Incontinence of the Void – Economico–Philosophical Spandrels

374 Pages·2017·1.77 MB·English

by  Slavoj Žižek

Short Circuits
Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupančič, and Slavoj Žižek, editors
The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, by Slavoj
Žižek
The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, by Alenka
Zupančič
Is Oedipus Online? Siting Freud after Freud, by Jerry Aline Flieger
Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK, by Alexei Monroe
The Parallax View, by Slavoj Žižek
A Voice and Nothing More, by Mladen Dolar
Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan, by
Lorenzo Chiesa
The Odd One In: On Comedy, by Alenka Zupančič
The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, by Slavoj Žižek and
John Milbank, edited by Creston Davis
Interface Fantasy: A Lacanian Cyborg Ontology, by André Nusselder
Lacan at the Scene, by Henry Bond
Laughter: Notes on a Passion, by Anca Parvulescu
All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity, by Andrew Cutrofello
The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis, by Aaron
Schuster
The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan, by Lorenzo Chiesa
What Is Sex?, by Alenka Zupančič
Liquidation World: On the Art of Living Absently, by Alexi Kukuljevic
Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels, by Slavoj
Žižek
Incontinence of the Void
Economico-Philosophical Spandrels
Slavoj Žižek

The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Table of Contents
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Series Foreword
Introduction: The Use of Useless Spandrels
Part I SOS: Sexuality, Ontology, Subjectivity
Chapter 1 The Barred One
Chapter 2 Antinomies of Pure Sexuation
Chapter 3 Toward a Unified Theory of Four Discourses and
Sexual Difference
Chapter 4 Transreal, Transhuman, Transgender
Part II The Belated Actuality of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy
Chapter 5 The Varieties of Surplus
Chapter 6 In der Tat: The Actuality of Fantasy
Chapter 7 Capitalist Discourses
Chapter 8 The Politics of Alienation and Separation
Chapter 9 Appendix: Death, Life, and Jealousy in Communism
Index
Series Foreword
A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network—
faulty, of course, from the standpoint of the network’s smooth
functioning. Is not the shock of short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best
metaphors for a critical reading? Is not one of the most effective critical
procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major
classic (text, author, notion), and read it in a short-circuiting way,
through the lens of a “minor” author, text, or conceptual apparatus
(“minor” should be understood here in Deleuze’s sense: not “of lesser
quality,” but marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology, or
dealing with a “lower,” less dignified topic)? If the minor reference is well
chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter
and undermine our common perceptions. This is what Marx, among
others, did with philosophy and religion (short-circuiting philosophical
speculation through the lens of political economy, that is to say, economic
speculation); this is what Freud and Nietzsche did with morality (short-
circuiting the highest ethical notions through the lens of the unconscious
libid.inal economy). What such a reading achieves is not a simple
“desublimation,” a reduction of the higher intellectual content to its lower
economic or libid.inal cause; the aim of such an approach is, rather, the
inherent decentering of the interpreted text, which brings to light its
“unthought,” its disavowed presuppositions and consequences.
And this is what “Short Circuits” wants to do, again and again. The
underlying premise of the series is that Lacanian psychoanalysis is a
privileged instrument of such an approach, whose purpose is to
illuminate a standard text or ideological formation, making it readable in
a totally new way—the long history of Lacanian interventions in
philosophy, religion, the arts (from the visual arts to the cinema, music,
and literature), ideology, and politics justifies this premise. This, then, is
not a new series of books on psychoanalysis, but a series of “connections
in the Freudian field”—of short Lacanian interventions in art, philosophy,
theology, and ideology.
“Short Circuits” intends to revive a practice of reading which confronts
a classic text, author, or notion with its own hidden presuppositions, and
thus reveals its disavowed truth. The basic criterion for the texts that will
be published is that they effectuate such a theoretical short circuit. After
reading a book in this series, the reader should not simply have learned
something new: the point is, rather, to make him or her aware of another
—disturbing—side of something he or she knew all the time.

