Introduction
1 While the ‘popularity’ of Žižek is seen by many professional philosophers as proof of the superficiality of his thought, it also can be seen more positively in the light of a politicized emphasis on ‘popular consciousness’. The ‘critique of ideology’ in Žižek vehemently opposes any simple opposition between philosophical knowledge and (popular) ‘false consciousness’. The connections between the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis and elements of so-called ‘low culture,’ such as punk, similarly practice a subversion of traditional, institutional and professional divisions. In leftist thinking, this brings Žižek, Dolar and Zupančič far closer to thinkers such as Gramsci and Freire (Freire 1972) and further away from thinkers such as Althusser and Marcuse (Althusser 1994). Lacan is also an interesting and somewhat paradoxical example in this case. While his work is supposedly extraordinarily ‘difficult’ (Derrida 1988), it also is famous for its slogans, jokes and popular examples (Lacan 2008). In the film Žižek! (Žižek 2007b), directed by Astra Taylor, Žižek is keen to stress the ‘simple’ and ‘direct’ message which lies behind his thinking, contrasting it for example with the endless qualifications of ‘deconstructionism’. He gives the comical example of Judith Butler struggling to describe the phenomenon of love or even the existence of a bottle of iced tea (Žižek 2007b).
Chapter 1
1 Beforehand, a necessary disclaimer has to be made – in what is proverbially called a ‘typical Slovenian way’ – namely, by saying what this introduction is not, or rather, what it will not or cannot aspire to be. First, it will not be a clavis of any sort, a key to what Žižek is all about, it will not uncover the secrets of the recent Yugoslav history, it will not attempt to sort out and simplify the vivid variety of what Slovenian or Yugoslav ‘alternative culture’ was in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and it will certainly refrain from resorting to the level, as Mladen Dolar elegantly phrased it at our first meeting concerning this book, of ‘who slept with whom’. Secondly, it will not jump on the contemporary bandwagon of classifying the people, groups and movements of the time into the ‘left’ and ‘right’, into the true ‘independentists’ and the ‘yugophiles’, the freedom fighters and the traitors, the discourse too frequently misused and abused by Slovenian politicians and intellectuals today. Finally, it will not provide either an inside view or an outside view, but will try to balance on the narrow edge between the two.
2 Namely, Slovenians, Croats, Serbs, Macedonians, Montenegrians and awkwardly named ‘Muslims’, that is, Bosniacs and two nationalities, Albanians in Kosovo and the Hungarians in Vojvodina. The criteria for distinguishing the two statuses was that the nationalities, unlike the nations, were those that belonged to a nation that had a nation state outside of Yugoslavia, in these two cases Albania and Hungary.
3 Before 1991, the parliament was still officially called the ‘Socio-political assembly’ and the government was the ‘Executive Council’, while the federal republic was presided over by a collective presidency of four members, led by a president of the presidency. Žižek, who is often mistakenly said to have been a presidential candidate, was actually running for one of these four seats in the collective presidency as a candidate of the ZSMS, but did not succeed.
4 The dates in brackets specify the time when each of these proclaimed independence. The degree to which each of this is internationally recognized, is a separate issue.
5 Žižek was supposed to have started teaching years before that, but was suspended from doing so after he refused to alter his master’s thesis in order to better suit the official line (Dolar et al. 2014).
6 Institutions and organizations were establishing centres for the study of Marxism at different levels. Žižek, for example, worked for the Marxist Centre at the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Slovenia in the late 1970s.
7 The poem Duma (Word) by Tomaž Šalamun (an excerpt of which serves as the epigraph to the book), which is a parody of an older Oton Župančič poem with the same title that starts ‘I walked our land and drank its beauty’. Šalamun rewrote it as: ‘Fucked by the Absolute/ fed up with virgins and other dying sufferers/ I love you o neighbors, meek fantasies of God the Father/ I love you o integral characters of sweet gazing/ in my mind grace yielded/ o proud possessors of anxieties/ o trained intellectuals with sweaty little hands/ o logicians, vegetarians with the thickest glasses/ o muzzled rectors/ o ideologues with your whoring ideologies/ o doctors munching on punctuation marks and Skofja Loka pastries/ o mummified academicians patting passion and pain/ Pascal who tried and Bach who pulled it off/ o lusty inexpressible dried-up lyricist/ o horticulture, the enlightened and the happy swallows/ o socialism à la Louis XIV or how to shelter the poor little creatures/ o one hundred thirty-five constitutional bodies or how to keep/ a dead cat from stinking/ o the revolutionary zeal of the masses or/ where is the sanatorium to cure our impotence/ I walked our land and got an ulcer/ land of Cimpermans and pimply groupies/ land of serfs myths and pedagogy/ o flinty Slovenians, object of history crippled by a cold/’ (translated by Tomaž Šalamun and Christopher Merrill, http://www.writinguniversity.org/index.php/main/author/tomaz_salamun1/).
