Work Of Slavoj Research Articles

From Communist Ideology to the Idea of Communism

This article approaches a potential tension in the work of Slavoj Žižek between his critique of communist ideology and his endorsement of the communist idea. The aim is to show how this endorsement, in effect, emerged out of Žižek’s sustained engagement with communist ideology. The article captures this transformation by focusing on his understanding of the notion of the idea and the ways in which ideology can be transgressed. The conclusion drawn is that in moving from a Kantian to a Hegelian notion of the idea, Žižek also leaves behind his initial Beckettian Leninism in favor of an understanding of revolution that no longer depends on the heroic act of a subject, but on the immanent logic of the communist idea.

Less than net zero: Redirecting capitalist fantasies through fetishistic reversal

Inspired by the work of Slavoj Žižek, critical marketing theorists have identified how ideological fantasies support the capitalist status quo by operating as unconscious fetishes that are difficult to dispel. While these studies suggest that fetishisation is a formidable challenge to critical thought and activism, this think piece considers how fetishistic reversal may provide a means to redirect the ideological fantasies of capitalism towards more critical ends. This line of thinking is pieced together by drawing Žižekean theories alongside the topical example of Net Zero. It is argued that Net Zero is not a politically-neutral target but rather an ideological fantasy that can be interrogated for fetishistic disavowals, inversions and ticklishness. However, it is added that renouncing Net Zero as an ideological fantasy is likely to be unproductive, or even counter-productive. Instead, critical marketing scholars should proceed by reversing fetishistic effects. Developing Žižek’s notion of Less Than Nothing, it is suggested that Net Zero should be transposed with the more radical target of Less Than Net Zero. This piece concludes by thinking about the application of fetishistic reversal to other socioecological issues in order to push critical marketing theory further towards a more optimistic horizon.

Unconscious Gods and the Return of Belief in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence

This article considers the role of belief in Max Gladstone’s Hugo-nominated Craft Sequence, a six-volume fantasy series that imagines a world in which humanity’s gods have either expired or been resurrected in a zombie-like state so that their divine power can be siphoned and used to fuel the social, economic, and technological superstructure of everyday modern life. The article draws on the work of Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Lacan, and Alain Badiou to show how Gladstone portrays the return of belief as an effective vehicle for social change that counters a model of atheism in which the individual’s supposed liberation from God entails the repression of its continued commitment to what Lacan calls the big “Other,” which is to say, the symbolic order itself.

Sport and the ‘national Thing’: exploring sport’s emotive significance

This article critically details how the work of Slavoj Žižek theoretically elaborates on the links between nationalism and sport. Notably, it highlights how key terms, drawn from Žižek’s work on fantasy, ideology and the Real (itself grounded in the work of Jacques Lacan), can be used to explore the relationship between sport, nationalism and enjoyment (jouissance). In outlining this approach, specific attention is given to Žižek’s account of the ‘national Thing’. Accordingly, by considering the various ways in which sport organizes, materializes and structures our enjoyment, the emotive significance of sport during national sporting occasions is both introduced and applied. Moreover, it is argued that such an approach offers a unique and valuable insight into the relationship between sport and nationalism, as well as an array of social and political antagonisms.

Indonesia and the “conflictual consensus”: a discursive perspective on Indonesian democracy

ABSTRACTIn this essay we propose an alternative approach to assessing the state of democracy in Indonesia. We focus not on institutional indicators (as is usually the case) but on manifestations of political discourses in the public sphere. In applying post-Marxist political theory through the work of Slavoj Žižek and Chantal Mouffe, we argue that democracy’s main defining feature is that it allows antagonistic discourses about alternative policies to coexist, yet still manages to coalesce around a minimal consensus on how these discursive conflicts are to be dealt with in a fair way. Applying this approach to democracy analysis to Indonesia, we suggest that the major obstacles to democratic practice do not emerge from institutional problems, but from an overbearing political discourse that imposes broad consensus and harmony on most political issues. Political discourse in Indonesia is generally structured around “Islam” and “the people.” These themes provide a basis for a political consensus that conceals economic and social contradictions and reveals considerable depoliticization in Indonesian democratic practice.

