The Transsexual in Badiou's SAINT PAUL

• Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul; The Foundation of Universalism. Ray Brassier trans. Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 2003.

The cover design they didn't choose.

I was surprised to come upon this here. I was searching in all my ARG-poached files for any reference to trans* and Badiou's book on Paul popped up. Go figure. In the text, Badiou is giving a snarky sort of litany of hyperbolic identitarian positions and asks who will "eulogize the cultural­ marginal-homeopathic-media-friendly transsexual?" and the collision of these varied terms is an index of the general scorn that Badiou has for what he calls identitarian or minoritarian logics. Below is reasonable chunk (I hope) of Badiou in which the reference to the transsexual appears, to help provide a sense of why the transsexual appears at all and what Badiou's point may be, and to what degree we can assume it to have any bearing on trans* persons as such. 

For those not versed in or perhaps even familiar with Badiou this might be steep reading. Keep in mind that for Badiou universalism is not a bad thing and truth and 'truth procedures' are crucial. I'm not the best expositor of this stuff because I am not sure I follow once things get articulated as set theory. Still, in one example (that I might sort of get), that of "politics" being replaced by "management" (see below), part of the point is that politics maintains antagonism as politically constitutive (a point Badiou had made in the 70s but which is independently arrived at by Laclau and Mouffe later in a formulation that is more well known) whereas management elides antagonism, presenting it as something that can administered out of existence by better management. There is a similar elision at work when the terms sexuality, technology and culture replace those of love, science and art in Badiou's analysis. & Badiou's thoughts about love and its truths are related to Lacan's (lack of sexual relationship) if by no means equivalent. (Big topic, not going there.)

Also important to Badiou's philosophy are events and truths and subjects that they create. Being super schematic about all of that…  An event is what can not be predicted based on how the situation or status quo is at any given moment (an event is then not a consequence of what there is, it is an interruption in that field). An event happens and it manifests or embodies a truth in one of the four 'conditions' [art, science, politics, love] and this truth creates subjects, in that subjects hold to the truth, live so as to sustain that truth, in the sense of remaining faithful to that truth - this is what Badiou calls fidelity to truth. To reneg on that, to lose faith in the truth found in some event is evil. (Yeah, no shit, he goes to that word! …which gives you another glimpse of what is so unusual about Badiou.) Anyway, here is the passage from Saint Paul; The Foundation of Universalism…  

The contemporary world is thus doubly hostile to truth procedures. This hostility betrays itself though nominal occlusions: where the name of a truth procedure should obtain, another, which represses it, holds sway. The name "culture" comes to obliterate that of "art." The word "technology" obliterates the word "science." The word "management" obliterates the word "politics." The word "sexuality" obliterates "love." The "culture-technology-management-sexuality" system, which has the immense merit of being homogeneous to the market, and all of whose terms designate a category of commercial presentation, constitutes the modern nominal occlusion of the "art-science-politics-Iove" system, which identifies truth procedures typologically.

Now, far from returning toward an appropriation of this typology, identitarian or minoritarian logic merely proposes a variant on its nominal occlusion by capital. It inveighs against every generic concept of art, putting the concept of culture in its place, conceived as culture of the group, as the subjective or representative glue for the group's existence, a culture that addresses only itself and remains potentially nonuniversalizable. Moreover, it does not hesitate to posit that this culture's constitutive elements are only fully comprehensible on the condition that one belong to the subset in question. Whence catastrophic pronouncements of the sort: only a homosexual can "understand" what a homosexual is, only an Arab can understand what an Arab is, and so forth. If, as we believe, only truths (thought) allow man to be distinguished from the human animal that underlies him, it is no exaggeration to say that such minoritarian pronouncements are genuinely barbaric. In the case of science, cultural­ism promotes the technical particularity of subsets to the equivalent of scientific thought, so that antibiotics, Shamanism, the laying on of hands, or emollient herbal teas all become of equal worth. In the case of politics, the consideration of identitarian traits provides the basis for determination, be it the state's or the protestor's, and finally it is a matter of stipulating, through law or brute force, an authoritarian management of // these traits (national, religious, sexual, and so on) considered as dominant political operators. Lastly, in the case of love, there will be the complementary demands, either for the genetic right to have such and such a form of specialized sexual behavior recognized as a minoritarian identity; or for the return, pure and simple, to archaic, culturally established conceptions, such as that of strict conjugality, the confinement of women, and so forth. It is perfectly possible to combine the two, as becomes ap­parent when homosexual protest concerns the right to be reincluded in the grand traditionalism of marriage and the family, or to take responsibility for the defrocking of a priest with the Pope's blessing.

