Slavoj Zizek "The Metastases Of Enjoyment" (Verso)
Zizek writes in the tradition of Adorno, because he takes the Continental philosophical tradition seriously, and, he understands it. I don't pretend to understand this book in full, but, reading it is not as obtuse as my first encounter with Adorno.
That's because Zizek is much more chukka chukka hip about popular culture and uses it, along with the canon, to make his points, whereas Adorno would refer to far more obscure literary texts.
But both write in the shadow of what Arthur Koestler called a god that failed (Communism) which i do not feel is dead. Zizek writes as another Moloch, another god, fails, and that's globalized capitalism where the condition of entry is self-objectification narrated as freedom to choose.
Freedom to choose...what? Zizek writes from the standpoint of the idle fellow temporarily stranded in a small city on business back when there were movie theaters showing second-run films, and who wanders into the theater like Parsifal in the enchanted castle or at the puppet show, and masochistically gives himself over to an enjoyment which hasn't yet metastasised into its perverse reverse.
Marxism had in fact the American opposition to Marxism root and branch which started soon after the (American) civil war, and union busters, and finally the mad woman, Thatcher.
Of course, opposition doesn't always invigorate a cause. Thatcherism and Reagan dealt a death blow to a Marxism already weakened by the discovery that Leninism didn't end competition in the new society.
But, the second-wave feminism had only one man to talk back while the others, until Zizek, were T. S. Eliot's dried voices whispering together.
Don't get me wrong. Zizek, in my understanding, isn't opposed to feminism. But, he won't go along with a women-centered programme drained of humanism, either.
His invocation of the angry ghost of Weininger is as if to say, it still moves: culture *as we know it* is male, and is being destroyed by a metastasing American consumption barbarism which won't sign the Kyoto accords and is in hock to China...so, you better call it down and ring, you better pawn it babe: European culture is appreciating like the Euro itself.
Like writing in Adorno, it is a home for the homeless mind.
Perhaps "male" and "female" as adjectives are just too abstract to attach to anything but men and animals to describe their sex, and even this would require an interpretation of the pointy thing, and the receptive thing.
Alas, the progressive thought Zizek is out to rescue is a pitiful mixture of Marx and Freud, of Althusser and Lacan, that might have been in fashion in the seventies, but that has lost whatever contact with reality it ever had. Where Zizek reconnects with reality, and pitches the interest of his reader, is with his references to popular culture and Hollywood movies. They are relatively few in this book, which is quite highbrow and loaded with heavy philosophical discussions. But Zizek reveals his proprietary trademark when he confesses, in the self-interview that closes the book: "I am convinced of my proper grasp of some Lacanian concept only when I can translate it successfully into the inherent imbecility of popular culture."
Zizek also gets it right when he underscores the changes in the figure of authority in contemporary society. The modern father, or the political leader, is no longer the towering figure ordering us to do right and to follow the Law: it is the Master of Enjoyment who invites us to trespass law and bend rules, thereby obstructing our very access to transgression and pleasure. The Ego Ideal turns into the superego and reveals the obscene 'nightly' law that necessarily redoubles and accompanies, as its shadow, the 'public' Law. This unwritten code is meant to be kept hidden: in public, everybody pretends to know nothing about it, or even actively denies its existence. Its function is to sustain the Law and to hold the community together: solidarity-in-guilt is induced by participation in a common transgression. Identification with community is ultimately based upon some shared lie or disavowal of a founding crime. In Andersen's tale, of course everybody knew that the emperor was naked, yet it was precisely the denial of this fact that held the subjects together.
What is new in contemporary society is that this shared lie is now made public: state authorities recognize using torture and other illegal means to reach their aims; greed is turned into a virtue by unfettered money-makers; and people no longer hide when they violate common decency or morality. The secret law becomes the official rule, and the legitimate law is denied as ineffective or out-fashioned. In today's epoch, a state power, or a political leader, can proudly admit to its dark side, advertising the fact that it is discreetly doing dirty things it is better for us not to know about. The emperor can rule as long as his subjects feign to acknowledge that he has clothes on: but when he goes around naked and boasts about it, the kingdom is in peril.
Zizek provides tools, if that's the word, which it probably isn't, to think about the whole where the whole is untrue.
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