In Cruelty’s Name: Biesecker
I am obliged, for the time being, to suspend the important question of the
difference between the violent and the cruel in the interest of first examining the validity
of a typology of violence that moves from the assumption that rhetoric is either an
alternative (mode of power) to (physical) violence or its response—a manner of thinking
rhetoric as always already situational. Is it ever the case that rhetoric is neither a force for
the displacement (however provisional) of the violent act nor its rejoinder but itself a
mode, in the strict philosophical sense of the term, of violence? The aim of this piece is
therefore to introduce into our thinking on violence and rhetoric a dangerous, indeed
violent, supplement—what I have come to call “evental rhetoric,” a name for that
occurrence of discourse which is not merely situational but more than situational, even in
the deconstructed sense of the term. My thesis is this: Evental rhetoric is more than
performative in the Derridean sense since it is full speech in the Lacanian sense.
Now let us be aware that evental rhetoric, if there is any, not only presents itself
as situational rhetorics’ dangerous supplement, adding only to replace and marking an
emptiness in the positivity of the present or given.i It is also an advent that many
members of today’s philosophical establishment will not allow—certainly not the
(neo)Foucaultians and the Badiouians, perhaps not even the Derrideans—since what we
are dealing with here is not the saying of the Event, not the inscription of the Event into
language or into speech, but saying as the Event, saying as eventful and not as an
eventuality.
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As is the case for all speech, différance is an evental rhetoric’s necessary
condition. It is not, however, sufficient. Derrida’s theorization of différance as “the
nonfull, nonsimple ‘origin’” of all symbolization or as “the structured and differing origin
of differences”ii simply cannot account for a rhetoric that is evental in the strong sense of
the term.iii So what, then, in addition to différance as the name for the economy of
signification as such is required in order that we make sense of saying as the Event,
speech as eventful and not as an eventuality? Nothing shy of the Lacanian theory of the
barred subject in relation to the lack (Real) in the Other (the Symbolic) with which comes
the distinction between full and empty speech.
According to Lacan any subject of speech is, by definition, a barred or split
subject; it is precisely the movement into the Symbolic which marks the advent of the
necessarily self-alienated “I.” Why? Because any human being becomes a subject of
predication or speech only by taking up a language and taking its place within a symbolic
order (“reality”) that is not his or her own. This is what Lacan is suggesting when he
asserts that the subject is nothing more or less than a position adopted with respect to the
Other as language or law and, hence, a “manque—tre, a want-to-be”: “the subject fails to
come forth as someone, as a particular being; in the most radical sense, he or she is not,
2
he or she has no being. The subject exists—insofar as the word has wrought him or her
from nothingness, and he or she can be spoken of, talked about, and discoursed upon.”iv
Now since the subject is founded by the signifier, it is the signifier and not socalled reality or the subject which “wields ontic clout, wresting existence from the real
that it marks and annuls.”v In creating a “reality,” “the letter kills” or cancels out the real:
“the system of language,” Lacan explains, “at whatever point you take hold of it, never
results in an index finger directly indicating a point of reality; it’s the whole of reality that
is covered by the entire network of language.”vi In the constitution of a subject, a certain
positive ontological condition or real is de-terminated, relegated to non-existence. It is
this foundational loss as constitutive of the desiring subject that, as I have noted
elsewhere, distinguishes Lacanian psychoanalysis from a poststructuralist “everything is
discourse” approach. Everything is not discourse; there is the Real.vii Indeed, it is the
insistence of the Real that sets the Lacanian barred subject unambiguously apart from the
poststructuralist conception of subject-positions. As Slavoj Zizek has written,
In ‘post-structuralism’, the subject is usually reduced to so-called subjectivation,
he [sic] is conceived as an effect of a fundamentally non-subjective process: the
subject is always caught in, traversed by the pre-subjective process (of ‘writing’,
of ‘desire’ and so on) and the emphasis is on the individuals’ different modes of
‘experiencing’, ‘living’ their positions as ‘subjects’, ‘actors’, ‘agents’ of the
historical process. . . .
