materialist procedure in his Phenomenology; each gure of consciousness is staged, exemplied, and then undermined through its own example. This is why the idealist approach always demands a multitude of examples; since no single example is fully tting, one has to generate more of them in order to indicate the transcendent wealth of the

200

iz Slavoj Z ek / Rejoinder to Ernesto Laclau

idea they exemplify, the idea being the xed point of reference of oating examples. A materialist, on the other hand, tends to repeat one example, returning to it obsessively. It is the particular example that remains the same in all symbolic universes, while the universal notion it is supposed to exemplify continually changes its shape, so we get a multitude of universal notions circling like bugs around the light, around a single example. Is this not what Lacan is doing, returning to the same exemplary cases (the guessing game with ve hats, the dream of Irmas injection), each time providing a new interpretation? This is what, ultimately, the Hegelian Cunning of Reason is about. Hegels wager is that the best way to destroy the enemyin this case, a universal ideais to give him the freedom to deploy his potentials and that his success will be his failure, since the lack of external obstacles will confront him with the absolutely inherent obstacle of the inconsistency of his own position: Cunning is something other than trickery. The most open activity is the greatest cunning (the other must be taken in its truth). In other words, with his openness, a man exposes the other in himself, he makes him appear as he is in and for himself, and thereby does away with himself. Cunning is the great art of inducing others to be as they are in and for themselves, and to bring this out into the light of consciousness. Although others are in the right, they do not know how to defend it by means of speech. Muteness is bad, mean cunning. Consequently, a true master is at bottom only he who can provoke the other to transform himself through his act.9 The wager of the Cunning of Reason is thus not so much trust in the power of reason (We can take it easy and withdraw, reason will see to it that the good side wins) as trust in the power of unreason in every determinate agent that, left to its own devices, will destroy itself. Irony is, therefore, for Hegel, the very core of dialectics: All dialectics lets hold that which should hold, it treats it as if it fully holds [la sst das gelten, was gelten soll, als ob es gelte] and, in this way, it lets it destroy itselfthe general irony of the world.10 With his questioning, Socrates merely pushes his opponentpartner to render concrete his idea-representation (what do you mean by justice, by happiness?) and, in this way, lets him bring out the inconsistency of his position and lets this position destroy itself. It does not impose external measures on an idea; rather, it measures the idea according to its own
9. G. W. F. Hegel, Jenaer Realphilosophie, Vorlesungsmanuskripte zur Philosophie der Natur und des Geistes von 18051806 (Berlin, 1969), p. 199. 10. Hegel, Vorlesungen u ber die Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1971), 1:581.

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006

201

standards and lets it destroy itself through its own self-explication. So when Hegel writes that womankind is the everlasting irony (in the life) of the community, does he not thereby assert the feminine character of irony/ dialectics?11 What this means is that the very presence of Socrates, his questioning attitude, transforms the speech of his partner into prosopopoeia: When the participants in a conversation are confronted with Socrates, their words all of a sudden start to sound like quotes and cliche s, like borrowed voices. The participants are confronted with the abyss of what authorizes them in their speech, and the moment they try to rely on the usual supports of authorization, authorization fails. It is as if an inaudible echo of irony adds itself to their speech, an echo which hollows out their words and their voices, and their voices appear as borrowed and expropriated.12 It is in this sense that, for Lacan, Socratic irony announces the subjective position of the analyst. Does the same not hold also for the analytic session? Let us imagine the patient telling the analyst the impassioned story of some of his recent adventures or fantasies. The very presence of the analyst, through his ironic stance, desubjectivizes the patient; it transubstantiates his authentic subjective expression into a puppetlike rendering of a miscellany of falsied memories and fragments from totally dierent situations originally involving other people (like the patients father) or even fragments from speeches originally made by others. This (not the ridiculous notion of some mysterious spirit that secretly pulls the strings and guarantees the happy outcome of our struggles) is what the Cunning of Reason amounts to: I hide nothing from you, I renounce all hermeneutics of suspicion, I do not impute any dark motives to you, I just leave the eld open for you to deploy your potentials and thus destroy yourself. It is easy to discern here the unexpected proximity of the Hegelian master to Lacans analyst; the Cunning of Reason means that the Idea realizes itself in and through the very failure of its realization. It is worth recalling the sublime reversal found in Charles Dickenss Great Expectations. When, at his birth, Pip is designated as a man of great expectations, everyone sees this as a forecast of his worldly success. However, it is only at the novels end, when he abandons Londons false glamor and returns to his modest childhood community, that he lives up to this forecast. It is only by way of nding the strength to leave behind the vain thrill of Londons high
11. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1977), p. 288. 12. Mladen Dolar, Prozopopeja (Ljubljana, 2006), pp. 21415. For the insight on this issue of the feminine character of irony/dialectics, see esp. p. 186.