The two components of the articulated whole (abstract homogene­ity of capital and identitarian protest) are in a relation of reciprocal maintenance and mirroring. Who will maintain the self-evident superiority of the competent-cultivated-sexually liberated manager? But who will de­fend the corrupt-religious-polygamist terrorist? Or eulogize the cultural­ marginal-homeopathic-media-friendly transsexual? Each figure gains its rotating legitimacy from the other's discredit. Yet at the same time, each draws on the resources of the other, since the transformation of the most typical, most recent communitarian identities into advertising selling points and salable images has for its counterpart the ever more refined competence that the most insular or most violent groups display when it comes to speculating on the financial markets or maintaining a large-scale arms commerce.

Breaking with all this (neither monetary homogeneity nor identitarian protest; neither the abstract universality of capital nor the particularity of interests proper to a subset), our question can be clearly formulated: What are the conditions for a universal singularity?

(Badiou, Saint Paul, 12-13)

These days, I restrict myself
to lacy underthings - Alain Badiou

I feel a certain use value in the critique of the "culture-technology-management-sexuality" system launched from the POV of "art-science-politics-Iove" but I am unsure precisely where Badiou stands on some of these. What I guess I am responsive to is in part to the aesthetics of the critique itself, the way that, by ref. to an event the universality of truth creates subjects to that truth (in one of those four areas, art - science, love, politics) a subjection that requires fidelity. So, while I respond to that critique, it also makes me a bit nervous in that "Honor" and "Duty" and all manner of other suspect master signifiers seem to lurk in the wings, waiting for the old narratives to take off running with this purportedly new rationale. After all, I respond to tear-jerkers just like the next moron, but so what?

Another point of ambivalence for me concerns Badiou's thoughts on love. Apparently there is a new book on love out now by Badiou (In Praise of Love), though I've not seen it or read anything about it so far. Again to shoot from the hip; Badiou's language seems to shut things down to the terms of the extant sex/gender regime in what I have read, and he does not seem to be thinking about those who do not fit within it - and yet, the arguments that he makes about love as an event that creates of two people - the lovers - subjects of this shared event, does not seem to be predicated upon sexuality as such and thus, perhaps not to be limited to any M/F predictability. So these various terms like fidelity and truth, and the narrative that is implied in his discussion chimes uncomfortably close to the find your soulmate and never let go dicta that underpins so much of the popular ideology of love. But what if I think sexuality is important too? Can there be no truth of sexuality? Seemingly not for Badiou, events just don't come from there. Yet another wrinkle is added when one tries to factor in that the vast majority of the times when two people both get all gooey for one another and declare that they are in love, that this is probably not "love" as Badiou conceives it. 

Here though is a passage from Žižek's book Violence,

Alain Badiou develops the notion of “atonal” worlds - monde atone - which lack the intervention of a Master-Signifier to impose meaningful order onto the confused multiplicity of reality. // A basic feature of our postmodern world is that it tries to dispense with this agency of the ordering Master-Signifier: the complexity of the world needs to be asserted unconditionally.  Every Master-Signifier meant to impose some order on it must be deconstructed, dispersed: “the modern apology for the ‘complexity’ of the world…is really nothing but a generalized desire for atony.”  Badiou’s excellent example of such an “atonal” world is the politically correct vision of sexuality as promoted by gender studies with its obsessive rejection of binary logic: the world is a nuanced world of multiple sexual practices which tolerates no decision, no instance of the Two, no evaluation, in the strong Nietzschean sense of the term.(34-35)

I'd be curious to read Badiou on Gender Studies, not sure where that is to be found though - the quote that Žižek embeds is from the French version what in English is Logics of Worlds, so perhaps it is found there. What strikes me as a bit weird in this account of atony is that Slavoj tells us that the effort is to get rid of S1s - master signifiers - and yet he writes "the complexity of the world needs to be asserted unconditionally" which, to my mind, nominates COMPLEXITY to the status of S1 - even a more aggressive S1 in that - like the Borg perhaps - it attacks and assimilates all other rivals to itself. But might we not also observe that the assertion of complexity might be understood as pushing the Symbolic in relation to the Imaginary? A strategy that might be thought of as contributing to the loosening of Imaginary fixations. 

None of which is to say that I also do not see a point to his criticism, just that it has these contrary associations as well. I am thus asserting the complexity of the potential meanings of complexity to Žižek (who is surely still reading). 

I bet Žižek likes this notion of atony as well as it echoes his analysis of the rhetoric around wars - where they have profit incentive they are insistently make-or-break, into the breach, combattings of the "obvious" evil etc, but where no profit motive, complexity rules and it is impossible to ascribe clear blame to anyone, the conflict is intractable, time to step back, queue the sociologist-historian, etc. Thus complexity acts as an apology for inaction - there is something to that, and I largely buy his earlier analysis…  just not sure that I can sign off yet on atony as discussed here (though it further contextualizes Badiou I guess).  