The Subversion of the Male Gaze and 9/11 as the Anamorphic Spot in David Greig’s Outlying Islands

On a purely narrative level, Scottish playwright David Greig’s Outlying Islands (2002) deals with two ornithologists who have set sail to a small island in the North Atlantic to watch a rare bird species. What they do instead of watching birds is to “watch each other.” Hence, the play explores the mutual processes of looking and being looked at. By tracing the identification processes of characters and audience alike, this article analyses how Greig uses the motif of film to comment on the play and the engagement of its audiences. It engages in a comparative reading of Outlying Islands and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, showing that Greig deploys Hitchcock’s motif in reverse. Drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek, it argues that the playwright presents the island as a construction – the imagining of which the audience is involved in – that subliminally comments on the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Reconciliation Through Narrative: Toward a Theology of Spiritual Care in Public Health Care

In the West, chaplains are often employed by state mandated and state funded health care institutions. Because such western institutions are predicated upon the principles of secular liberalism, understanding the work of chaplains within such contexts is an urgent intellectual need. This paper seeks to describe such work through a Christian theological lens, arguing chaplaincy work can counter balance frequent experiences of alienation when people encounter health care systems as patients. Drawing upon the work of Slavoj Žižek, Rowan Williams, and Mieke Bal, this paper describes spiritual care as being a specific kind of narrative practice that can prompt the work of reconciliation in chaplaincy clients themselves, in the clients’ lived experience, and in their experience of health care systems.

Constantly online and the fantasy of ‘work–life balance’: Reinterpreting work-connectivity as cynical practice and fetishism

ABSTRACTSmartphones and other mobile communication devices are promoted with promises of enhancing professional competence and individual freedom in working life, and in work–life balance. However, an emerging stream of research demonstrates that the adoption of such technologies is accompanied by increasing stress, collective control and work intensification. This article provides a discussion of recent research on the effects of smartphone usage in contemporary organizational life. Generally, this research presents a contradiction between, on the one hand, the discourse on technologies as a means to enhance individual autonomy and competence and, on the other hand, the de facto incorporation of technology users in networks of control and an unhealthy work culture of permanent connectivity. Finding inspiration in the work of Slavoj Žižek and his development of psychoanalytical concepts, this article offers an alternative approach to this issue. It does so by reconsidering how to understand employee subjectivity and, specifically, why employees voluntarily embrace company-sponsored smartphones although they are fully aware of the damage that this technology creates in their personal lives.

Of Symbolic Mortification and ‘Undead Life’: Slavoj Žižek on the Death Drive

The work of Slavoj Žižek contains arguably the most conceptually ambitious re-articulation of the Lacanian notion of the death drive. This paper offers an expository thread joining many of the fragmentary depictions of the death drive in Žižek's work. I begin by tracing the most counter-intuitive aspects of Žižek's re-articulations of the concept. Opposing the notions of death drive as biological instinct, cosmic principle, Nirvana-like release, and self-annihilating impulse, Žižek highlights instead the Lacanian notions of repetition automatism, excess negativity, ‘undead’ eternal life, and symbolic mortification. Žižek provides useful applications of a series of related Lacanian ideas – the lamella, the zone between two deaths, and the ethical dimension of the death drive – and extends these via a set of philosophical conceptualizations (self-relating negativity, negative inherence, death drive as non-historicizable). The last section of the paper explores how the notion of self-relating negativity allows Žižek to consolidate the foregoing Lacanian concepts and to understand the death drive as simultaneously reflexive, a-subjective and ‘meta-causative’.

The Grimace of Ambiguity: Unambiguity and the Critics

This article considers the notion of ambiguity and its treatment by critics and theorists from a perspective informed by the work of Slavoj Žižek, according to which ambiguity should not be conceived as an exceptional ‘grimace’ of language’s deeper, more genuine ‘Unambiguity’; rather, the pervasive fantasy of Unambiguity should be thought of as the grimace of ambiguity – a convenient invention whose function is to mask the Void of a generalised indeterminacy feared by literary critics. It examines not only ambiguity’s ideological functions in literature, but ideology’s role in the critical conceptualisation of ambiguity. Eleanor Cook’s article, ‘Ambiguity and the Poets’, is taken to exemplify the much-maligned concept’s strangely persistent usefulness for an enriched understanding of poetry, but also the contradictoriness of the positions adopted by liberal interpreters. Revisiting poems by Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens discussed by Cook, and adding a reading of Tess Gallagher’s ‘Instructions to the Double’, the article demonstrates 1) the social character of ambiguity in those texts, and 2) how the moral hesitation about linguistic instability evident in the language of Cook’s article – ambiguity’s ‘mixed reputation’ – highlights anxieties around sexual and economic power within critical discourse. Critics’ implicit and ever-frustrated desire for ‘Unambiguity’ (an ideal of stable semantics and a correspondingly well-ordered society) is symptomatic of the contradictions of their historical moment and the bourgeois assumptions of ‘traditional’ literary criticism. It is therefore proposed, in conclusion, that unblinking attention to the unfinished, ambiguous nature of social and linguistic reality is a more effective path to political change, and indeed to the effective appreciation of poetry, than unspoken appeals to this fantasy of unachievable Unambiguity.

