Madness isn't the Only Option: On Zizek’s Resignation to Narcissistic Politics

William Earnest

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In his writings Zizek addresses an array of themes, and does so with an erudite enthusiasm that is both refreshing and dizzying.   Psychoanalytic categories alternately collaborate with and elbow those of philosophy, with philosophy at times either on the couch or questioning psychoanalysis about its frail subjectivist presuppositions.   As part of this conceptual stew – often exhilirating in its mix of levels of analysis and related experience that other writers usually sequester off into disconnected disciplines –  Zizek’s exposition of psychoanalytic concepts tends to be abbreviated; in particular, his arguments are rarely framed with references to case material. [1]  

In the following I present extended case examples to remedy this lack.  Once his universal, or metapsychological, statements are embodied in accounts of the lives of analysands who represent the psychodynamics he refers to, serious questions arise about both the validity of his generalizations and their relevance to radical politics.   I do so from a perspective that criticizes an unacknowledged and surprising emphasis on narcissistic dynamics that leads Zizek, drawing on Lacan, to endorse a modification of psychoanalysis that greatly diminishes its critical potential.  This emphasis on narcissistic dynamics appears to be related to Zizek’s pessimistic analysis of contemporary capitalism’s ability to captivate those living under it;  narcissism appears to Zizek as a psychological formation resistant to captivation.    

Limiting Self-Contentment 

As a point of departure I begin with a passage in The Ticklish Subject where Zizek does refer to a clinical case.  Before citing the case, he considers 

the radical dimension of the death drive - the fact that the excess of the Will over a mere self-contented satisfaction is always mediated by the 'nihilistic' stubborn attachment to Nothingness. The death drive is not merely a direct nihilistic opposition to any life-asserting attachment; rather, it is the very formal structure of the reference to Nothingness that enables us to overcome the stupid self-contented life-rhythm, in order to become 'passionately attached' to some Cause - be it love, art, knowledge or politics - for which we are ready to risk everything. In this precise sense, it is meaningless to talk about the sublimation of drives, since drive as such involves the structure of sublimation: we pass from instinct to drive when, instead of aiming directly at the goal that would satisfy us, satisfaction is brought about by circulating around the void, by repeatedly missing the object which is the stand-in for the central void. So, when a subject desires a series of positive objects, the thing to do is to distinguish between objects which are actually desired as particular objects, and the object which is desired as the stand-in for Nothingness... [2] [emphasis added] 

In this passage Zizek enlists the death drive to break up the embrace of conformity, but with an important moderation.  Writers from Freud to Ogden regard the death drive as disruptive not only of object attachments that might make up a “stupid self-contented life rhythm,” but also disruptive of the subject’s tolerance of their own desires as well. [3]   Zizek offers the death drive in mediated form: it does not lead to a Nothingness of drivelessness, a cessation of striving, but a desperate attraction to an object that “stands-in for Nothingness” and forestalls direct experience of its horror.    

The Kris Case 

To show the form this might take in terms closer to psychological experience, Zizek introduces Lacan’s discussion of an analysis presented by Ernst Kris: 

As for this Nietzschean difference between 'willing nothing (not willing anything at all)’ and ‘willing Nothingness itself’, one should read it against the background of Lacan's distinction, elaborated apropos of Ernst Kris's case of ‘pathological' self-accusation of plagiarism, between ‘stealing nothing (in the simple sense of "not stealing anything")’ and 'stealing Nothingness itself’:  when the patient - an intellectual obsessed with the notion that he is constantly stealing ideas from his colleagues - is proved  by the analyst (Kris) not, in reality, to have stolen anything, this does not yet prove that he is simply innocent. What the patient is actually stealing  is 'nothing' itself, just as an anorexic is not simply eating nothing (in the sense of 'not eating anything') but, rather, eating Nothingness itself.   What, exactly, do these passages, so often referred to, mean? Darian Leader linked this case to another in which a patient evokes the anecdote of a man suspected by his employer of stealing something: as he leaves the factory where he works every evening, his wheelbarrow is searched systematically - nothing is found, until at last it is understood that he is stealing wheelbarrows themselves. . . . Along the same lines, as Lacan emphasizes, when Kris's patient displays his obsession with the 'pathological' feeling of plagiarizing, the crucial point is not to take this self-accusation at face value, and endeavour to prove to the patient that in reality he is not stealing anything from his colleagues - what the patient (as well as his analyst) fails to see is that 'the real plagiarism is in the form of the object itself, in the fact that for this man something can only have a value if it belongs to someone else':  the patient's apprehension that everything he possesses is stolen conceals the profound satisfaction— jouissance - he derives from the very fact of not having anything that truly belongs to him - that is truly 'his'. [4]