But with Lacan, we have quite another notion of the subject. To put it
simply: if we make an abstraction, if we subtract all the richness of the different
modes of subjectivation, all the fullness of experience present in the way the
individuals are ‘living’ their subject-positions, what remains is an empty place
which was filled out with this richness; this original void, this lack of symbolic
structure, is the subject, the subject of the signifier. The subject is therefore to be
strictly opposed to the effect of subjectivation: what the subjectivation masks is
not a pre- or trans-subjective process of writing but a lack in the structure, a lack
which is the subject.viii
Hence, it would be a mistake to understand the Real as “that which is beside meaning and
in which meaning inscribes itself in order to realize itself;” instead, the Lacanian Real
“spells from the intimate fault line in the symbolic system.”ix The Real is that which,
thanks to the symbolic incision, has existence but not substance, an existence discernable
only by virtue of a careful accounting of its (de)structuring effects.
Of the many (de)structuring effects of the Real, it is the difference between what
Lacan named empty speech (parole vide) and full speech (parole pleine) that holds
singular significance for tendering a theorization of evental rhetoric. Put all too
schematically (the distinction is not nearly as clear or clean as one might wish and as this
statement will inadvertently suggest since full speech is always delivered in and through
the discourse at hand), in the opposition between empty and full speech, the former is on
the side of meaning, reference, and representation, in the usual sense of the terms, while
the latter is on the side of a truth and its a-signifying but institutive effects. Empty
speech is, then, Lacan’s name for all those speech acts—indeed, the vast majority of
utterances—that accord with the shared symbolic code and its correlative rationality, and
3
that together constitute the domain of reference we call reality and Lacan calls the
Symbolic. As Mikkel Borsh-Jacobson rightly noted in a study that years ago explored the
entailments of the Lacanian distinction that I wish to put to new theoretical use today,
empty speech vigorously supports the representational illusion that Lacan persistently
denounced:
Irresistibly, [empty speech] makes us believe in the reality of which it speaks, a
reality that it then purports to represent (adequately, correctly, precisely, and so
on), just as it makes us believe in “the reality of the subject beyond the wall of
language,” as if this subject had already been something before the speech in
which he makes himself [sic] recognized. This is what Lacan calls the “mistaken
notion of ‘language as a sign’;” whereas “the world of words . . . creates the world
of things” and the symbol “makes [the] man,” language presents itself as a sign
that represents, communicates, signals, facilitates something for someone. And
this is why it creates a “wall;” not at all because it would prevent anyone from
attaining the thing itself but, on the contrary, because it makes us believe that
there are objects and/or subjects “behind the wall,” whereas it is actually the wall
that is the thing itself.x
With an eye to evental rhetoric, what must be understood is that the problem with empty
speech is not merely that it sustains or even promotes our wrongheaded over-investment
in appearances or so-called reality; even more, by redoubling our belief in signification’s
noumenal beyond, speech that is stuffed with meaning simultaneously delivers us over to
the grand illusion of the signified, the spatial and temporal coordinates of the Symbolic,
and likewise, then, to finitude’s grip.xi
By contrast, if speech is full in the Lacanian sense it is so not because it transmits
a meaning or transports a message from a speaker to an audience. Full speech performs
something more, something quite other, since it refuses the closure of representation that
induces the referential illusion or the mistaken belief that something obtains in itself on
the other side of the empire of signs. Indeed, in breaking with and against the
conventional code, the symbolic value of full speech is a consequence not of the
utterance’s conformity with the given rules of making good sense and reference but, quite
to the contrary, a virtue of its working in excess of those rules of formation. In Lacan’s
own words, the import of full speech “remains in its difference from the code.”xii
But what is it, then, that full speech says? The short answer to the question is,
“absolutely nothing,” since full speech works not on the level of the statement but, rather,
on the level of enunciation. Hence, the truth of the matter is that full speech does not
merely speak about or represent some existent thing (be it an object, idea or relation) or
even about the truth of what has been said. It “communicates nothing—nothing, Lacan
says, but ‘the existence of communication’.”xiii He elaborates,
Speech appears all the more truly to be speech in that its truth is founded less on
what is called “adequacy to the thing”: thus, paradoxically, [full or] true speech is
opposed to [empty speech or] true discourse; their truths are distinguished by the
fact that [full or] true speech constitutes the recognition by the subjects of their
beings, in which they are inter-ested, whereas [empty speech or] true discourse is
4
constituted by knowledge of the real [or so-called reality], insofar as the subject
aims for it in objects.xiv
In this passage, the affinity between Lacan’s parsing out of full and empty speech and J.