Žižek's evocation of the binary is also a bit off-putting, but is anyone seriously reading him for gender politics? The question I can't answer is whether Badiou's thinking about such matters is any different or an sort of "improvement".

To the extent that Badiou's rephrased critique of the "it's a black thing, you wouldn't understand" idea is generalized to all similar identitarian claims, I am intrigued by the charge of barbarism (and how he seems to liken this to essentialism via the brute animality of humans). But, I am uncertain how Badiou gets from there to being in a position, it seems, to blame this logic for the proliferation of all manner of things which it appears he dislikes, things like "Shamanism, the laying on of hands, or emollient herbal teas" (recall that the transsexual above is 'media friendly' and 'homeopathic', the latter term surely fitting in to a sequence with emollient herbal teas for Badiou). So, given that I think that homeopathy is ridiculous (I do actually) am I to see the transexual, who is media-friendly (really?) and culturally marginal, as also being ridiculous (guilt by association?). Or to cut to the quick, is identifying oneself as a "transsexual" (or a "manager" or "straight") in and of itself enough to sustain the charge of barbarism that he formulates? 

& can we really let that "media-friendly" pass without further question? With the terms manager and terrorist (with which transsexual would seem to be substitutable) what would being media-friendly mean? Certainly the media has been thriving on terrorism and transsexuality and in a vastly different way on managers/management - but even with those terms - it seems to me that they are, what they are, in ways that exceed what the media is "friendly" towards and about. Is the media-friendly transsexual the one parodied on Jerry Springer and the one troped as psychotic killer and the one marked prostitute and etc… If so, then it seems ludicrous to name this construct a product of an indentitarian or minoritarian logic as there seems to be nothing behind this "identity" or "minority" at all but refusal, a various phrased but quite insistent "That's not me". 

& throughout, are we implicitly limiting to trans women in this discussion? I ask as the discussion of the media invisibility of trans men is not uncommon and I am having trouble thinking any similar set of delimited connotations for trans man (has there ever been a trans man prostitute story for example?). For terrorist and for manager we have a bewildering variety of associations, the difference being that for terrorist the "positive" connotations are few and far between and the term acts as a flashpoint for negative affective connotations. By contrast manager is rather neutral, or simply open to positive and negative connotations. Transsexual has by contrast has been heavily overdetermined by the few possible articulations (stereotypes might be a better term) above and few others as all (already well-critiqued by folks like Julia Serrano), with actual trans people being pushed or pulled or crammed into one or another of these few narratives.

Anyway, all of this to gesture at how fraught it is to conjoin "media-friendly" with "transexual" as Badiou does.

Maybe something can be extracted from the passages on politics to help think about this…

"In the case of politics, the consideration of identitarian traits provides the basis for determination, be it the state's or the protestor's, and finally it is a matter of stipulating, through law or brute force, an authoritarian management of these traits (national, religious, sexual, and so on) considered as dominant political operators."

…which echoes a statement that will come later

"The two components of the articulated whole (abstract homogene­ity of capital and identitarian protest) are in a relation of reciprocal maintenance and mirroring."

…this feels to me like the real teeth of this critique. That is, if we had good reason to doubt or dispute that "identitarian protest" was in a relationship of "reciprocal maintenance and mirroring" with the "abstract homogeneity of capital" then this critique would have no bite to it. But do we doubt this? Do I, I suppose I ought to ask. 

I recall a discussion a decade or more ago with this poet who was insistent that every artistic form had already been politically neutralized. I asked about graffiti. He acted like I was an idiot and told me exasperatedly that there had been graffiti shows in NYC galleries since the 80s at least, ergo, graffiti had absolutely no status outside of the commodity. The "one drop rule" just flitted through my head, but that's a pretty fraught analogy to work from, even if it works. I'm uneasy with the idea that the potential for politics to emerge from within any group thought to have an "identity," if that identity has, at any time, anywhere, been positioned as a social category to be administered by the economy in some fashion, is thereby liquidated. Certainly I am not trying to uphold barbarism in the form of an "it's a My Identity®™ sort of knowledge (so I just have it) and you are not of my identity (so you never can know it)" but I worry that assuming that because there is a socially mediated niche seemingly already present and something appears to fit there, that whoever that "something" is has become tainted through and through. Does the existence of one "uncle Tom" politically neutralize all African Americans? I don't see how that can be right. 

Another Badiou wrinkle to keep floating nearby is that for him, until one has been subjected to a truth, one is not a subject at all. Badiou is unconcerned with "identities" as generally conceived and does not extend subjecthood on the basis of membership in a group such as women or african americans, dead white guys or male lesbians, etc.