202

iz Slavoj Z ek / Rejoinder to Ernesto Laclau

society that he makes good on these great expectations, thereby authenticating the designation. We are dealing here with a kind of Hegelian reexivity; what changes in the course of the heros ordeal is not only his character but also the very ethical standard by which we measure his character. This is what negation of negation is, the shift of perspective that turns failure into true success. And does the same not go for the Freudian Fehlleistung (the acte manque ), an act that succeeds in its very failure? In other words, what is the Hegelian Begri as opposed to the nominalist notion (the result of abstracting shared features from a series of particular objects)? Often, we stumble upon a particular case that does not fully t its universal species, which is atypical; the next step is to acknowledge that every particular is atypical, that the universal species exists only in exceptions, that there is a structural tension between the universal and the particular. At this point, we become aware that the universal is no longer just an empty neutral container of its subspecies but an entity in tension with each and every one of its species. The universal notion thus acquires a dynamics of its own; more precisely, the true universal is this antagonistic dynamic between the universal and the particular. It is at this point that we pass from the abstract to the concrete universal, when we acknowledge that every particular is an exception and, consequently, that the universal, far from containing its particular content, excludes it (or is excluded by it). Laclaus reproachthat I do away entirely with symbolic mediationand have a pure expression of true consciousness (p. 654), which is the same as to claim that there is a direct access to the Thing as such, while objets a will only be granted the status of distorted representationsmisses (distorts, to be ironic) not only my point but Hegels dialectics itself. For Hegel, if the Idea cannot adequately represent itself, if its representation is distorted or decient, then this distortion simultaneously signals a limitation or deciency of the Idea itself. And, in order to get at the speculative core of Hegelian dialectics, one must take another step. Not only does the universal Idea always appear in a distorted or displaced way, this Idea is nothing but distortion and displacement, the self-inadequacy of the Particular. The imbalance between the universal and the particular is thus the very vehicle of Hegelian dialectical movement; what pushes the dialecticalmovement forward is the self-inadequacy of every moment. We take a universal notion, and when we stage it, when we fully deploy its particular content, we always get something less (and/or more), something in the particular that doesnt t its universal frame. What I mean by reication is, however, something totally dierent. Reication occurs when the cause of imbalance is not posited as inherent to the universal but projected into an external intruding object, and this operation precisely abolishes the imbalance. In

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006

203

this way, the true universal exists in the guise of the organic order that is reestablished once the enemy is destroyed. Furthermore, Laclau cannot resist the opportunity to take another stab at me with regard to Stalin: While in fascism the Idea is subordinated to the will of the leader, in communism Stalin is a secondary leaderin the Freudian sensebecause he is subordinated to the Idea. A beautiful compliment to Stalin! As everyone knows, he was not subordinated to any ideology but manipulated the latter in the most grotesque of ways to make it serve his pragmatic political agenda (p. 648). Sancta simplicitas! As if everyone does not know that Stalin manipulated Marxist ideology in the most grotesque way to make it serve his pragmatic political agenda. My point, of course, works at a dierent level, that of a formal discursive position, of the structure of Stalinism as a discursive formation. The way Stalin discursively presented himself was as an instrument of the historical necessity that intervenes in the guise of the communist Idea (which is why, as I theorized decades ago and as Lacan put it in his seminar, Stalinism is a discourse of the university, in contrast to fascism, which is a return to the discourse of the master).

