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Slavoj Zizek

This document summarizes Slavoj Zizek's retrieval and interpretation of Hegel and Lacanian psychoanalysis. It discusses how Zizek uses Hegel and psychoanalysis to analyze popular culture and politics. Specifically, it examines two of Zizek's texts - Looking Awry, which employs psychoanalytic concepts to interpret fiction, and The Metastases of Enjoyment, which deals with femininity, feminism, and the Frankfurt School. The document analyzes how Zizek draws connections between Hegel, Lacan, and culture, and evaluates Zizek's attempts to link psychoanalysis with politics.

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96 views1 page

Slavoj Zizek

This document summarizes Slavoj Zizek's retrieval and interpretation of Hegel and Lacanian psychoanalysis. It discusses how Zizek uses Hegel and psychoanalysis to analyze popular culture and politics. Specifically, it examines two of Zizek's texts - Looking Awry, which employs psychoanalytic concepts to interpret fiction, and The Metastases of Enjoyment, which deals with femininity, feminism, and the Frankfurt School. The document analyzes how Zizek draws connections between Hegel, Lacan, and culture, and evaluates Zizek's attempts to link psychoanalysis with politics.

Uploaded by

peterjohnjohn63
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Hegel is the founding figure for much recent French philosophy, and his work lies not only

in the
background of contemporary discussions of phe- nomenology and hermeneutics, but it is also often an
implicit reference point even for arguments from within ‘post-structuralism’ that pretend to have nothing to
do with Hegel. Zizek’s retrieval of Hegel is valuable because it shows why certain theoretical notions in
his writing – Truth arising through error, the production of ‘substance as subject’, universal- ity in the
particular – are crucial to philosophy (and then to psychoanalysis and politics). We will look at those
connections between Hegel and other domains of work toward the end of the chapter.

Zizek proceeds, in true Hegelian fashion, by specifying Hegel against what he is not. This means that we
also need to locate them both in relation to other philosophical traditions, the most important for our
purposes here being Kant. Hegel then needs to be treated, as Zizek suggests, as a space to think, as
shifting and opening up new ideas. This is more in keeping with what Hegel was trying to do than if he
had been describing a positive, fully- formed system that might then pretend to solve all the problems of
philosophy. Negativity is at the heart of Hegel, and it is Zizek’s task to keep that negativity at work while
reading him. The points at which motifs of negativity turn into formulaic injunctions in his work then need
to be analysed so that the limitations of Zizek’s version of Hegel can be understood.

The discussion of psychoanalysis in the following chapter focuses on two key texts to illustrate how Zizek
uses ideas from psychoanalysis to read popular culture, and the way he buys into certain psychoanalytic
notions about representation and the subject. The first is Looking Awry, which appeared in 1991. This
book not only employs notions of fantasy, trauma and unconscious desire to interpret science fiction and
detective novels, but it also makes of these cultural phenomena sites to illustrate key concepts in
Lacanian psychoanalysis. That is the way I use Zizek’s text here.

The second text is the summary and position statement in The Metastases of Enjoyment published in
1994, where Zizek deals, among other things, with femininity and feminist responses to psychoanalysis.
That book is the setting for a review of ideas from the rival Frankfurt School tradition of psychoanalytic
social theory that have been so appealing and problematic for many radicals, and it tackles the worries of
those sympathetic to Lacan as a progressive alternative, and ostensibly more politically sensitive ‘return’,
to Freud.

8 SLAVOJ ZIZEK

However, Zizek does more than this, for his description of Lacanian concepts is also an opportunity to
explicate further how useful Hegel is. As we explore Lacan, then, we will also be drawing on the material
in the previous chapter to explore the way Lacan is indebted to Hegel, and then to question Zizek about
this. Lacanian psychoanalysis, for Zizek, is not only a reading of popular culture; it is also a way of
intervening in political debate, as we will see in his discussion of the nation as ‘thing’ in Looking Awry and
of ‘sexuation’ in The Metastases of Enjoyment. The way Zizek repeats standard psychoanalytic attempts
to comment upon political phenomena, and the way he attempts to invent some connections of his own
between psychoanalysis and culture need to be traced out and assessed.

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