The Sublime Object of Ideology

Slavoj Zizek

Description

Exploring the ideologies fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society
Slavoj Zizek, the maverick philosopher, author of over 30 books, acclaimed as the "Elvis of cultural theory", and today's most controversial public intellectual. His work traverses the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory, taking in film, popular culture, literature and jokes-all to provide acute analyses of the complexities of contemporary ideology as well as a serious and sophisticated philosophy. His recent films The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema and Zizek! reveal a theorist at the peak of his powers and a skilled communicator. Now Verso is making his classic titles, each of which stand as a core of his ever-expanding life's work, available as new editions. Each is beautifully re-packaged, including new introductions from Zizek himself. Simply put, they are the essential texts for understanding Zizek's thought and thus cornerstones of contemporary philosophy.
The Sublime Object of Ideology: Slavoj Zizek's first book is a provocative and original work looking at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. In a thrilling tour de force that made his name, he explores the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Philosophie moderne
• Philosophie moderne
• Political
• Modern
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• History of ideas
• Modern history
• History of philosophy
• Cultural studies
• Politics
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf

Informations

• Publié par: Verso
• Date de parution: 28 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789604375
• Langue: English

Extrait

Slavoj Žižek was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1949, and is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana. He has been a visiting professor at Columbia University, New York, and the University of Paris VIII, as well as at a number of other prestigious institutions on both sides of the Atlantic.
In his home country, he was a prominent political figure in the 1980s. He wrote a regular column for the newspaper Mladina and, in 1990, finished fifth in the election for Slovenia’s four-person presidency. His international reputation as a writer and philosopher was secured in 1989 with the publication of The Sublime Object of Ideology , a book which applied the author’s pioneering distillation of Lacan, Hegel and Marx to an analysis of agency and modern ideology. A string of much lauded works have followed, including For They Know Not What They Do (1991), The Ticklish Subject (1999), Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002), The Parallax View (2006) and In Defense of Lost Causes (2008).
As well as providing original insights into psychoanalysis, philosophy and radical political theory, he has, through employing his extraordinary scholarship to the examination of popular entertainment, established himself as a witty and deeply moral cultural critic. He has been the subject of two feature-length documentaries, Slavoj Žižek: The Reality of the Virtual (2004) and Žižek! (2005). He also presented and wrote the three-part British TV documentary A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006).
His compelling, charismatic presence and puckish sense of the absurd have prompted the press to dub him ‘the Elvis of cultural theory’ and an ‘intellectual rock star’. However, these jocular monikers belie a seriousness of purpose that has been nothing short of startling in an era marked by despondency and disengagement on the Left. More than an academic or theorist, Žižek has the gravitas and drive of a breed once thought extinct: the revolutionary. He has made philosophy relevant again for a whole generation of politically committed readers.
A series of classic philosophical texts from Verso
The four pillars of Slavoj Žižek’s work are (Lacanian) psychoanalysis, (Hegelian) philosophy, a (Marxist) theory of ideology, and (Christian) theology. The structure of this scholarly edifice is mapped out in the titles of ‘The Essential Žižek’, four central interventions into each of these fields. The focus of The Sublime Object of Ideology is the importance of Lacan’s work to philosophy and contemporary political struggle; The Ticklish Subject examines German Idealism and the unsurpassable horizon of our thinking; The Plague of Fantasies anatomizes the ideological mechanisms that shape our daily experience; and The Fragile Absolute explores the emancipatory core of Christianity.
Also available from Verso by the same author:
In Defense of Lost Causes
Welcome to the Desert of the Real
Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle
Revolution at the Gates , Žižek on Lenin: The 1917 Writings
Lacan: The Silent Partners
THE SUBLIME OBJECT OF IDEOLOGY

