Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political

Conclusion. Theorizing from the Rubble

CONCLUSION Theorizing from the Rubble The idea of rupture as the source of political values has a growing number of champions in contemporary thought. Though different thinkers have a variety of terms for what we call rupture, the idea itself has become widespread. As we argued at the outset, it appears most evidently in the event of Alain Badiou, the gesture of Giorgio Agamben, and the act of Slavoj Zizek. Our development of the idea in the preceding chapters represents an attempt to formalize rupture's increasing prominence. The other theorists of rupture have made occasional appearances throughout the book, but they have remained predominantly in the background. In each chapter, we identify a discoverer of a political value out of rupture: the Jews discover belief; Plato identifies universality; Christians recognize solidarity; Descartes uncovers equality; Kant finds freedom; Kierkegaard insists on singularity; and Freud grasps the inhuman as that which distinguishes humanity. We have privileged those movements and thinkers whose commitment to rupture enabled them to grasp its capacity for the generation of political values. But we might also identify a present-day adherent for each of these values who sustains the project begun by the original discoverers. These theorists attempt to sustain certain values through an insistence on their connection with rupture. They reveal the theoretical fecundity of rupture as an idea, and they trace its political importance. The possibilities for rupture are already evident in this theoretical work, and the task of our book has involved an effort to remain faithful to these possibilities. But the book would not be complete without providing a sense of just how widespread the idea of rupture's political fecundity has become. In the introduction, we identify Slavoj Zizek as one of the central proponents of rupture in contemporary philosophy. Throughout his philosophical career, Slavoj Zizek has been an unremitting critic of belief. Though we live in a predominantly secular age of cynicism with regard to belief, he refuses to take this cynicism at face value. From the appearance 217 218 Conclusion of his first book in English in 1989, Zizek reveals that cynicism hides a structure of belief that manifests itself in how subjects act. The Sublime Object of Ideology depicts the functioning of ideological fantasy in spite of the disbelief that its adherents express. At the moment when contemporary subjects envision themselves as cynical disbelievers, their actions betray them as believers. Though they know, for instance, that the commodity has no substantial value, they act as if it did and thereby reveal a belief to which they would never own up. To paraphrase one of Zizek's own book titles, they know not what they believe. But the problem with this belief of the cynic as well as that of the fundamentalist is that it fails to leave an opening for genuine belief-belief connected to rupture. Though we have become cynics who secretly believe, we have lost the capacity for belief like that of the Jews who recognized the rupture within signification and the missing signifier that it produces. As Zizek puts it in The Parallax View, "Both liberal-skeptical cynicism and fundamentalism thus share a basic underlying feature: the loss of the ability to believe in the proper sense of the term. For both of them, religious statements are quasi-empirical statements of direct knowledge: fundamentalists accept them as such, while skeptical cynics mock them."l For a self-proclaimed atheist like Zizek, the prospect of "the loss of the ability to believe" should seem salutary, but his lament here has its origin in an understanding of the necessary role that belief has in all political struggle. Unless one avows the missing signifier, one remains a prisoner of the ruling authority and its formulation of structural permanence. All of Zizek's critique of contemporary hidden belief has as its aim engendering the possibility of a genuine belief-a belief in a missing God rather than the knowledge of a present one. Zizek writes in order that we can believe again.2 If Zizek has become the theoretical advocate of belief stemming from rupture, Joan Copjec functions today as the primary defender of universality insofar as it is the product of rupture. Copjec's sense of universality is inextricable from her position as a feminist. Her brand of feminism, however, runs counter to the prevailing versions, especially those that emphasize the construction of sex. There are universals, as Copjec sees it, because we cannot reduce sexual difference to a...