For him, it appears that the sequence of "the transformation of the most typical, most recent communitarian identities into advertising selling points and salable images" could probably be re-articulated endlessly, he gives us "the competent-cultivated-sexually liberated manager (…) the corrupt-religious-polygamist terrorist (and) the cultural­ marginal-homeopathic-media-friendly transsexual" which would seem to allow extensions, such as the vegan-hacker-genderqueer or the bipolar-leather bear-derivatives investor which would have to entail the same scorn from Badiou for making use of the same "identitarian or minoritarian logic." But at this hyperbolic and parodic level are we perhaps failing to address what it Badiou is implying here? That is, the conjoining of all of these terms and insistent S1s in someone's life is not so monovalent as this is it? Does Badiou thereby elide the differences and ambivalences in investment even in the terms most insisted upon? Does he flatten the relational aspect of these things? 

That is, there are probably some who identify strongly with being a manager - but does that have anything like the same range of effects and consequences that being identified as man or woman, straight or queer, muslim or buddhist, etc has for a person? Context is crucial here, no? I frankly find it hard to imagine a symbolic economy wherein the designation transsexual gains or loses in currency or legitimacy in a reciprocal relation with a term like manager - the two seem to operate in radically different zones of social meaning. Admittedly Badiou is probably using these somewhat synecdochally to refer to any and every such term one could produce and thus - by implication the system of differentially constructed identity terms. (This would connect to his claim that in the situation as such, all we have are bodies and languages - until a truth appears that is. See here for more).

Recall though that after his list of compound identities he writes "Each figure gains its rotating legitimacy from the other's discredit. Yet at the same time, each draws on the resources of the other, since the transformation of the most typical, most recent communitarian identities into advertising selling points and salable images has for its counterpart the ever more refined competence that the most insular or most violent groups display when it comes to speculating on the financial markets or maintaining a large-scale arms commerce."

There is a bunch of stuff in this that needs unpacking. Let's start with his recognition that there is/are something called "communitarian identities", temporally marked as "recent" and also as "typical" (though what register that term relates to I am not sure) (are "atypical communitarian identities" not subject to Badiou's critique?). So he seems to acknowledge that communities do confer, in some cases, "identities" upon their members. Is that already a problem? That is, is the identitarian or minortarian logic already at work here in Badiou's POV? I'm not sure really, though surely this is an important question. It seems that these problematic logics are operant at least by the point at which such "identities" have been converted into "advertising selling points and salable images". 

Hi, I'm a spokes corpse!

Here we might think about the way that The Gap used images of Kerouac to sell khaki pants or chinos or whatever they're called. Beatnik as spokes-corpse. Surely the beats have long since been turned into "advertising selling points and salable images" and I am not likely to argue for their relevance to the poetic or literary moment (though I hear that Sha-Na-Na are doing a reunion tour) but I'd also dispute that because something called beat has entered into economic circulation that who the beats were and what their work might persist in provoking in new readers is somehow foreclosed by that fact. 

Is the economic dimension of this the top level of description? That is, when one of these figures "draws on the resources of the other" do we mean that they others are all literally "speculating on the financial markets" and this, their participation in the market, is what taints each and sets up the "relation of reciprocal maintenance and mirroring"? What about groups that don't speculate on the market? Or for whom such interaction with the market is not shared by all - surely even amongst managers there are many who do not invest in the market. Or, from a different direction we might ask if it makes any sense descriptively to discuss "transsexual market investors" as a group? 

I have no published position
on Homeopathy

What does it mean that "communitarian identities" have been used as "advertising selling points and salable images" and that "the most insular or most violent groups" are good at "speculating on the financial markets or maintaining a large-scale arms commerce" - how is the latter a "counterpart" to the former? The answer would have to be for Badiou that they are exhibiting these suspect logics that he's been complaining about. But do they? Let's say that I am a terrorist and I am also great at speculating on the derivatives market and I have a great business plan where I draw my resources from gun running, drug and sex trafficking and this all funnels into and is exponentialized by my market speculation and thus do I plan and fund terror worldwide. How does that sit next to, as the demonstration of the same "logic" the situation of a transsexual, who is media-friendly, culturally marginal and "into" homeopathy? Ok, let's pretend that Chaz Bono is way into homeopathy. Let's also call him culturally marginal just to keep the game going. If we could maintain this thought experiment without it collapsing into stupidity would we see this purportedly identical logic at work in both cases? What sort of perspective would I have to occupy to see the investment savvy capitalist-terrorist and Chaz as equivalent operators or a cultural logic? What makes Chaz media-friendly is his parents and his transition, child of celebs + sex change is like a tabloid wet dream and 'media-friendly' surely encompasses such dreams regardless of whether they aid or victimize their subjects. So, while I would not wish to deny any agency to Chaz Bono and submit him entirely to the enjoyment of the media apparatus - the balance seems to be with the demand of that media apparatus. But in the terrorist example the terrorist as agent is all slickly capitalistic and knows how to work the system, but it does not appear that the terrorist is worked by that system in anything like the same fashion. If these are counterparts, how much weight do we put on counter, do we read "counterpart" as denoting an inversion or reversal? That seems possible if I use my close-reading glasses (which make it impossible to see as far as my toes) but really? Does it really seem that the same logic is in effect in these two scenarios? To me, it does not.

