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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.html7/30/2019 Zizek Alternative
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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.
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