L. Austin’s distinction between performative and constative utterances begins to make
itself felt. Like the performative speech act, full speech is constitutive rather than
representational, which is to say it does not point to something—objective or
subjective—before or beyond itself; instead, it institutes a singular intersubjective
relation or, to use Lacan’s own term, “pact.” Here, again, Borch-Jacobsen’s reading of
Lacanian full speech as a reiteration of Speech Act Theory is illuminating:
If speech, in Lacan, is said to be “full,” this is because he understands it in a
quasi-feudal sense: full, authentic speech . . . is the speech in which one gives
one’s word, one’s fealty (from the same root, fides, as “faith”). When I sign a
contract, when I say “I do” before a justice of the peace, or when I recognize
someone as my master (or my disciple), I neither communicate nor give anything
but my word, and yet that word binds me, it “performs.” In fact, the rare
examples of full speech that Lacan gives are all of this type: “You are my wife.”
“You are my master.” “You are the one who will follow me.” They are words
that not only have no referents before their enunciation but also have no signified
other than themselves. In Lacan’s terms, they “are first and foremost signifiers of
the pact that they constitute as signified.” Indeed, the given word does not
represent the pact of speech, any more than it contents itself with being its
secondary and exterior sign or record. It is the pact itself, insofar as its utterance
(the act of giving one’s word) accomplishes the act that it designates or enunciates
(that is, the act of giving one’s word).xv
Useful to be sure, but only as far as it goes since an obvious question imposes itself here:
Is every performative utterance in Austin’s sense full speech in Lacan’s sense? Not
likely since, if this were the case, instances of full speech would not be nearly so rare as
Lacan insists. So what is the crucial difference to which Borch-Jacobsen remains blind
and we must attend? How are we to draw the line between the performative utterance and
full speech?
First of all, let it be said again that doing so depends upon a Lacanian revolution
in the way we conceptualize speech acts, rhetorical acts and, more broadly still, the
communication process, thereby disabusing ourselves of one of our most fundamental but
mistaken—indeed, phantasmatic—theoretical investments. Following Lacan but simply
put, we must give up the ghost of thinking the communication process in general and,
likewise, speech acts and rhetorical acts as dyadic affairs—as something that takes place
between, say, a sender and a receiver, one interlocutor and other, a speaker and an
audience. Typically there are never only two but always at least three parties to acts of
speech, constative or peformative, deliberative or forensic or epideictic, since, as was
noted above, almost all communication is routed through the Symbolic or big Other. In
other words, to this point and almost without exception we have theorized
communication practices as wholly specular and imaginary occurrences, neglecting
altogether the absent cause that structures those interactions, the subjective mechanism by
means of which those speaking and listening beings are integrated into a given sociosymbolic field. That subjective mechanism is, of course, what Lacan calls the ego-ideal
5
(I(O)), the point of symbolic identification that lends to nearly all human (inter)action its
meaning and force. Indeed, it is our identification with a point (that is always absent in
its positive sense) from which we are being observed (be it the Law, a God, the Name of
the Father) that animates most acts, orchestrates most speech.xvi To contend with the
Symbolic and the ego-ideal is, therefore, to confound in no small measure the distinction
between constative and performative speech. The lesson here, however, is not, pace
Derrida, that all speech acts are performative in a certain sense thanks to “the general
graphematic structure of every ‘communication’.”xvii Instead, what this means is that
according to Lacan almost all speech acts are constative utterances in a fundamental
sense that Raoul Moati explains in this way:
What Austin calls the illocutionary force of speech, that which does rather than
describes, comes from the Other. It is received by the subject without its
awareness, to the degree that it believes (or, rather, mistakenly believes) the
illusion that the source of the illocutionary value of its message arises from his
own ego, or from that which the Gricean and new Gricean would call his
intentions of discourse. This lack of awareness of the source of the illocutionary
force of its statements belongs to the empty word in which the subject remains
powerless to recognize that the establishing symbolic force of his speech comes
from the big Other; for example, in the paradigmatic declarations such as “You
are my master” or “You are my wife.”xviii
Almost all speech acts, then, as little more or less than verifications of a symbolic pact
that proceeds all meaningful utterance; almost all speech as acts that do not institute but,
instead, simply bear witness—albeit typically unawares to the speaker—to a symbolic
relation and its concomitant mandate which lends meaning to the subject and
illocutionary force to the utterance. In other words, “You are my master” or “You are
my wife” in most instances must be understood as inverted reiterations of “I am your
disciple” or “I am your husband”—one might aptly call them duped performatives whose
source and symbolic efficiency derives not from the ego but the big Other.