In the Beginning … Was the Act! Money, Analysis, Party

Acknowledging commodity fetishism as the form of ideology in capitalist economies rather than simply one form of ideology among many can be used to clarify the structural link between psychoanalysis, Marxism, and party politics as seen in the work of Slavoj Žižek. Relying as he does on the articulation of commodity fetishism and enjoyment, Žižek is able to suggest (1) that the form of psychoanalysis is historically linked to capitalist money; (2) that there is no capitalist economy without the fantasy of value, which is embodied in money; and (3) that the “perversion without perversion” that is the discourse of the analyst thereby shares a social form with the Leninist party. Conceiving of Žižek's take on the party in this way (as against other readings) serves to place perversion and drive at the center of the discussion.

The Mystical and the Material: Slavoj Žižek and the French Reception of Mysticism

This paper will argue that the work of Slavoj Žižek can be fruitfully understood as a response to mystical theology as it has been received in two strands of 20th century French thought—psychoanalysis and phenomenology—and that Žižek's work in turn offers intriguing possibilities for the re-figuring of mystical theology by feminist philosophy of religion. Twentieth century French psychoanalysis is dominated by the work of Jacques Lacan and by his students Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. All three of these figures engage in significant ways with mystical theology—particularly with the works and figures of female mystics—as a crucial resource for theorising gender and subjectivity. A second strand of the 20th century French reception of mystical theology is the phenomenological tradition, specifically the work of Jacques Derrida. This paper will argue that, drawing on and challenging both of these elements of recent French engagement with mystical theology, Žižek's work offers a materialist ontology which seeks to locate transcendence within immanence and materiality, offering to feminist philosophy of religion the resources for re-thinking the relationship of the mystical to the material.

Tilottama Rajan Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, WollstonecraftRomantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft. Tilottama Rajan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Pp. xxvii+282.

<i>Tilottama Rajan</i> Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft<i>Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft</i>. Tilottama Rajan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Pp. xxvii+282.

“When you have Shakespeare, why do you need movies?”: Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins and an anti-Hamletian Hamlet

Neil Jordan has suggested that “when you have Shakespeare, why do you need movies?” This article seeks to highlight the analogies between some key themes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Jordan’s Michael Collins in order to suggest how Jordan’s question is, perhaps, ironic. Importantly, recourse to Hamlet is shown to supply an alternative method for the analysis of Jordan’s film and, in turn, demonstrate how literature per se can be deployed as a critical tool. An important aspect of this discussion includes a psychoanalytical framework that draws upon the work of Slavoj Žižek and a concept termed “extimacy”.

Corporate social responsibility á la the liberal communist

This article explores the ‘liberal communist’, a conceptual and satirical figure originally elaborated in the work of Slavoj Žižek (2008). The liberal communist claims (1) that there is no opposition between capitalism and the social good; (2) that all problems are of a practical nature, and hence best solved by corporate engagement and (3) that hierarchies, authority and centralized bureaucracies should be replaced by dynamic structures, a nomadic lifestyle and a flexible spirit. This analysis of the liberal communist has at least two implications for research on CSR. First, it examines the ideological role of CSR by moving beyond a propaganda view, instead offering an ideological reading that focuses on the ways in which CSR seeks to obliterate any existing contradictions between ‘philanthropic actions’ on the one hand and ‘profit-seeking business activities’ on the other hand. Second, it demonstrates how critique is not necessarily what corporations seek to avoid, but something that they actively engage in.