6. The Necessity of Contingency, the Contingency of Necessity Laclaus central anti-Hegelian point concerns the contrast between dialectics and heterogeneity. A dialectical process is by denition an immanent process, taking place in a totally saturated place where no disruptive encounter with a radical outside can ever occur. A dialectical mediation is
a type of connection between elements so that I have in each of them everything needed to logically move to all the others. In the duality A-not A the identity of each pole is exhausted in being the pure negation of the other. So dialectical transitions are not only compatible with contradiction but have to rely on contradiction as the condition of their unity within a homogeneous space. There is nothing heterogeneous in a dialectical contradiction. For that reason, dialectical transitions can only take place in a saturated space. Any remnant of a contingent empiricity that is not dialectically mastered by the whole would jeopardize the latter, for, in that case, the contingency of the unmastered element would make the whole equally contingent, and the very possibility of a dialectical mediation would be put into question (this is the Krugs pen objection to dialectics, which Hegel answered with a brisk dismissal that hardly concealed the fact that he had no answer). [P. 665] Here, we see again Laclaus method at work. The opponentHegel, in this caseis reduced to a rather ridiculous undergraduate-textbook for-

204

iz Slavoj Z ek / Rejoinder to Ernesto Laclau

mula (the Hegelian contradiction as relation A-not A, in which the full representability of its two poles eliminates the interruptive nature of the Real, [p. 671]), which is then easily overrun by the assertion of irreducible heterogeneity up to contingent empiricity, which cannot be accounted for in terms of the immanent dialectical development. It is dicult to imagine a more commonsensical critique of Hegel (and it is Laclau who asserts here the contingent empiricity as an aspect of the Real that resists symbolic mediation [p. 665]). To this dialectical mediation as the deployment of immanent contradictions, Laclau of course opposes the logic of hegemony, in which, on account of constitutive antagonism, the subject-agent is prevented from achieving full identity and then invests a contingent empirical element to represent this full identity. There is a process of identication by which certain objects, aims, and so on, become the names of that absent fullness (they areelevated to the dignity of the Thing). This is exactly what the B-ness of B means. It is not simply an empirical object but one that has been invested, cathected, with the function of representing a fullness overowing its ontic particularity. So, iz as we can see, Z eks alternative is entirely misconceived. First, he conceives the Real of antagonism as a dialectical relation A-not A, in which the full representability of its two poles eliminates the interruptive nature of the Real. And, second, he reduces the B-ness of B to the empirical determinations of the object, thus ignoring the whole logic of the objet a. iz There is not the slightest substance in Z eks objection. [Pp. 67172] The strange fact here is that Laclau constructs an opposition between his position and mine when, in fact, our stances are very close. Of course I am aware of how in the logic of hegemony a contingent-empirical element is invested with the function of representing the impossible thing.13 The difference concerns the Real of antagonism in its relation to dialectical contradiction (the dialectical relation A-not A); for Laclau, they are clearly incompatible because antagonism is a disruption of identity, while (the Hegelian) contradiction is an immanent deployment of As identity. But is it? My claim (and it is not mine alone) is that the Hegelian contradiction is not between A and non-A. It is that which thwarts, frustrates, A from within, preventing it from achieving its identity, from becoming what it is. In (what Laclau calls) a space of full representability, A and B would be two selfidentical terms opposed to each other, dening each other through this opposition and thus constituting each other; man is only man in his
13. The fact that Laclau here confuses objet a and master-signier is another point on which we have no time to insist.