Badiou's discourse here about these identitarian or minoritarian logics doesn't feel to me like it has that solid a grasp upon the ways that identities are adopted, imposed, implied, revoked and many other such "identity processes" of the social take place. I'm unconvinced that such processes can be adequately conceptualized as all exhibiting an identical logic. The terms in question also seem to operate at different levels, mobilizing different potentials of investment and investment that is coded at times, coded along the lines of earlier identifications - as male or female, by race, etc - even as these things may work to inhibit or facilitate certain outcomes. How much more likely circa 1950 in the USA was it for a man than for a woman to attain to the position of "manager" in a business? More perhaps than ended up in that year becoming "firemen" probably, but being identified as woman for the social realm surely impacted what professions one might attain in that time, arguably making this imposed identity more fundamentally determinative than others like 'manager' or 'patriot' or 'vegetarian'. 

Perhaps if one drastically limited the terms to - for example - the designations available on any given US census, then we could begin with the pretense that these categories, all imposed by the same authority, operating on the same plane of reference, might be susceptible to reciprocal mirroring that Badiou discusses. But I am not sure that even in a setting where such is facilitated, like this one, that it can be unproblematically understood that way (which is not to exclude any understanding deriving from such a move, just to add a bracket for further consideration, a step back from the dogmatism of Badiou's presentations). 

The idea that, should any term of identification enter into circulation within the economy, that the "identity" so referred to by the term is now reduced to a commodity-cog of said economy without remainder, strikes me as false. Which is not to argue that when a term of identification enters the economy that there are not many effects - surely there are, only that they cannot be adequately thought along the lines of a 'one drop rule'. 

So, while I continue to find Badiou intriguing and provocative, here at least, little of what he is saying convinces me. My answer to my opening questions about the transsexual in Badiou's text is that - in principle - nearly any other identity term might have been chosen by him. So his use of "transsexual" feels largely spontaneous to me and given my thoughts above, largely irrelevant to whether anyone does or does not find transsexual a useful, necessary, problematic or irrelevant term for self-identification. 

Works Cited

Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul; The Foundation of Universalism. Ray Brassier trans. Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 2003.

Žižek, Slavoj. Violence; Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador, 2008. 

"One Possible Narrative of the Concept of Ideology since Marx"

I completed and sent away my project on Ideology, and as we all know "Done is Good!"

The pieces of that text which appeared here as individual posts had many issues, which I hope I have corrected in the final version. But, whatever the case, the final is much revised and cleaned up. If you have any interest remaining in all of this, you are more than welcome to download a PDF of the entire piece, whose title ended up being "One Possible Narrative of the Concept of Ideology since Marx," here.

Slavoj Žižek, from MAPPING IDEOLOGY

Rather than reading this version which is a draft, you can download the corrected and cleaned up text of all the annotations and my introduction to them here now called, "One Possible Narrative of the Concept of Ideology since Marx". 