Slavoj Žižek
Introduction: The Use of Useless Spandrels
Incontinent the void. The zenith. Evening again. When not night it will
be evening. Death again of deathless day. On one hand embers. On the
other ashes. Day without end won and lost. Unseen.
Samuel Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said
The term “spandrels” originated in architecture (where it designated the
space between a curved figure and a rectangular rectilinear surround)
and was then appropriated by evolutionary biology, where it stands for
features of an organism arising as byproducts, rather than adaptations,
that have no clear benefit for the organism’s fitness and survival;
however, precisely as such, they can be “ex-apted” and acquire a new
unexpected role crucial to the organism’s functioning. For Gould and
Lewontin, many functions of the human brain, especially language,
emerged as spandrels.1 Reflections in this book operate in the same way:
they fill in the empty spaces that emerge in the interstices between
philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the critique of political economy. It
seems that today the most interesting theoretical interventions emerge in
such interstices, without clearly and fully belonging to any particular
field.
This “spandrelization” of the content in no way implies a confused,
nonsystematic structure. The book’s three parts follow the triad of UPS:
the universal dimension of philosophy, the particular dimension of sexual
difference, the singular dimension of the critique of political economy.
The passage from one dimension to another is strictly immanent: the
ontological Void of the barred One is accessible only through the
impasses of sexuation, and the ongoing prospect of the abolition of
sexuality, i.e., of the change in “human nature” itself, opened up by the
technoscientific progress of global capitalism, compels us to shift the
focus to the critique of political economy. Each of the two parts of the
book deals with these passages: Part I (“SOS: Sexuality, Ontology,
Subjectivity”) with the passage from ontology to sexuation; Part II (“The
Belated Actuality of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy”) with the
passage from sexuation to the critique of political economy.
In the dimension of philosophy, (1) the limit of ontology is first
approached through the notion of an excessive element, an element
structurally out of place that gives body to radical negativity; (2) this
negativity inscribes itself into the order of being as the antagonism of
sexual difference, which is why the human subject is constitutively
sexualized; (3) a “unified theory” of the four discourses and the formulas
of sexuation is outlined; (4) the explosive combination of biogenetics and
digitization clearly discernible in today’s global capitalism opens up the
prospect of a nonsexual reproduction of life, and thus poses a threat to
the very existence of subjectivity.
In the dimension of the critique of political economy, (1) the excess
detrimental to every ontology assumes the form of surplus-value, the key
Marxian notion that is elaborated in its homology with three other
notions of excess: Lacan’s surplus-enjoyment, scientific surplus-
knowledge, and political surplus-power; (2) this brings us to a Lacanian
reading of the “labor theory of value” and of the self-propelling
circulation of capital, and (3) to the question of how the capitalist
discourse (social link) fits into Lacan’s matrix of four discourses (Master,
University, Hysteria, Analyst). (4) Although, in the Lacanian perspective,
alienation is irreducible, constitutive of human subjectivity, this does not
mean that alienation is the ultimate horizon of political activity: Lacan
posits separation as a move that supplements and overturns alienation,
so the question raised is that of a politics of separation.
The second part concludes with an appendix which, rejecting the
utopian notion of Communist society as one in which tensions such as
resentment disappear, deals with the obscure topic of the libidinal
paradoxes that would persist in an imagined future Communist society.
Although this last topic may appear irrelevant in view of the state of
today’s Left, it casts its shadow on today’s struggles.
*
This book is a weird one. It repeats the paradox of Spinoza’s Ethics: while
it focuses on “eternal” topics (the basic structure of being, etc.), it gets
caught up in many very specific debates on contemporary issues. It
contains some passages from my earlier books, which are all included in
new contexts, and thus given a new spin.2 Especially in the first part, it is
largely a dialogue with the recent work of Alenka Zupančič, for which I
have the highest appreciation. So it brings something old, something
new, something borrowed, something … red, not blue!
Notes
1. See S. J. Gould and R. C. Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco and
the Panglossian Paradigm,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of
London, ser. B, 205, no. 1161 (1979): 581–598.
2. Chapter 3 is in its entirety a slightly rewritten version of a text that first
appeared in Slavoj Žižek, ed., Cogito and the Unconscious (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1998).