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006

205

opposition to woman, and so on. What I claim is that this is not a Hegelian contradiction at all but a simple relationship of polarity in which the two terms complement each other. To get from the polarity of opposites to contradiction one has to do two things: rst, conceive B as thwarting (curtailing, blocking) A from within, preventing (not constituting) its self-identity; and, second, in a crucial additional twist, conceive B as an eect (materialization) of the impossibility of the A to be fully itself, to achieve its selfidentity. In short, not only is B what prevents A from achieving its self-identity, a foreign body in its midst, but B is nothing but the failure of the A to be itself, the materialization or incarnation of this failure. It is thus Laclaus notion of Hegelian dialectics that reads like a simplied version from an undergraduate paper. What he totally misses is the properly Hegelian relationship between necessity and contingency. In order to give a brief account of this relationship, let me begin with an exemplary case of pre-Hegelian essentialism, that of Rousseau, a man who was not afraid to pursue the paradoxes of the general will to their Stalinist extreme: Aside from this primitive contract, the vote of the majority always obligates all the others. This is a consequence of the contract itself. But it is asked how a man can be both free and forced to conform to wills that are not his own. How can the opponents be both free and be placed in subjection to laws to which they have not consented? I answer that the question is not put properly. The citizen consents to all the laws, even to those that pass in spite of his opposition, and even to those that punish him when he dares to violate any of them. The constant will of all the members of the state is the general will; through it they are citizens and free. When a law is proposed in the peoples assembly, what is asked of them is not precisely whether they approve or reject, but whether or not it conforms to the general will that is theirs. Each man, in giving his vote, states his opinion on this matter, and the declaration of the general will is drawn from the counting of votes. When, therefore, the opinion contrary to mine prevails, this proves merely that I was in error, and that what I took to be the general will was not so. If my private opinion had prevailed, I would have done something other than what I had wanted. In that case that I would not have been free.14 The totalitarian catch here is the short circuit between constative and performative; by reading the voting procedure not as a performative act of decision but as a constative, as the act of expressing an opinion on (or
14. Jean-Jacques Rousseau,On Voting, On the Social Contract, trans. and ed. Donald Cress (Indianapolis, 1987), p. 81.

206

iz Slavoj Z ek / Rejoinder to Ernesto Laclau

guessing) what is the general will (which is thus substantialized into something that preexists voting), Rousseau gets rid of the problem of the rights of those who remain in the minority (they should obey the decision of the majority because, in witnessing the result of voting, they learn what the general will really is). In other words, those who remain in the minority are not simply a minority; in learning the result of the vote (which runs against their individual vote), they do not simply learn that they are a minority. What they learn is that they were mistaken about what is the general will. The parallel between this substantialization of the general will and the religious notion of predestination is striking. In the case of predestination, fate also becomes a decision that precedes the process, so whats at stake in an individuals activities is not the performative constitution of his or her own fate but the discovery (or guess) of his or her preexisting fate. What is obfuscated in both cases is the dialectical reversal of contingency into necessity or the way the outcome of a contingent process is the appearance of necessity; things will have been necessary retroactively. This reversal was described nicely by Jean-Pierre Dupuy: The catastrophic event is inscribed into the future as a destiny, for sure, but also as a contingent accident: it could not have taken place, even if, in the futur anterieur, it appears as necessary. . . . If an outstanding event takes place, a catastrophe, for example, it could not not have taken place; nonetheless, insofar as it did not take place, it is not inevitable. It is thus the events actualizationthe fact that it takes placethat retroactively creates its necessity. Dupuy goes on to provide the example of the French presidentialelection of May 1995, here citing the January forecast of the countrys main polling institute: If, on next May 8, Ms. Balladur will be elected, one can say that the presidential election was decided before it even took place.15 If, accidentally, an event takes place, it creates the preceding chain that makes it appear inevitable, and thisnot commonplaces on how the underlying necessity expresses itself in and through the accidental play of appearances is in nuce the Hegelian dialectics of contingency and necessity. The same goes for the October Revolution (once the Bolsheviks won and stabilized their hold on power, their victory appeared as an outcome and expression of a deeper historical necessity) and even Bushs much-contested rst electoral victory (after the contingent and contested Florida majority, his victory appears retroactively as an expression of a deeper U.S. political trend). Laclaus quip about the Krugs pen objection to dialecticsKrug was
15. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Petite me taphysique des tsunamis (Paris, 2005), p. 19.