“How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?” - Slavoj Žižek

A younger Slavoj, given that this contributions date to '91

This is also the first chapter of Žižek’s book The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). Žižek opens by referring to Lacan’s claim that Marx invented the symptom and asks whether this is mere wit or whether it has theoretical merit. His answer is that there is a “fundamental homology” between Marx’s and Freud’s methods, specifically Marx’s analysis of the commodity and Freud’s of the dream. “In both cases the point is avoid the properly fetishistic fascination of the ‘content‘ supposedly hidden behind the form (...) but, on the contrary, the ‘secret’ of this form itself” (296). Žižek then looks at a common reproach made to Freud as it illustrates the mistake at issue here if one treats the latent content as the answer or secret of the manifest content. He cites Freud on this point to insist that “there is nothing ‘unconscious’ in the ‘latent dream-thought’” (297). What is at issue in the dream is not this hidden content, the dreamwork itself “the mechanisms of displacement and condensation, the figuration of the contents of words or syllables” which combine to produce the form of the dream itself (297). This is not to say that the latent content is not important to analyze, between this latent content and “another desire which is already repressed” there has been effected a “short circuit” connecting it to a “desire which has nothing to do” with the the latent content (297-8). The issue here, psychoanalytically speaking, is that that which is primally repressed cannot be “reduced to a ‘normal train of thought’” (298). As such the “structure [of the dream] is always triple; there are always three elements at work: the manifest dream-text, the latent dream-content or thought and the unconscious desire articulated” by the dream’s form (298). He remarks that the form of unconscious desire in the dream is not in some sense “deeper”, and that it is rather more “‘on the surface’, consisting entirely of the signifier’s mechanisms” (298). Žižek shows how Freud “preceeds here in two stages”, 1^st he asserts that dreams are meaningful phenomenon and not just random or meaningless, 2^nd cautions analysts not to become ensnared by the latent contents and to focus on the unconscious desire as expressed in the way the dreamwork forms the dream itself (299). He then shows the same two stage approach in Marx. 1^st, we must assert that the commodity form has meaning, that its value is not simply a product of chance or “the accidental interplay of supply and demand” (299), and 2^nd, we must not simply become fascinated by the latent aspect of the commodity, that it is an expression of congealed labor, and instead we must attend the question of “why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value” (Marx qtd 300). Žižek’s next section title is “Te Unconscious of the Commodity Form” in which he argues that the fascination with Marx’s thoughts about commodity fetishism is that it allows us “to generate all other forms of the ‘fetishistic inversion’” (301). Turning then to the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel he observes that “in the structure of the commodity-form it is possible to find the transcendental subject” (301). The claim here, both Žižek’s and Sohn-Rethel’s, is that the “commodity-form articulates in advance the anatomy (...) of the Kantian transcendental subject (...) the network of transcendental categories which constitute the a priori frame of ‘objective’ scientific knowledge” (301). Per the argument of Sohn-Rethel, “[b]efore thought could arrive at pure abstraction, the abstraction was already at work in the social effectivity of the market” (301). The reasoning here is that “[b]efore thought could arrive at the idea of a purely quantitative determination, a sine qua non of the modern science of nature, pure quantity was already at work in (...) that commodity which renders possible the commensurability of the value of all other commodities” irrespective of their material differences, i.e., money (302). Žižek calls this a “scandal” as it reveals how the Kantian categories and transcendental subject are dependent in their “formal genesis” upon a “‘pathological’ process” and he notes that this scandal “corresponds perfectly” to that of the unconscious for a “transcendental philosophical perspective” (302). Sohn-Rethel is crucial here for Žižek as he formulates the idea of the “real abstraction” - “the act of abstraction at work in the very effective process of the exchange of commodities” (302). Žižek’s thesis from this is that “the ‘real abstraction’ is the unconscious of the transcendental subject, the support of objective-universal scientific knowledge” (302). As this concept is crucial to what follows, I will quote at length;

On the one hand, the ‘real abstraction’ is of course not ‘real’ in the sense of the real, effective properties of commodities as material objects: the object-commodity does not contain ‘value’ in the same way as it possesses a set of particular properties determining its ‘use value’ (its form, colour, taste, and so on). As Sohn-Rethel pointed out, its nature is that of a postulate implied by the effective act of exchange - in other words, that of a certain ‘as if’ [als ob]: during the act of exchange, individuals proceed as if the commodity is not submitted to physical, material exchanges; as if it is excluded from the natural cycle of generation and corruption; although on the level of their ‘consciousness’ they ‘know very well’ that this is not the case. (302)

Žižek gives as an example of this, the case of money itself. Users of money understand that currency is simply paper (and coins, metal), that it gets old, wears down, etc. Yet “in the social effectivity of the market we none the less treat coins as if the consist of an immutable substance” (303). Žižek evokes the notion of disavowal and stages it for this case as “I know that money is a material object like others, but still... [it is as if it were made of a special substance over which time had no power]” (303). Žižek opines that Marx never solved this problem, that of the “sublime material”  or the “immutable body” of money (303). “This immaterial corporeality of the ‘body within the body’ gives us a precise definition of the sublime object” though he insists that we must recognize how the “postulated existence of the sublime body depends upon the symbolic order” that it’s very immutable nature is “sustained by the guarantee” of the symbolic (303). Returning then to the question of the ‘real abstraction’ Žižek argues that it “has nothing to do with the level of ‘reality’, of effective properties” and that, as such “it would be wrong to conceive of it as a ‘thought-abstraction’” (303). Instead the ‘real abstraction’ is “external, decentered” as Sohn-Rethel writes “‘[t]he exchange abstraction is not thought, but it has the form of thought’” (303). Žižek immediately notices the parallel to the unconscious, “the form of thought whose ontological status is not that of thought” (303). This leads Žižek, as a good Lacanian, to point out that this “form of thought external to thought itself (..) whereby the form of the thought is already articulated in advance” is none other than “the symbolic order (...) which supplements and/or disrupts the dual relationship of ‘external’ factual reality and ‘internal’ subjective experience” (304). This realization is situated in the blindspot of philosophy and in Žižek’s words “philosophy as such is defined by its blindness to this place” (304). But the same blindness is present in every act of exchange in which we “misrecognize the socio-synthetic function of exchange: that is the level of the ‘real abstraction’ as the form of socialization of private production through the medium of the market” (304). Given this “the social effectivity of the exchange process is a kind of realty which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic” (305). Žižek dubs this “the fundamental dimension of ‘ideology’” (305). As such “a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence” is what we must see as ideological (305). This in a sense, turns the conception of false consciousness ‘on its head’. “‘Ideological‘ is not the ‘false consciousness’ of of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness’” (305). At last the symptom enters the discussion here as Žižek offers a “possible definition” of it as “a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject” as when, by virtue of analysis and interpretation the subject brings this knowledge to consciousness, the symptom dissolves (305). 

