Lacan, Deleuze and world politics: rethinking the ontology of the political subject

Abstract

In this fascinating study, Andreja Zevnik challenges dominant modes of global politics and their theorization. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the book is Zevnik's use of the Guantánamo Bay detention centre as a prism through which she channels the light of Lacan and Deleuze, thereby illuminating the practices of sovereign power and resistance in a period in which what constitutes law at the domestic and international levels is contested. The focus of the book is on law as ‘an ordering principle that governs all forms of social exchange in the world’, with natural and positive law being in turn underpinned by psychoanalytic law (p. 23). Zevnik's unpicking of the edifice of law addresses the fictiveness of its foundations (p. 33). The key distinction Zevnik draws is between Oedipal law (based on Freud's treatment of the origins of the law in a mythic act of parricide and subsequent reinscription of the paternal law among the community of men who murdered the tyrant father), and sinthome law, which offers an alternative understanding of law as a knot conjoining the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, without recourse to Oedipal logic. Sinthome law allows law to be expressed in non-essentialist terms and crucially as a negotiation of rights as opposed to a series of paternal commandments. Rendering Oedipal law in fictive terms allows the exposure of the ‘very narrow expression of being-ness’ that it embodies and enables the proliferation of legal identities and processes beyond sovereign power and its associated paternalistic governmentality. Where the Oedipal law constrains and canalizes desire, sinthome law bonds authority and jouissance (a Lacanian concept, which in Zevnik's reading is synonymous with enjoyment and/or the affirmation of desire, broadly conceived), producing new forms of representation. The Lacanian idea of ‘not-all’ (a category of unknown pleasure/possibility) is opposed to the universalist and dominating tendencies of Oedipal law. Where Oedipal law orders and commands, ‘sinthomal law enables individuals to … escape rigid social structures’ (p. 46), thereby helping to create ‘a different ontology of thinking and making politics’ (p. 48). Oedipal law's weakness lies in its incapacity to deal with what lies outside its domain. Deleuze's significance for Zevnik's project is his identification of the category of the ‘thought of the outside’ that transgresses the limits of Oedipal law. Sinthomal law is typical of ‘the thought of the outside’ in that ‘a different political subject emerges’ but it is ‘an unstable form, more a break with the symbolic order than an institution of another different order’ (p. 68) in which the ‘subject is no longer at the centre of philosophical investigation. That place is not left empty or filled by practices, appearances and different chaotic movements and flows’ (p. 69).