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
First edition published by Verso 1989
This edition published by Verso 2008
© Slavoj Žižek 1989
All rights reserved
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London V1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brookyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-300-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-78960-437-5 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78960-436-8 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset by Hewer UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the US by Maple Vail
Contents
Preface to the New Edition: The Idea’s Constipation
Introduction
Part I The Symptom
1 How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?
2 From Symptom to Sinthome
Part II Lack in the Other
3 ‘ Che Vuoi? ’
4 You Only Die Twice
Part III The Subject
5 Which Subject of the Real?
6 ‘Not Only as Substance , but Also as Subject ’
Notes
Index
Preface to the New Edition: The Idea’s Constipation?
When a discipline is in crisis, attempts are made to change or supplement its theses within the terms of its basic framework – a procedure one might call ‘Ptolemization’ (since when data poured in which clashed with Ptolemy’s earth-centred astronomy, his partisans introduced additional complications to account for the anomalies). But the true ‘Copernican’ revolution takes place when, instead of just adding complications and changing minor premises, the basic framework itself undergoes a transformation. So, when we are dealing with a self-professed ‘scientific revolution’, the question to ask is always: is this truly a Copernican revolution, or merely a Ptolemization of the old paradigm?
Two examples of Ptolemization: there are good reasons to claim that ‘string theory’, which claims to provide the foundations for a unified theory (a single theoretical framework describing the four fundamental interactions between subatomic particles that were previously explained separately by relativity theory or quantum physics), remains an attempt at Ptolemization, and that we are still waiting for a new beginning which will require an even more radical change in the basic presuppositions (something like abandoning time or space as the basic constituent of reality). 1 Likewise, in social theory, there are good reasons to claim that all the ‘new paradigm’ proposals about the nature of the contemporary world (that we are entering a post-industrial society, a postmodern society, a risk society, an informational society … ) remain so many Ptolemizations of the ‘old paradigm’ of classic sociological models.
The question is then: how do things stand with psychoanalysis? Although Freud presented his discovery as a Copernican revolution, the fundamental premise of the cognitive sciences is that psychoanalysis remains a ‘Ptolemization’ of classical psychology, failing to abandon its most basic premises. (Post-classical economists, incidentally, make the same claim about Marx: his critique of Smith and Ricardo amounts to a Ptolemization.) The Sublime Object of Ideology tries to answer this question by way of rehabilitating psychoanalysis in its philosophical core – as a theory indebted to Hegel’s dialectics and readable only against this background. This cannot but appear, perhaps, as the worst possible move to have made: trying to save psychoanalysis, a discredited theory (and practice), by reference to an even more discredited theory, the worst kind of speculative philosophy rendered irrelevant by the progress of modern science.
However, as Lacan taught us, when we are confronted with an apparently clear choice, sometimes the correct thing to do is choose the worst option. Thus my wager was (and is) that, through their interaction (reading Hegel through Lacan and vice versa), psychoanalysis and Hegelian dialectics may simultaneously redeem themselves, shedding their old skins and emerging in a new unexpected shape.
Let us take Hegel’s dialectics at its most ‘idealist’ – with the notion of the sublation [ Aufhebung ] of all immediate-material reality. The fundamental operation of Aufhebung is reduction: the sublated thing survives, but in an ‘abridged’ edition, as it were, torn out of its life-world context, stripped down to its essential features, all the movement and wealth of its life reduced to a fixed mark. It is not that, after the abstraction of Reason has done its mortifying job with its fixed categories or notional determinations, speculative ‘concrete universality’ somehow returns us to the fresh greenness of Life; rather, once we pass from empirical reality to its notional Aufhebung , the immediacy of Life is lost forever. There is nothing more foreign to Hegel than a lamentation for the richness of reality that gets lost when we proceed to its conceptual grasp. Recall Hegel’s unambiguous celebration of the absolute power of Understanding from his Foreword to the Phenomenology : ‘The action of separating the elements is the exercise of the force of Understanding, the most astonishing and greatest of all powers, or rather the absolute power.’ This celebration is in no way qualified; that is, Hegel’s point is not that this power is nonetheless later ‘sublated’ into a subordinate moment of the unifying totality of Reason. The problem with Understanding is, rather, that it does not unleash this power to the end, that it takes it as external to the thing itself – hence the standard notion that it is merely our Understanding (‘mind’) that separates in its imagination what in ‘reality’ belongs together, so that the Understanding’s ‘absolute power’ is merely the power of our imagination, which in no way concerns the reality of the thing so analysed. We pass from Understanding to Reason not when this analysis, or tearing apart, is overcome in a synthesis that brings us back to the wealth of reality, but when this power of ‘tearing apart’ is displaced from being ‘merely in our mind’ into things themselves, as their inherent power of negativity.
Back in the 1960s, one ‘progressive’ theorist of education touched a chord when he published the results of a simple experiment: he asked a group of five-year-olds to draw an image of themselves playing at home; then, he asked the same group to do it again two years later, after they had been through a year and a half of primary school. The difference was striking: the self-portraits of the five-year-olds were exuberant, lively, full of colours, surrealistically playful; two years later, the portraits were much more rigid and subdued, with a large majority of the children spontaneously choosing only t