The Political Fantastic: Žižek, Fantasy, and a New Autonomous Aesthetics

This essay examines how Slavoj Žižek’s conception of fantasy may open up new approaches for political, literary, and aesthetic criticism. Taking In Defense of Lost Causes (2008) as a case study, I demonstrate how Žižek’s method provides a much-needed consideration of form. Moreover, I argue that Žižek’s analysis illuminates historical and ideological elements that both positivistic historicism and traditional literary formalism necessarily miss. Working against critics who assail “paranoid” symptomatic criticism, I suggest that considering artwork in terms of fantasy shifts the terrain of historical analysis and, as a consequence, recalibrates what formal and political hermeneutics might entail. Such an approach provides a means to “return to the political” via a new perspective on the relation between art and historical context. I conclude by building on Žižek’s Lacanian conception of “autonomous ethics” to offer autonomous aesthetics as a way to conceive of this new orientation toward artistic and formal analysis.

A battle fought yesterday over the promises of emancipation and the illusions and disillusions of history continues today on aesthetic ground.

— Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics