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127 4 From the Spectacular Act to the Vanishing Act: The Politics of Lacanian Theory§16 The Inherent Prematurity of the Political: Badiou, Žižek, and Lenin’s Legacy After viewing Astra Taylor’s recently released documentary film on him, those familiar with Žižek might be left with the false impression that they’ve heard it all before. Here as elsewhere, Žižek’s approach perhaps risks striking some as being much like that of a professional comedian, not only in terms of content (à la the numerous elements of humor peppered throughout his writings and talks) but also in terms of method. More specifically, at certain moments in the film, it sounds as though he rehearses a series of bits that have been carefully polished through repeated retelling. As has sometimes been claimed, maybe it seems that part of his art resides, like that of a skilled comedian, in slightly modifying the reiterated bits themselves and the transitions between them. However, the impression that there’s nothing new said in Žižek! The Movie by its protagonist is wrong. The crucial twist Žižek introduces in Taylor’s film has to do with how he presently positions himself with respect to the political dimension of his corpus. He strongly suspects it cannot be the case that the majority of his audience shares with him a passion for Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and German idealist philosophy. Rather, he admits to experiencing himself in relation to this mass as the object of transference-style investments—more specifically, the expectations of left-leaning readers that he will play the part of the brilliant intellectual who, as a secular messiah , finally furnishes them with a succinct formula for the dissolution of capitalism and the ushering in of some sort of reinvigorated variety of socialism. Žižek not only protests in various ways that he doesn’t possess such a formula (and that the anticipations of being handed this magic anti-capitalist bullet by him flow from beliefs in nonexistent, fictional solutions woefully underestimating the complexities of the contemporary world)—he cleverly makes a virtue out of this (as he describes it) de- 128 S L A V O J Ž I Ž E K centering of his subjectivity that results from his audience pinning their false political hopes on him. Implicitly departing from Lacan’s portrayal of transference as arising from the analysand’s conflicted conferral upon the analyst of the status of the “subject supposed to know,”1 Žižek does so by opting, like a Lacanian analyst, to use the enigma of his desire as a magnet to extract from those transferentially relating to him qua the political sujet supposé savoir the structure of the underlying fantasies informing this demand to be provided with a definitive, easily encapsulated response to the problems of late-capitalism. Much like the “Che vuoi?” (i.e., the provocative mystery of the desire of the Other) which, according to Lacan, is one of the key spurs driving the construction of the formations of the unconscious underpinning desiring subjectivity,2 the question “Politically speaking, what does Žižek want?” is not really a question Žižek answers. Instead, this query left hanging is a puzzling riddle he now intends to preserve as such in order to encourage what he hopes will be a searching process of self-analysis in his politically minded readers. Žižek’s recent reinvention of himself as an analyst-like object of transferential cathexes stemming from the political fantasies of others not only ingeniously makes a virtue out of the necessity of his lack of control over both the dissemination of his texts (as Derrida might say) as well as the role imputed to him by his audience—this reinvention might also be the response to an impasse internal to the Žižekian theoretical edifice itself. To be more precise, perhaps it’s not just his readers who are left asking the question of what Žižek desires politically; maybe this desire is enigmatic for Žižek himself. A survey of his numerous forays into the realm of politics (an endeavor not to be undertaken here) reveals, through the apparent absence of a systematic unity to these scattered interventions (especially when contrasted with the elegant coherence of his ontology and accompanying account of subjectivity), ample evidence in favor of this hypothesis that Žižek too is plagued by the riddle of what he wants at the political level. This is not wrongly to say that he...

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