Zizek does not give a citation for the Kris case.  However, a literature search indicates that Kris discussed an analysand troubled by self-accusations of plagiarism in two papers, one published in 1939, the other in 1951. [5]    In both, what Kris tells us of the analysis differs significantly from Lacan’s rendering cited by Zizek.  From the second paper:  

At the time of his second analysis a patient, who was a young scientist in his early thirties, successfully filled a respected academic position without being able to advance to higher rank because he was unable to publish any of his extensive researches.  This, his chief complaint, led him to seek further analysis.  He remembered with gratitude the previous treatment which had improved his potency, diminished social inhibitions, producing a marked change in his life, and he was anxious that his resumption of analysis should not come to the notice of his previous analyst (a woman) lest she feel in any way hurt by his not returning to her; but he was convinced that after a lapse of years he should now be analyzed by a man. 

He had learned in his first analysis that fear and guilt prevented him from being productive, that he 'always wanted to take, to steal, as he had done in puberty'.  He was under constant pressure of an impulse to use somebody else's ideas—frequently those of a distinguished young scholar, his intimate friend, whose office was adjacent to his own and with whom he engaged daily in long conversations. 

Soon, a concrete plan for work and publication was about to materialize, when one day the patient reported he had just discovered in the library a treatise published years ago in which the same basic idea was developed.  It was a treatise with which he had been familiar, since he had glanced at it some time ago.  His paradoxical tone of satisfaction and excitement led me to inquire in very great detail about the text he was afraid to plagiarize.  In a process of extended scrutiny it turned out that the old publication contained useful support of his thesis but no hint of the thesis itself.  The patient had made the author say what he wanted to say himself.  Once this clue was secured the whole problem of plagiarism appeared in a new light.  The eminent colleague, it transpired, had repeatedly taken the patient's ideas, embellished and repeated them without acknowledgment.  The patient was under the impression he was hearing for the first time a productive idea without which he could not hope to master his own subject, an idea which he felt he could not use because it was his colleague's property. 

Among the factors determining the patient's inhibitions in his work, identification with his father played an important part.  Unlike the grandfather, a distinguished scientist, the father had failed to leave his mark in his field of endeavor.  The patient's striving to find sponsors, to borrow ideas, only to find that they were either unsuitable or could only be plagiarized, reproduced conflicts of his earlier relationship with his father.  The projection of ideas to paternal figures was in part determined by the wish for a great and successful father (a grandfather).  In a dream the Oedipal conflict with the father was represented as a battle in which books were weapons and conquered books were swallowed during combat.  This was interpreted as the wish to incorporate the father's penis.  It could be related to a definite phase of infancy when, aged four and five, the little boy was first taken as father's companion on fishing trips.  'The wish for the bigger fish', the memory of exchanging and comparing fishes, was recalled with many details.  The tendency to take, to bite, to steal was traced through many ramifications and disguises during latency and adolescence until it could be pointed out one day that the decisive displacement was to ideas.  Only the ideas of others were truly interesting, only ideas one could take; hence the taking had to be engineered.  At this point of the interpretation I was waiting for the patient's reaction.  The patient was silent and the very length of the silence had a special significance.  Then, as if reporting a sudden insight, he said:  'Every noon, when I leave here, before luncheon, and before returning to my office, I walk through X Street [a street well known for its small but attractive restaurants] and I look at the menus in the windows.  In one of the restaurants I usually find my preferred dish—fresh brains.'    

Kris is not the superficial, normalizing counselor Lacan makes him out to be.  Where Zizek’s retelling implies that Kris aimed to convince his patient that he had not stolen anything, Kris’ own narrative plainly shows that he did not limit his intervention to supportive therapy.  Kris did not aim to reassure by bolstering the analysand’s grasp of his real innocence.  Rather, he involved his analysand in an effort to understand the unconscious impetus for his plagiarization fear.  The fear of plagiarization developed out of an impulse to steal, linked to the patient's wish to have for himself the ideas/brains/phallus [6] of a fantasized father, in contrast to his real (as experienced by the analysand) father, who was not successful or phallicly potent.  Beyond this basic framework, Kris found significant nuances; for example, the analysand would at times “set up” with his own ideas the person he feared he might plagiarize.     

As reported by Zizek, Lacan’s dismissive summary of Kris’ work expresses Lacan’s argument with ego-psychological psychoanalysis in all of its tendentiousness.  I will have more to say about that dispute elsewhere, but relevant here is Lacan’s belief that ego-psychological psychoanalysis was naïve in its orientation to the ego.  That is, Lacan believed that ego-psychological psychoanalysis gave too much emphasis to improving the ego’s capacity for reality testing, and ignored how the ego rested on, and in a sense is composed of, identifications that must be called into question (just how much to be questioned will be discussed below).  