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006

207

a contemporary of Hegel who challenged him to deduce dialectically the very pen he was writing with, a challenge Hegel answered with a brisk dismissal that hardly concealed the fact that he had no answer (p. 665)is thus doubly wrong. Not only does Hegel (quite consistently with his premises) deduce the necessity of contingencyin other words, how the Idea necessarily externalizes itself (acquires reality) in phenomena that are genuinely contingentbut he also (and this aspect is often neglected by many of his commentators) develops the opposite and theoretically much more interesting point, that of the contingency of necessity. This is to say that when Hegel describes the progression from external contingent appearance to inner necessary essence, the appearances self-internalization through selfreection, he is not thereby describing the discovery of some preexisting inner essence, the penetration towards something that was already there (this would have been a reication of the essence), but a performative process of constructing (forming) that which is discovered. As Hegel puts it in his Logic, in the process of reection the very return to the lost or hidden ground produces what it returns to. What this means is that not only is inner necessity the unity of itself and contingency its opposite, necessarilypositing contingency as its moment. But contingency is also the encompassing unity of itself and its opposite, necessity; that is to say, the very process through which necessity arises is a necessarily contingent process. The same goes for the relation between law and its (criminal) transgression. Here, a comparison of Hegel with G. K. Chesterton can be instructive. In The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton deployed the dialectics of crime: We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other peoples. . . . The common criminal is a bad man, but at least he is, as it were, a conditional good man. He says that if only a certain obstacle be removedsay a wealthy unclehe is then prepared to accept the universe and to praise God. He is a reformer, but

208

iz Slavoj Z ek / Rejoinder to Ernesto Laclau

not an anarchist. He wishes to cleanse the edice, but not to destroy it. But the evil philosopher is not trying to alter things, but to annihilate them.16 This provocative analysis demonstrates Chestertons limitation, his lack of true Hegelianism; what he doesnt get is that universal(ized) crime is no longer a crimeit sublates (negates/overcomes) itself as crime and turns from transgression into a new order. He is right to claim that, compared to the entirely lawless philosopher, burglars, bigamists, and even murderers are essentially moral. A thief is a conditional good man. He doesnt deny property as such; he just wants more of it for himself and is then quite ready to respect it. However, the conclusion to be drawn from this is that crime is as such essentially moral and that it simply wants a particular illegal reordering of the global moral order that should otherwise remain. And, in a truly Hegelian spirit, one should bring this proposition (of the essential morality of the crime) to its immanent reversal; not only is crime essentially moral (in Hegelese: an inherent moment of the deployment of the inner antagonisms and contradictions of the very notion of moral order, not something that disturbs moral order from outside as an accidental intrusion), but morality itself is essentially criminalagain, not only in the sense that the universal moral order necessarily negates itself in particular crimes but, more radically, in the sense that the way morality (in the case of theft, property) asserts itself is already in itself a crime. Property is theft, as they said in the nineteenth century. This is to say, one should pass from theft as a particular criminal violation of the universal form of property to this form itself as a criminal violation. What Chesterton fails to perceive is that the universalized crime that he projects into lawless modern philosophy and its political equivalent, the anarchist movement that aims at destroying the totality of civilized life, already exists in the guise of the existing rule of law, so the antagonism between law and crime reveals itself to be inherent to crime, the antagonism between universal and particular crime. Chesterton was aware of this in his Defence of Detective Stories, in which he remarks how the detective story keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions. When the detective in a police romance stands alone, and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and sts of a thief s kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic gure, while the burglars and footpads
16. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 4546.

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006

209

are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. [The police romance] is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies.17 It is not dicult to recognize here the elementary matrix of the Hegelian dialectical process. The external opposition (between law and criminal transgression) is transformed into the opposition, internal to the transgression itself, between particular transgressions and the absolute transgression that appears as its opposite, as the universal Law.