Žižek argues that what Marx does “consists in detecting a point of breakdown heterogenous to a given ideological field and at the same time necessary for that field to achieve its closure, its accomplished form” and this, precisely, would be the “Marxian procedure” of ideology critique (306). Žižek gives two examples crucial to market ideology; freedom and equality. Each of these is “‘false’ in so far as it necessarily includes a specific case which breaks it unity” (306). For freedom we have the worker’s freedom to sell himself and thus become unfree, and for equality (or equivalent exchange) it is again the worker, who by virtue of having become a commodity “the use of which - labour itself - produces a certain surplus value” which is “appropriated by the capitalist” (307). In both cases the purported universality of the terms in question produces an excess which negates the the term “in other words, it brings about a symptom” (307).  

Returning to Lacan’s claim about Marx’s invention in its specifics, Žižek tells us that for Lacan, it emerges in Marx’s analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and is bound up with Marx’s thoughts about commodity fetishism. Where in the feudal period there was a fetishizing of the relations between men (Kings, etc) in the capitalist period we reach the fetishization of things (commodities). Thus with regard to a subjects’ relation to their king, “they think they are subjects giving the king royal treatment because the king is already in himself, outside the relationship to his subjects, a king” thus failing to grasp that he is the king because of their submission him as such (309). This form of fetishism and that of commodity fetishism are “incompatible” (310). But with once the capitalist model holds sway “the relations of domination and servitude are repressed” so that social subjects can maintain their self-conception as free, autonomous agents, but the “repressed truth - that of the persistence of domination and servitude - emerges in a symptom,” namely the fetishism of commodities (310).

Žižek next tackles the idea that because, in our contemporary society, there appears to be a wide-spread cynicism, whereby, in Sloterdijk’s rephrasing of Marx, “they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it” (312). Sloterdijk’s concept of cynical reason is paraphrased by Žižek as a scenario in which reason is “no longer naive, but (...) a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it” (312). “It is clear” Žižek writes, “that confronted with cynical reason, the traditional critique of ideology no longer works” (313). But rather than consigning our age to the post-ideological, Žižek introduces “the distinction between symptom and fantasy” as a means of  demonstrating that, even under the generalized sway of cynical reason, that “the fundamental level of ideological fantasy, the level on which ideology structures the social reality itself” remains “untouched” (313-4).