At this theoretical juncture it is tempting to understand full speech as the duped
performative’s enlightened correlate, as nothing more than its sincere instantiation. That
is to say, as with empty speech, the illocutionary force of full speech would be
attributable to the big Other; however, in the case of the latter the speaking subject would
know it. Full speech, then, as the authentic utterance of a self-conscious subject who
fully assumes his or her humble position vis-à-vis the big Other. And, indeed, this is the
direction in which Borch-Jacobsen’s treatment of the distinction in the early work of
Lacan moves: “Full, true speech, in this sense, says nothing other than what empty, lying
speech says. But it says that it says (it).”xix But as Maoti suggests, herein lies at least one
good reason to follow Lacan’s thinking to the end of the line: by the 1950s and, thus,
with the delivery of the Séminaires on ethics and his full-throttled investigation into the
Real emerges a dramatically more robust conception of full speech, which is to say one
that does not always already attribute the performative—and therefore constitutive and
eventful—force of speech to the big Other but to speakers and audiences themselves.
If in the early work Lacan conceptualizes full speech as the discourse of a subject
in his or her resigned-heroic acceptance of a primordial symbolic pact, in the later work
6
he goes much further, affirming in those seminars the capacity of speakers to do real
things with words on condition that those words open onto the Real. So what is this Real
onto which full speech or an evental rhetoric opens? How does it do so? And what,
exactly, is its value, effect or force? Perhaps the most basic and, for the purposes of
theorizing an evental rhetoric, most pertinent and succinct exegesis of the Lacanian Real
that emerges in the Seminars appears in Slavoj Zizek’s regularly referenced The Sublime
Object of Ideology wherein he wrote, “[t]oday, it is a commonplace that the Lacanian
subject is divided, crossed-out, identical to a lack in a signifying chain. However, the
most radical dimension of Lacanian theory lies not in recognizing this fact but in
realizing that the big Other, the symbolic order itself, is also barré, crossed-out, by a
fundamental impossibility, structured around an impossible/traumatic kernel, around a
central lack.”xx The Real is, then, quite simply Lacan’s name for that lack in the Symbolic
with respect to which, it is significant to note, all ideologies labor tirelessly. Indeed,
concealing or covering over the fundamental impossibility of a symbolic order that, so to
speak, ‘has it all’ or ‘is the all’ is the tenacious use to which all available modes of
representation are put by any existent regime whatsoever. The first order of business of
every ideology, in other words, is to work up what Lacan calls an “absolute signification”
and what Zizek means by fantasy, “the frame through which we experience the world as
consistent and meaningful—the a priori space within which the particular effects of
signification take place.”xxi
Now it is not at all immaterial that the big Other or Symbolic is, according to
Lacan, persistently vexed by its Real since were that not the case the Symbolic (again,
what we call “reality”) would be air-tight, an enclosure from which it would be
impossible to escape, thereby leaving human beings, as Zizek writes, no other alternative
than their “radical alienation in the other:”
So it is precisely this lack in the Other which enables the subject to achieve a kind
of ‘de-alienation’ called by Lacan separation: not in the sense that the subject
experiences that now he is separate for ever from the object by the barrier of
language, but that the object is separated from the Other itself, that the Other
itself ‘hasn’t got it’, hasn’t got the final answer—that is to say, is in itself blocked,
desiring . . . .xxii
Having some kind of access to or awareness of the Real of every Symbolic is clearly,
then, the fundamental condition of possibility for derailing the endless ordinary run of
things.xxiii As Zizek has stated on near countless occasions: “‘Naïve’ people are not those
who think that we can break out of our ordinary reality; ‘naïve’ people are those who
presuppose this reality as an ontologically self-sufficient given.”xxiv However for Zizek
and ever more so for Alain Badiou, it is always the radical act or event and not the radical
act of speech that offers the way out of this recurring ideological impasse.xxv On this
count I think they are both wrong. Triggering that awareness of the limit of the Symbolic
is, I submit, the charge of full speech and the accomplishment of an admittedly rare but
evental rhetoric.