I don’t wish to completely deny the validity of that objection.  But, unfortunately, in their haste to convince the reader that ego-psychological psychoanalysis cannot carry out a satisfactory analysis of unconscious psychological processes,  Zizek/Lacan [7] characterize ego-psychological psychoanalysis as promoting a simple-minded non-psychoanalytic affirmation of reality:  “You don’t need to feel guilty, you're innocent!”  They effectively conflate it with – to refer to current psychological theories – cognitive-behavioral therapy, which ignores (or ontologically rules out) unconscious meaning in favor of reality assessment.  Instead of considering whether the analysand imbues objects with unconscious meaning, cognitive-behavioral therapy examines whether the analysand’s inferences about themselves and others are skewed, for example, whether they are “catastrophizing” when a catastrophe is highly unlikely.  This mischaracterization of Kris’ work is very different from criticizing ego-psychological psychoanalysis for truncating the scope of analysis and thereby placing the basic structure of the ego above psychoanalytic scrutiny. 

By pitting the interpretations actually offered by Kris against Zizek/Lacan’s interpretation, we can draw out differences between the two positions.   Zizek continues: 

On the level of desire, this attitude of stealing means that desire is always the desire of the Other, never immediately 'mine' (I desire an object only in so far as it is desired by the Other) - so the only way for me authentically to 'desire' is to reject all positive objects of desire, and desire Nothingness itself (again, in all the senses of this term, up to desiring that specific form of Nothingness which is desire itself - for this reason, human desire is always desire to desire, desire to be the object of the Other's desire). Again, we can easily see the homology with Nietzsche: a Will can be a 'Will to Will', a willing which wants willing itself, only in so far as it is a Will which actively wills Nothingness. (Another well-known form of this reversal is the characterization of Romantic lovers as actually being in love not with the beloved person, but with Love itself.)   Crucial here is the self-reflexive turn by means of which the (symbolic) form itself is counted among its elements: to Will the Will itself is to Will nothing, just as to steal the wheelbarrow itself (the very form-container of stolen goods) is to steal Nothingness itself (the void which potentially contains stolen goods). This 'nothing' ultimately stands for the subject itself- that is, it is the empty signifier without signified, which represents the subject. Thus the subject is not directly included in the symbolic order: it is included as the very point at which signification breaks down.  

Kris focused his central line of interpretation on conflicts surrounding the analysand’s aim to build his father up into a man whose power he could appropriate.  The wish for the phallus (understood as a representation of idealized paternal power) was displaced onto ideas; in turn, ideas become substance in the form of brains and the act of brain-eating.   Zizek/Lacan argue instead that by effectively committing himself to be in the position of having to steal, the analysand is committing himself to ‘not having,’ i.e. to be “one who needs to steal to fulfill their Desire (that which is desired by the other).”   They do not regard this as an ascetic renunciation, but rather, paralleling Nietzsche’s “Will to Will,” a desire to remain in a state of desire.  They see Kris’ analysand as not actually wanting to incorporate/possess the phallus, but instead to remain in a state of desiring it.  (Again, this is far different from an orientation informed by the death drive that would extinguish desire.)    

At this point Zizek’s argument takes an unacknowledged turn.  If he had presented Kris’ account more adequately, the depth of Kris’ analysis would have obliged Zizek to offer an alternative psychodynamic formulation explaining why the conflicted analysand would seek to remain a plagiarist instead of an author.  Instead, Zizek offers this interpretation – “the only way for me [the analysand] authentically to ‘desire’ is to reject all positive objects of desire, and desire Nothingness itself.”   That serves as a formulation of the decision made by the analysand, and indeed potentially every analysand, to strive for authenticity. [8]   Zizek thereby implicitly concludes that we have arrived at a psychoanalytic terminus, a point where meaning becomes simple and unified; in this context, it is a place where Will triumphs over the conflicting motives that push it into a “decision.”  He then moves on to set out examples purportedly resonant with the idea of authentically wanting Nothing in order to continue wanting, including a tale of wheelbarrow theft that is both beguiling and beguiled – he seems to accept the thief’s claim that he really was stealing nothing. 

Let’s pause before we accept this foreclosure of further analytic investigation.  Instead, we will consider a feasible psychoanalytic assessment of what may be driving the analysand’s commitment to Nothingness or, to put it in the more tangible symbolic terms of the analysand, a commitment to perpetually seek to steal, but not have, the phallus.  Simply, if one is listening to an analysand elaborate a standpoint that involves renunciation of the fantasied powerful phallus, it is reasonable to consider the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that this standpoint represents the analysand’s way of managing highly charged and conflicted motives.  If this is so, then the analysand has a considerable stake in experiencing their way of containing the conflict as a “done deal,” and won’t want to stir things up.  In this way, when Zizek brings the analytic effort to a stop he colludes with the analysand’s defensive effort.