To elucidate the level of fantasy at work here, Žižek begins with the famous line from Marx “they do not know it, but they are doing it” and asks whether “the place of ideological illusion [is] in the ‘knowing’ or in the ‘doing’” (314). He says that is seems to most that it is in the knowing, and thus “a matter of a discordance between what people are effectively doing and what they think they are doing” (314). This has been the dominant answer to the question, if indeed it had been explicitly posed before Žižek does so. But Žižek argues that it cannot be in the knowing and uses the example of money once again. We know that the currency in our hand is simply paper, but our actions, how we effectively behave with this small stack of paper makes clear that this knowing has little bearing on our doings in the world. So while there may be distortions and falsehoods involved in our knowing, that the full import of Marx’s statement can only be appreciated if we focus on the doing. Because of how we actually behave in our everyday lives with regard to money and other commodities, we act as if money were “the immediate embodiment of wealth as such” (314). As such, we “are fetishists in practice, not in theory” (314-5). We fail to see that what we understand as reality itself, is a misrecognition “guided by (...) fetishistic illusion” (315). To spell this out a bit more fully Žižek raises the notions of universal and particular in relationship to the commodity say that “when we are victims of commodity fetishism it appears as if the concrete content of a commodity (its use value) is an expression of its abstract universality (its exchange value)” leading us to treat the “abstract Universal, the Value as a real Substance” (315). That is to say, in our knowing, we see particular commodities as embodying a particular value (the universal in the particular), but in our doing we act as if commodities are “just so many embodiments of universal Value” (315). Understood in this light “the illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what people are doing” (316). The fetishistic inversion proper to the commodity structures what we take as reality itself. This factor, this unconscious illusion, is what Žižek calls “ideological fantasy” (316). The reason that cynicism or ‘enlightened false consciousness’ do not dispel ideology, is that cynicism does not bear upon the level of doing but only on that of knowing. Contrary to Althusser and his followers, who disputed commodity fetishism as being based on an “unfounded opposition between persons (human subjects) and things,” Žižek argues that the “point of Marx’s analysis is that things (commodities) believe in the place of subjects” (317). He understands this as strictly in accord with Lacan’s position, that “it is belief which is radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective procedure[s] of people” (317). Belief here is not an internal, private or intimate mental state or intellectual conviction, rather it “is always materialized in our effective social reality: belief supports the fantasy which regulates social reality” (317). Social reality then, “is supported by a certain as if” (318). Žižek gives a lengthy list of as if scenarios, of which I will only give one; we all know quite well that bureaucracies are not omnipotent, but facing them “we act as if we believe in the almightiness of bureaucracy” (318). That examples of this same dynamic come so readily to mind seems to me to be telling. All of this leads quite naturally to Pascal and a discussion of the law and belief. Reading Pascal closely Žižek finds something quite like Lacan’s notion of the unconscious as automaton. Here is Pascal; “[p]roofs only convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed. It inclines the automaton, which leads the mind unconsciously along with it” (318). This raises the question of obedience to the law and Žižek, building from Pascal and Lacan argues that “real obedience, then, is an ‘external’ one: obedience out of conviction is not real obedience because it is already ‘mediated’ through our subjectivity - that is, we are not obeying the authority but simply following our judgement” (318). From Kierkegaard, Žižek draws the idea that “the crucial religious experience” is to believe in advance of justification,  and that if we do that “we find reasons attesting our beliefs because we already believe” (319 my italics). Next, mapping Kierkegaard onto Pascal, Žižek locates the essential character of the law in its “incomprehensible” or “irrational” aspects, those which we believe (through our effective doings in the world) with only the hypothesis that, perhaps, in time, we will have reasons to justify (319). This scenario then looks to Žižek much like the superego with its incessant irrational commands. In his view the law is founded upon the “non-integrated” aspect which “must be repressed into the unconscious, through the ideological, imaginary experience of the ‘meaning’ of the Law, of its foundation in Justice, Truth” etc (319) when in fact Law is not “true”, only “necessary” (320). Žižek invokes the psychoanalytic notion of transference to explain how social subjects, impute to the law, the notion that somehow, inscrutably, behind the obviously fissured surface of it, that there is meaning and truth (320). He glosses Pascal once again, giving the earlier thinker’s ‘position’ as regards ideology as “leave rational argumentation and submit yourself simply to ideological ritual, stupefy yourself by repeating the meaningless gestures, act as if you already believe, and the belief will come by itself” (320). Here we must read that gloss as containing two sorts of belief, the belief embodied in doing and the resultant belief that takes root in knowing. What distinguishes this from “insipid behaviourist wisdom” in Žižek’s view is that the crucial aspect is the “belief before belief” and the that “the external custom is always a material support for the subject’s unconscious” (321). 

The next section’s title is “Kafka, Critic of Althusser” and in it Žižek builds upon the discussion thus far to offer a criticism of Althusser’s concept of interpellation. Against Althusser who writes of “the process of ideological interpellation through which the symbolic machine of ideology is ‘internalized’ into the ideological experience of Meaning and Truth”, Žižek sticks closer to Pascal from whom we learn that “this ‘internalization’, by structural necessity, never fully succeeds” and “there is always a residue (...) of traumatic irrationality and senselessness sticking to it, and that this leftover, far from hindering the full submission of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it” (321-2). What Kafka’s work presents and what Althusser fails to see is that the interpellation of the Other is “without identification/subjectification” because the subject (K) does not know what it is that the Law demands of him or what he is guilty of. Schematizing this through the Lacanian algebra, Žižek argues that “before being caught in the identification (...) the subject ($) is trapped by the Other through a paradoxical object-cause of desire in the midst of it (a)” which gives us Lacan’s matheme of fantasy $<>a (322). Noting that Lacan argues that “in the opposition between dream and reality, fantasy is on the side of reality” (322), Žižek argues that our lived social reality “is a fantasy-construction which enables us to mask the Real of our desire” and that it is “exactly the same with ideology” (323). “The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” (323). Thus, in accordance with the clinical procedure, the “only way to break the power of our ideological [fantasy]” would be to “confront the Real of our desire” which that fantasy serves to mask (325). Ideology then, for Žižek is not what it was for most Marxist thinkers. It is not partial or false knowledge that hides what is really happening in the social totality, rather “ideology (...) designates totality set on effacing the traces of its own impossibility” (327).