Slavoj Žižek - Incontinence of the Void – Economico–Philosophical Spandrels

Short Circuits

Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupani, and Slavoj iek, editors

The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, by Slavoj iek

The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsches Philosophy of the Two, by Alenka Zupani

Is Oedipus Online? Siting Freud after Freud, by Jerry Aline Flieger

Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK, by Alexei Monroe

The Parallax View, by Slavoj iek

A Voice and Nothing More, by Mladen Dolar

Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan, by Lorenzo Chiesa

The Odd One In: On Comedy, by Alenka Zupani

The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, by Slavoj iek and John Milbank, edited by Creston Davis

Interface Fantasy: A Lacanian Cyborg Ontology, by Andr Nusselder

Lacan at the Scene, by Henry Bond

Laughter: Notes on a Passion, by Anca Parvulescu

All for Nothing: Hamlets Negativity, by Andrew Cutrofello

The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis, by Aaron Schuster

The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan, by Lorenzo Chiesa

What Is Sex?, by Alenka Zupani

Liquidation World: On the Art of Living Absently, by Alexi Kukuljevic

Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels, by Slavoj iek

Slavoj iek

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-0-262-03681-8

eISBN 9780262342513

ePub Version 1.0

A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the networkfaulty, of course, from the standpoint of the networks smooth functioning. Is not the shock of short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading? Is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion), and read it in a short-circuiting way, through the lens of a minor author, text, or conceptual apparatus (minor should be understood here in Deleuzes sense: not of lesser quality, but marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology, or dealing with a lower, less dignified topic)? If the minor reference is well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions. This is what Marx, among others, did with philosophy and religion (short-circuiting philosophical speculation through the lens of political economy, that is to say, economic speculation); this is what Freud and Nietzsche did with morality (short-circuiting the highest ethical notions through the lens of the unconscious libid.inal economy). What such a reading achieves is not a simple desublimation, a reduction of the higher intellectual content to its lower economic or libid.inal cause; the aim of such an approach is, rather, the inherent decentering of the interpreted text, which brings to light its unthought, its disavowed presuppositions and consequences.

And this is what Short Circuits wants to do, again and again. The underlying premise of the series is that Lacanian psychoanalysis is a privileged instrument of such an approach, whose purpose is to illuminate a standard text or ideological formation, making it readable in a totally new waythe long history of Lacanian interventions in philosophy, religion, the arts (from the visual arts to the cinema, music, and literature), ideology, and politics justifies this premise. This, then, is not a new series of books on psychoanalysis, but a series of connections in the Freudian fieldof short Lacanian interventions in art, philosophy, theology, and ideology.

Short Circuits intends to revive a practice of reading which confronts a classic text, author, or notion with its own hidden presuppositions, and thus reveals its disavowed truth. The basic criterion for the texts that will be published is that they effectuate such a theoretical short circuit. After reading a book in this series, the reader should not simply have learned something new: the point is, rather, to make him or her aware of anotherdisturbingside of something he or she knew all the time.

Slavoj iek

Incontinent the void. The zenith. Evening again. When not night it will be evening. Death again of deathless day. On one hand embers. On the other ashes. Day without end won and lost. Unseen.

Samuel Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said

The term spandrels originated in architecture (where it designated the space between a curved figure and a rectangular rectilinear surround) and was then appropriated by evolutionary biology, where it stands for features of an organism arising as byproducts, rather than adaptations, that have no clear benefit for the organisms fitness and survival; however, precisely as such, they can be ex-apted and acquire a new unexpected role crucial to the organisms functioning. For Gould and Lewontin, many functions of the human brain, especially language, emerged as spandrels. Reflections in this book operate in the same way: they fill in the empty spaces that emerge in the interstices between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the critique of political economy. It seems that today the most interesting theoretical interventions emerge in such interstices, without clearly and fully belonging to any particular field.

This spandrelization of the content in no way implies a confused, nonsystematic structure. The books three parts follow the triad of UPS: the universal dimension of philosophy, the particular dimension of sexual difference, the singular dimension of the critique of political economy. The passage from one dimension to another is strictly immanent: the ontological Void of the barred One is accessible only through the impasses of sexuation, and the ongoing prospect of the abolition of sexuality, i.e., of the change in human nature itself, opened up by the technoscientific progress of global capitalism, compels us to shift the focus to the critique of political economy. Each of the two parts of the book deals with these passages: Part I (SOS: Sexuality, Ontology, Subjectivity) with the passage from ontology to sexuation; Part II (The Belated Actuality of Marxs Critique of Political Economy) with the passage from sexuation to the critique of political economy.

In the dimension of philosophy, (1) the limit of ontology is first approached through the notion of an excessive element, an element structurally out of place that gives body to radical negativity; (2) this negativity inscribes itself into the order of being as the antagonism of sexual difference, which is why the human subject is constitutively sexualized; (3) a unified theory of the four discourses and the formulas of sexuation is outlined; (4) the explosive combination of biogenetics and digitization clearly discernible in todays global capitalism opens up the prospect of a nonsexual reproduction of life, and thus poses a threat to the very existence of subjectivity.

In the dimension of the