Full speech and evental rhetoric are discursive interventions that function as
ground zero for fashioning our way out of mistaking the given for “the all” and thereby
delivering ourselves over in advance to its endless repetitive cycle—finitude’s final and
7
triumphant score. However, full speech and evental rhetoric achieves its aim not by
assaulting the Symbolic with its own alterative truth (say, for example, “these are our real
interests that, since time immemorial, have been voraciously withheld from our view”)
even when, particularly when, the truth-to-be-told holds itself in sworn fidelity to the
Event that is the occasion for utterance. Like the discourse it struggles against and seeks
to overcome, this is a discourse predicated on the logic of adequation between
signification and significance, a logic that perpetuates rather than problematizes the
binding power of the existing regime. By contrast, full speech and evental rhetoric lend a
sense of the nothing ‘inside’ the Symbolic, cast a doubt on its capacity to represent it all,
by shamelessly calling attention to what Joan Copjec terms the Symbolic’s own “void in
Being” in a moment of verbal anamorphosis whereby the gaze (another name for the egoideal or the projected point from which we take ourselves to be observed) is detached
from the object.xxvi In other words, paradoxical as it may at first seem, full speech and
evental rhetoric works not through the successful aggregation of the richest or most
meaningful signs in order to make good sense; everything must be made to move in the
opposite direction, toward non-sense. It is on the emptying out of the given regime’s
most salient signs in which the trace of the Other or ego-ideal is inevitably to be found
that the advent of something other depends. To paraphrase Lacan, the failure of
representation—the utter impoverishment of the sign into mere signifier—is full speech’s
and evental rhetoric’s positive condition.
One theoretical challenge remains: namely, to specify an evental rhetoric’s value,
effect or force. What real things can speakers do with words or particularly salient signs
that, by virtue of their having been emptied out and made into mere signifiers, are by
definition situated in a relation of excess to the symbolic system, which is to say
uncodifiable in its terms and logics? Here, again, and provided it is stitched to the later
lessons in the Real, instruction may be found in Lacan’s early exegesis of the difference
between empty and full speech wherein he invites all to think seriously about the
perlocutionary rather than the illocutionary effects of symbolic acts. That is to say, there
he encourages us to shift our focus from what is done in the saying to what is done by the
saying; there, in a word, he recalls us to the criticality of audience.
In that now infamous lecture delivered at the Institute of Psychology at the
University of Rome in September of 1953 (a lecture whose resourcefulness to the study
of communication and rhetoric is, I suspect, as potentially profound as our failure to
attend to it is strange) over the long course of which Lacan makes visible “the inadequacy
of the conception of language as signs,” the exfoliation of the differences between empty
and full speech serving as the lynch pin of his critique of Saussure, Lacan says: “the
speech value of a language is gauged by the intersubjectivity of the ‘we’ it takes on.”xxvii
Given in this justification for the analyst’s movement into full speech is the identification
of the basic formula for and perlocutionary consequences of evental rhetoric, the only
rhetoric, I dare now to suggest, fit to be called democratic in the radical sense. It is a
rhetoric that enacts a doubled erasure, the emptying out of two salient signs, speaker and
audience, thereby freeing both from the symbolic fate the big Other consigns. Liberated
from the servitude that is situation or, to borrow from the lexicon of Badiou but to work
against the social ontology it labors to put in place, subtracted completely from the
8
Symbolic, it is a rhetoric that clears the way for its perlocutionary effect—the emergence
of a “we” whose prospects will not be de-termined by the given horizon of what appears
to be possible since its very emergence constitutes a breach in the very contours of
impossible. Here then, near the end, I shall put the words of Lacan that I cited almost at
the start to new use:
[Evental rhetoric] appears all the more truly to be speech in that its truth is
founded less on what is called “adequacy to the thing”: thus, paradoxically,
[evental rhetoric] is opposed to [situational rhetoric]; their truths are distinguished
by the fact that [evental rhetoric] constitutes the recognition by the subjects of
their beings, in which they are inter-ested, whereas [situational rhetoric] is
constituted by knowledge of the real, insofar as the subject aims for it in
objects.xxviii
Surely this is what Lacan had in mind or at least would allow when he spoke of the
subject as nothing but the signifier of the Real.
While they must be mentioned, there is neither the time nor the pages here to even
begin to develop three additional propositions that follow logically from my thesis:
One: Evental rhetoric takes the form of the exorbitant demand.
