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Zizek alternative module

Our Alternative is To Reject the Idea Implicit in the Affirmative that One Must

Identify Within the Boundaries of the System, Instead We Make the Impossible

Choice of the Act, Which Recognizes the Lack Inherent In the False Choice of

Our Subjectivity and Re-organizes the Co-ordinates of the WorldOnly this

Impossibility Can Deal With The Fact that Within The Current Structure

Revolution Will Never Occur

Slavoj Zizek, Philosopher, Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please! Cont ingency,

Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, 2000

Precisely because of this internality of the Real to the Symbolic, it is

possible to touch the Real through the Symbolic - that is the whole

point of Lacan's notion of psychoanalytic treatment; this is what the

Lacanian notion of' the psychoanalytic act is about - the act as a

gesture which by definition touches the dimension of some

impossible Real. This notion of the act must be conceived of against

the background of the distinction between the mere endeavour to

solve a variety of partial problems' within a given field and the more

radical gesture ofsubvert- ing the very structuring principle of this

field. An act does not simply occur within the given horizon of what

appears to be `possible' - it redefines the very contours of what is

possible (an act accomplishes what, within the given symbolic

universe, appears to he impossible', yet it changes its conditions so

that it creates retroactively the conditions of its own possibility.:. So

when we are reproached by an opponent for doing something

unacceptable. an act occurs when we no longer defend ourselves by

accepting the underlying premiss that we hitherto shared with the

opponent; in contrast, we fully accept the reproach, changing the

very terrain that made it unacceptable - an act occurs when our

answer to the reproach is `Yes, that it is precisely what I am doingl' infilm, a modest, not quite appropriate recent example would be Kev in Kline's blurting out `I'm gay'

instead of `Yes!' during the wedding ceremony in in and Out: openly admitting the truth that he is gay,

and thus surprising not only us, the spectators, but even himself.51 In a series of recent (commercial)

films, we find the same surprising radical ges ture. In Speed, when the hero (Keanu

Reeves) is confronting the terrorist black- mailer partner who holds

his partner at gunpoint, he shoots not the blackmailer , but his own

partner in the leg - this apparently senseless act thomentarily shocks

the blackmailei; who lets go of the hostage and runs away...In

Ransom, when the media tycoon (Mel Gibson) goes on television to

answer the kidnappers request for two million dollars as a ransom for

ins son, he surprises everyone by saying that he will oiler two million

dollars to anyone who will give him any information about the

kidnappers, and announces that he will pursue them to the end, with

all his resourccs, if they do not release his son immediately This

radical ges- ture stuns not only the kidnappers - immediately after

accomplishing it, Gibson himself almost breaks down, aware of the

risk he is courting~ And finally, the supreme case: when, in the

flashback scene from The Usual Suspects, the mysterious Keyser Soeze

(Kevin Stacey) returns home and finds his wife and small daughter

held at gunpoint by the members of a rival mob, he resorts to the

radical gesture of shooting his wife and daughter themselves dead -

this act enables him mercilessly to pursue members of the rival gang,

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their families, parents, friends, killing them What these three gestures

have in common is that, in a situation of the forced choice, the subject

makes the `crazy', impossible choice of, in a way striking at himself at

what is most precious to himself. This act, far from amounting to a

case of impotent aggressivity turned on oneself, rather changes the

co-ordinates of the situation in which the subject finds himself: by

cutting himself loose from the precious object through whose

possession the enemy kept him in check, the subject gains the spaceof free action. Is not such a radical gesture of `striking at oneself'

constitutive of subjectivity as such? Did not Lacan himself accornplish a similar act of`shooting at himself' when, in 1979, he dissolved the Ecole freudien de Paris, his agalma, his own

organization, the very space of his collective life? Yet he was well aware that only such a `self-destructive'

act could clear the terrain for a new beginning

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The Alternative SolvesWhile Your Indictments of the Indeterminate WorldAfter the Act Assume a Causal Series, The True Act is Its Own Immediate

Realization, Not a Process Which Reaches a Distant GoalOnly Radical

Criticism, Which Cares Not For Success By the Standards of the System, Can

Reach Outside the Boundaries it Already Accommodates

Slavoj iek, Critical Inquiry, Winter 2002(http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-a-plea-for-leninist-intolerance.html)

Today we can already discern the signs of a kind of general unease.