7. Of All Conceptions the Hardest for Ratiocination One of the culminating points of the dialectic of necessity and contingency is Hegels infamous deduction of the rational necessity of hereditary monarchy. The bureaucratic chain of knowledge has to be supplemented by the kings decision as the completely concrete objectivity of the will (that) reabsorbs all particularity into its single self, cuts short the weighing of pros and cons between which it lets itself oscillate perpetually now this way and now that, and by saying I will makes its decision and so inaugurates all activity and actuality. . . . The concept of the monarch [is] of all conceptions the hardest for ratiocination, i.e. for the method of reection employed by the Understanding.18 Hegel goes on to elaborate even further on this speculative necessity of the monarch:
This ultimate self in which the will of the state is concentrated is, when thus taken in abstraction, a single self and therefore is immediate individuality. Hence itsnatural character is implied in its very conception. The monarch, therefore, is essentially characterized as this individual, in abstraction from all his other characteristics, and this individual is raised to the dignity of monarchy in an immediate, natural fashion, i.e. through his birth in the course of nature. . . . It is often alleged against monarchy that it makes the welfare of the state dependent on chance, for, it is urged, the monarch may be ill-educated, he may perhaps be unworthy of the highest position in the state, and it is senseless that such a state of aairs should exist because it is supposed to be rational. But all this rests on a presupposition which is nugatory, namely that everything depends on the monarchs particular character. In a completely organized state, it is only a question of the culminating point of formal decision (and a natural bulwark against passion. It is wrong therefore to
17. Chesterton,A Defence of Detective Stories (1902), in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York, 1946), p. 6. 18. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. and ed. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1981), p. 288.

210

iz Slavoj Z ek / Rejoinder to Ernesto Laclau

demand objective qualities in a monarch); he has only to say yes and dot the i, because the throne should be such that the signicant thing in its holder is not his particular make-up. . . . In a well-organized monarchy, the objective aspect belongs to law alone, and the monarchs part is merely to set to the law the subjective I will.19 The speculative moment that Understanding cannot grasp is the transition of the concept of pure self-determination into the immediacy of being and so into the realm of nature. In other words, while Understanding can well grasp the universal mediation of a living totality, what it cannot grasp is that this totality, in order to actualize itself, has to acquire actual existence in the guise of an immediate, natural singularity.20 The term natural should be given its full weight here; in the same way that, at the end of logic, the Ideas completed self-mediation releases itself from Nature, collapses into the external immediacy of Nature, the states rational self-mediation must acquire actual existence in a will that is determined as directly natural, unmediated, stricto sensu irrational. While observing Napoleon on a horse in the streets of Jena after the battle of 1807, Hegel remarked that it was as if he saw there the World Spirit riding a horse. The Christological implications of this remark are obvious; what happened in the case of Christ is that God himself, the creator of our entire universe, was walking around as a common individual. This mystery of incarnation is discernible at dierent levels, up to the parents speculative judgment apropos a child, Out there our love is walking! standing for the Hegelian reversal of determinate reection into reexive determination. The same might be said about a king when a subject sees him walking around: Out there our state is walking. Marxs evocation of reexive determination (in the famous footnote in chapter 1 of Capital ) also falls short here; individuals think they treat a person like a king because he is one, while in actuality hes a king only because they treat him like one. However, the crucial point is that this reication of a social relation in a person cannot be dismissed as a simple fetishist misperception. What such a dismissal itself misses is something that perhaps could be designated as the Hegelian performative. Of course a king is in himself a miserable individual. Of course he is a king only insofar as his subjects treat him like one; however, the point is that the fetishist illusion that sustains our veneration of a king has in itself
19. Ibid., pp. 28889. 20. Did the Marxists who mocked Hegel not pay the price for this negligence in getting a leader who not only embodied rational totality but embodied it fully as a gure of full knowledge, not one who merely made the idiotic point of dotting the i s? In other words, a Stalinist leader is not a monarch, and this makes him much worse.

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006

211

a performative dimension. The very unity of our state, that which the king embodies, actualizes itself only in the person of a king. This is why it is not enough to insist on our need to avoid the fetishist trap and to distinguish between the contingent personhood of a king and what he stands for; what the king stands for only comes to be in his person, the same as with a couples love that (at least within a certain traditional perspective) only becomes actual in their ospring. I hope that you, the reader, see the irony here. For Hegel, what Understanding cannot grasp is precisely the necessity for the universal to be incarnated in a contingent singularity that according to Laclau, Hegel cannot conceive (and which I, consequently, also miss). Maybe this necessity is also too dicult for Laclaus ratiocination.