Two: Evental rhetoric works by and through the logic of sublimation and not by
and through the logic of representation or articulation.
Three: Evental rhetoric does not abide the binary logics of the timely and
untimely, the appropriate and inappropriate, or the possible and
impossible; it forces their displacement that, with Freud and Lacan, I
would call the uncanny.
I am obliged by the situation to leave those for another day.
i
On the doubled logic of the supplement see Jacques Derrida, of Grammatology, trans.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974),
141-157.
ii
Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s
Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University
Press, 1973), 141.
iii
Indeed no epistemology, however cleansed, can do the work of ontology. It is
important to note that for the same reason the “epistemic turn” in rhetoric similarly begs
the ontological question and is thereby subject to the critique that Lacan leveled against
Descartes: one cannot begin with the presumption of the subject that knows (anything).
iv
Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 52.
v
Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 53.
9
vi
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III: The Psychoses, ed. JacquesAlain Miler, trans. Russell Grigg (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1993), 32.
vii
For an extend discussion of the various and even competing treatments of the Lacanian
Real see, Barbara A. Biescker, "Rhetoric and the 'New' Psychoanalysis: What's the Real
Problem? or Framing the Problem of the Real." Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998):
222-259.
viii
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989),
174-175.
ix
Raoul Moati, “The Performative: From Ordinary Conventions to the Real,” Lacanian
Inc., http://www.lacan.com/symptom (downloaded September 12, 2008), 8.
x
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 1991), 137. Italics and ellipses in original.
xi
Notably, what the Lacanian deconstruction (vis-à-vis a rereading of Freud’s theory of
the drive[s]) can teach us is that “transcendence” or human freedom resides not between
being and its beyond but, to the contrary, a splitting within being or appearance itself.
This is crucial for politics as it identifies and racially challenges even Michel Foucault’s
retheorization of power and resistance. With Lacan’s help, one can acknowledge that
there is no being outside of power; however, there is a being outside within power. For a
brilliant working-through of this argument to which the present essay is deeply indebted
see, Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2004).
xii
Maoti, “The Performative,” 7.
xiii
Cited in Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, 138. For an outstanding discussion of why full
speech is not a metalanguage see pages 110-139 of this book.
xiv
Cited in Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, 137.
xv
Cited in Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, 140.
xvi
The ego-ideal is, in other words, the image I want to be, whereas the ideal-ego is the
point from which I ‘decide’ to take that image on, the point from which I appear likeable
to myself. Importantly, symbolic identification structures imaginary identification.
Hence, symbolic identification is a projection and imaginary identification is an
introjection
xvii
Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston,
Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 19.
xviii
Moati, “The Peformative,” 1. A number of the significant moves in my argument
take their cues from Maoti, especially the upcoming case that is made for the centrality of
the perlocutionary speech act, but takes off in a distinct direction.
xix
Borch-Jacoben, Lacan, 139.
xx
Zizek, Sublime, 122.
xxi
Zizek, Sublime, 123.
xxii
Zizek, Sublime, 122.
xxiii
One should bear in mind that the “endless run of things,” can be, as is the case in our
neoliberal present, organized by the mandate that “everything must change.” For an
elaboration on this precise point, see Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London
and New York: Verso, 2008), esp. pages 337-414. For a Lacanian critique of and
corrective to the “endless run of things” as bio-political capture see Joan Copjec’s “The
10
Tomb of Perseverance: On Antigone,” Imagine, 12-47. Here we move from the question
of violence (thought outside the ethical closure, to the extent that is possible) and enter
the terrain of cruelty.
xxiv
Slavoj Zizek, Did Someone Say Totalitarianism? (London and New York: Verso,
2001), 174.
xxv
This would be one way of accounting for Zizek’s insistence upon the centrality of The
Party in his theory of revolutionary politics. If speech is always after the fact of the
event, the party is necessary to its political disclosure and use. For an alternative account
of the perseverance of The Party in Zizek’s work see Jodi Dean, Zizek’s Politics (New
York: Routledge, 2006), 179-203.
xxvi
Copjec, Imagine, 35. My argument on the emptying out of the sign is deeply indebted
to Parveen Adams’ account of visual anamorphosis in The Emptiness of the Image:
Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
xxvii
Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: W.W. Norton,
2006), 247.
xxviii
Cited in Borch-Jacobsen, 137.