Bodies Do Matter: The Peculiar Persistence of Neoliberalism in Environmental Governance

Substantial academic attention has recently highlighted the increasing and contradictory tendency to promote neoliberal market-based mechanisms such as “ethical” consumption as the solution to environmental problems exacerbated by processes of capitalist accumulation themselves. To date, the majority of this research has drawn on Marxist or Foucaultian frames, and thus has paid little attention to the embodied psychodynamic processes supporting this paradoxical dynamic. This article thus draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis, primarily through the work of Slavoj Žižek, to analyze the role of fantasy and desire in sustaining faith in the potential of market-based environmental-ism. In the process, it seeks to synthesize Marxian, Foucaultian, and Lacanian perspectives in pursuit of a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding how contemporary environmental governance functions. It does so by treating the body as a crucial nexus of convergence among these different perspectives. The analysis is illustrated through discussion of how the practice of ecotourism, a quintessential market-based conservation strategy, is sustained through its promise to provide a transcendent experience of nature-culture unity yet instead offers, for the most part, a mere “pseudocatharsis” that paradoxically intensifies the very desire that it promises to satisfy and thereby supports the twin neoliberal fantasies of consumption without consequence and accumulation without end, in terms of which the body itself becomes a prime site of capitalization.

Perversity and Post-Marxian Thought in Buñuel's Late Films

This article examines certain motifs from Luis Bunuel's late trilogy-- The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoisie ( Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie, 1972), The Phantom of Liberty ( Le Fantome de la Liberte, 1974), and That Obscure Object of Desire ( Cet Obscur Objet du Desir , 1977)--in order to show how they anticipate key trends in contemporary post-Marxian philosophy. In doing so, it draws upon the work of Slavoj Žižek, whose Lacanian revision of Hegel has provided a model of ideology critique that preserves the structure of dialectical thought while avoiding the impulse to project a closed vision of subjectivity and historical change. In particular, such a model offers a means of reconsidering Bunuel’s concern with the perverse . Rather than having a singular ideological content (i.e., the repressed desire for freedom within consciousness), the perverse in Bunuel’s films serves as a more volatile index of ideological conflict: freedom becomes perverse from the perspective of law, and law becomes perverse from the perspective of freedom. To recognize these dialectical reversals not only offers a means of appreciating Bunuel’s sense of humor, but also sheds light on how the late films situate bourgeois and revolutionary impulses in a much more complex, interdependent, and dynamic relationship with one another.

Coming to Terms with the Antagonism between Rhetorical Reflection and Political Agency

Abstract What does it mean to say rhetoric scholarship should be relevant to democratic practice? A prevailing answer to this question insists that rhetoric scholars are participants in the democratic contest for power just like all other citizens, no more and no less. Drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek, the argument of this essay is that reducing scholarship to a mode of political agency not only produces an increasingly uninhabitable academic identity but also draws our attention away from producing results of rhetorical inquiry designed to be useful to citizens in democracy. Clinging to the idea that academic practice is a mode of political action produces a fantastic blindness to the antagonism between scholarly reflection and political agency that structures academic purpose. While empirical barriers to the production of rhetorical resources suitable for democratic appropriation undoubtedly exist, ignoring the self-frustrating character of academic desire is no less of an impediment to the production of democratically consequential rhetoric scholarship.

On the Violence of Systemic Violence

This paper questions the extension of the common notion of violence, i.e., “subjective violence,” involving the intentional use of force to inflict injury or damage, towards social injustice as “systemic violence.” Systemic violence is altogether unlike subjective violence and the work of Slavoj Žižek illustrates that conceptual obfuscation in this regard may lead to an overly broad and facile justification of revolutionary violence as counter-violence to systemic violence, appealing to the ethics of self-defense. I argue that revolutionary violence is only justified to counter subjective violence inflicted or organized by the state. Thus I reject in conclusion Žižek’s further defense of revolutionary violence as retributive and as “shock therapy” necessary to disrupt the old society.

The “False Choice” of Liberal Democracy: Participatory Assessment in the International Relations Classroom

This article discusses practical forms of participatory assessment in the international relations (IR) classroom to examine the relationship between teaching and practicing democracy. These techniques include a series of exercises that allow students to explore the links between IR course content and classroom pedagogy. Drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek, this study examines the ways in which participatory teaching methods challenge students to think about freedom and participation in the classroom and in general. Creating a responsive and participatory classroom generates important questions about the nature of foreign policy creation and the practical and ideological limits on democracy in IR.