Recall the series of events usually listed under the name of Seattle.

The ten-year honeymoon of triumphant global capitalism is over; the

longoverdue seven-year itch is here-witness the panicked reactions of

big media, which from Time magazine to CNN suddenly started to

warn about the Marxists manipulating the crowd of "honest"

protesters. The problem is now the strictly Leninist one: how to

actualize the media's accusations, how to invent the organizational

structure that will confer on this unrest the form of a universal

political demand. Otherwise the momenturn will be lost, and what will

remain is a marginal disturbance, perhaps organized as a new

Greenpeace, endowed with a certain efficiency but also strictly limited

goals, marketing strategy, and so forth. In other words, the key

Leninist lesson today is that politics without the organizational form of

the party is politics without politics, so the answer to those who want

just the (quite adequately named) new social movements is the same

as the answer of the Jacobins to the Girondin compromisers: "You

want revolution without a revolution!" Today's challenge is that there

are two ways open for sociopolitical engagement: either play the

game of the system, engage in the long march through the

institutions, or get active in new social movements, from feminism to

ecology to antiracism. And, again, the limit of these movements is that

they are not political in the sense of the universal singular: they are

one-issue movements that lack the dimension of universality; that is,

they do not relate to the social totality.

Here, Lenin's reproach to liberals is crucial. They only exploit the

working classes' discontent to strengthen their position vis-a-vis the

conservatives instead of identifying with it to the end.16 Is this also

not the case with today's left liberals? They like to evoke racism,

ecology, workers' grievances, and so on to score points over the

conservatives without endangering the system. Recall how, at Seattle,

Bill Clinton himself deftly referred to the protesters on the streets

outside, reminding the gathered leaders inside the guarded palaces

that they should listen to the message of the demonstrators (a

message that, of course, Clinton interpreted, depriving it of the

subversive sting attributed to the dangerous extremists introducing

chaos and violence into the majority of peaceful protesters). It's the

same with all new social movements, up to the Zapatistas in Chiapas:

systemic politics is always ready to listen to their demands, thus

depriving them of their proper political sting. The system is by

definition ecumenic, open, tolerant, ready to listen to all; even if one

insists on one's demands, they are deprived of their universal political

sting by the very form of negotiation. The Leninist Utopia What,

then, is the criterion of the political act? Success as such clearly

doesn't count, even if we define it in Merleau-Ponty's dialectical way

(as the wager that the future will retroactively redeem our present

horrible acts); neither do any abstract-universal ethical norms." The

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-a-plea-for-leninist-intolerance.htmlhttp://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-a-plea-for-leninist-intolerance.htmlhttp://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-a-plea-for-leninist-intolerance.htmlhttp://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-a-plea-for-leninist-intolerance.htmlhttp://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-a-plea-for-leninist-intolerance.htmlhttp://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-a-plea-for-leninist-intolerance.html

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only criteria is the absolutely inherent one: that of the enacted utopia.

In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither

simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise

that justifies present violence. It is rather as if, in a unique suspension

of temporality, in the short circuit between the present and the

future, we are-as if by Grace-for a brief time allowed to act as if the

utopian future were (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just

there to be grabbed. Revolution is not experienced as a presenthardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the

future generations but as the present hardship over which this future

happiness and freedom already cast their shadow-in it, we already are

free while fighting for freedom, we already are happy while fighting

for happiness, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is

not a Merleau-Pontyan wager, an act suspended in the futur

anterieur, to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome

of the present acts; it is as it were its own ontological proof, an

immediate index of its own truth.