8 Allegedly, the problem was that the staff of the printing shop fell mysteriously ill, machines were all suddenly broken and the mechanic was called overnight to join the army.
9 In the post-war period, Nietzsche was perhaps the most unwelcome of authors, being associated with the rise of fascism and national-socialism. In the mid 1950s, the first texts on his work were starting to be published again (cf. Vuko Pavićević’s Filozofija Fridriha Ničea, Rad, Belgrade, 1955), staying true to the official line of criticizing his thought, but already introducing a differentiation between his ideas and those of his Nazi admirers.
10 A line from a Pankrti song, with a pun on the socialist custom that no one should be called ‘gentleman’ for this represented bourgeois upper class, but should instead be called ‘comrade’.
Chapter 2
1 We might compare Klossowski’s invocation of concepts such as ‘evil’ with a similar trajectory in Bataille. In his text Literature and Evil, for example, (a text written during this period and with which Lacan would have been familiar), Bataille also seeks to critique moralism through the notion of ‘evil’. Significantly, in relation to the Lacanian project, Bataille also seeks to defend a notion of the ethical not unrelated to that of Lacan, although Bataille refers to it as ‘hypermorality’: ‘I believe that the Evil – an acute form of Evil – which it [literature] expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a hypermorality [mais cette conception ne commande pas l’absence de morale, elle exige une hypermorale]’ (Bataille 2001: 8).
2 This jettisoning of the notion of the ‘ethical’ is sometimes associated with Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche 1967). It is perhaps surprising that Nietzsche does not figure more significantly in the Lacanian analysis (it is known, for example, that Freud thought highly of Nietzsche’s critique of morality and religion). While there are clear tensions between Nietzsche and Lacan, for example, in relation to concepts such as ‘evil’ (which Nietzsche reads as exclusively Christian), nonetheless there are also powerful affinities. Nietzsche’s description of the ‘anti-nihilist’ in On The Genealogy of Morals is not far removed from Lacan’s own perspective on a breakthrough of the current moralistic (and religious) impasse: ‘This man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and antinihilist; this victor over God and nothingness – he must come one day’. (Nietzsche 1967).
Chapter 3
1 Benjamin, in conclusion to this essay also says something significant concerning the relation between surrealism and materialism. We will see that Dolar stresses strongly the ‘materialist’ element of Lacan’s work, very much in line with the discussion, for example, in Seminar XI from Lacan on the ‘critique of idealism’ (Lacan 1994). In the case of Benjamin, there is an emphasis on the gap between materialism and anthropology, again anticipating the significant critique of humanism in psychoanalysis. Kafka, and Dolar’s employment of Kafka here (Dolar 2006), would also be a very effective anti-humanist gesture. As Benjamin puts it: ‘For it must in the end be admitted: metaphysical materialism, of the brand of Vogt and Bukharon, as is attested by the experience of the Surrealists, and earlier of Hebel, Georg Buchner, Nietzsche and Rimbaud, cannot lead without rupture to anthropological materialism. There is a residue’ (Benjamin 1979: 239). One might see, for example, the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis as precisely taking up these two key thematics of ‘rupture’ and ‘residue’. The lineage from surrealism back to Nietzsche and Rimbaud is striking here, but the lineage can also be seen as extending (in)directly to Lacan.
Epilogue
1 One can make an analogous argument that Derrida’s work also anticipates very clearly this philosophical dimension. In On Touching (Derrida 2005), for example, Derrida reads the work of Nancy in terms of a problematic of ‘plasticity and technicity’ (‘en compte de la plasticité et de la technicité’) (Derrida 2000: 249, 2005: 220). Derrida seems to be arguing against the notion that one can draw the boundaries of touch at the organic limits of bodies. Rather, we now have to consider a whole new dimension of ‘touch’ and ‘sense’, which has evolved from ‘the intertwining of techne and the body [verflectung]’ (Derrida 2005: 237). The affinities with the thematic of The New Wounded are clear. Derrida’s work also owes a significant debt to Bataille in this regard, especially in the context of a technics or a ‘writing’ of embodiment (Irwin 2010, especially Chapter 2; Bataille 1988a), a debt Derrida readily acknowledges, for example, in his seminal essay, ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve’ (in Derrida 1972).