"Lacanian psychoanalysis requires what can only be called a labyrinthine, Byzantine science of composition, one which follows an extremely arbitrary (and thus tenuous, i.e. not ultimately convincing) train of thought, all couched in a psychotically precise-yet-disgusting psychoanalytic diction. The disorienting strangeness of the whole edifice is bolstered by a recourse to paradox and other left turns that I can never predict. As such, I am wholly unqualified to comment upon the technical accuracy of much of Zizek's philosophy here, especially in his opening salvos. I'm suspicious that these were not actually intending to say anything very new, but instead for two other purposes: A) as a shibboleth to convince his peers that he's sophisticated and intelligent enough to hang with them, which he certainly sounds like he is, and B) to discourage all readers who have not the fortitude to press on. This latter point is the more interesting and the more disheartening, not least because most of leftism's pretensions to help the marginalized are hindered by the impenetrability of their prose. But the other more interesting part of this is that the prose becomes easier to read as you go along. He gives more concrete examples and simplifies things considerably as it progresses. This wasn't because I ended up understanding his starting argumentation any better; I didn't and still don't. But it made me wonder why he didn't maintain that more accessible voice throughout the text. In other words, what prevented him? He certainly is capable of it; none of his later texts or talks are as labyrinthine, but also none of them are as profound or as technical. It was his debut book in English, so maybe he was overcompensating. We can leave it at that.

The problem with so many of Zizek's talks is that he speaks of ideology as if the people listening to him already know what he means by that. Here, he finally does the work of laying out what they are, and he infuses a Chestertonian/Lacanian comfort with paradox into them in order to lay bare some interesting concepts, some of which I had already arrived at, albeit through more theological avenues. What he means by ideology is not the generic concept that random political commentators throw around, like Jordan Peterson, but instead in the original Marxist way, where an organizing idea contains within itself contradictions that are necessary to its structure. The confusing thing about ideologies is that they are false because of those contradictions, but that illogical core imputes to them an incredible strength to reject criticism.

In my opinion, the purest form of ideology we see today is the pseudointellectual certainty of conspiracy theorists. Zizek often uses antisemitism in this book as an example of how different aspects of ideology function, an occurrence so frequent to the point that it almost becomes suspicious, but I'd bet he chose it because, at least back in the 80s when he wrote this, it was an extremely un-controversial topic. Now, not so much. But anyway, the one I've seen most in my experience is explained by Zizek in this way: the average person who has a Jewish neighbor notices that despite the propaganda, they seem normal (aren't greedy, killing Christian children for their blood, etc.), but they only appear normal because "You see how dangerous they really are? It is difficult to recognize their real nature. They hide it behind the mask of everyday appearance - and it is exactly this hiding of one's real nature, this duplicity, that is a basic feature of the Jewish nature." Converting this to conspiracy theorists, they find any flimsy evidence to support their cause, but any denials/counter-arguments from the government or other organizations are also evidence that they're right. If you agree with them, they're overjoyed; if you disagree, they're even happier, because it "proves" that they're "onto something," that they've "touched a nerve" and have progressed past all of you "sheeple."

Thankfully, however, Zizek does not peddle his own conspiracy-thinking mindset, and actually clarifies an oversimplification I used to believe about leftist rhetoric:

In the more sophisticated versions of the critics of ideology - developed by the Frankfurt School, for example - it is not just a question of seeing things (that is, social reality) as they 'really are', of throwing away the distorting spectacles of ideology; the main point is to see how the reality itself cannot reproduce itself without this so called ideological mystification. The mask is not simply hiding the real state of things; the ideological distortion is written into its very essence.

We find, then, the paradox of a being which can reproduce itself only in so far as it is misrecognized and overlooked: the moment we see it 'as it really is', this being dissolves itself into nothingness or, more precisely, it changes into another kind of reality. That is why we must avoid the simple metaphors of demasking, of throwing away the veils which are supposed to hide the naked reality.



Thus when Sontag complains of "interpretations" which attempt to "dig behind" a text to find what it's "hiding," she might actually be attacking either A) a strawman/oversimplification or B) a common misunderstanding among the less-intelligent of the postmodernists/post-structuralists. What Zizek mentions about the "misrecognition" is fascinating to me, not just because it ties back to the definition of ideology I formulated earlier, but because of how relatable it is; I personally have read so many poems where mis-reading a word or phrase actually made the line so much more poetic and impressive. Sometimes I've taken that mis-reading and made it into the first line of one of my own poems, because the accident was so much better than the intentioned text.

I've noticed that this accidental attribution of meaning to something random (or, simply not so well-done) is often quite an important way for us to make meaning out of the world (it might be the way that we usually make meaning out of our lives when we think back on our past/memories). Zizek lays this out in two main quotes:

Symptoms are meaningless traces, their meaning is not discovered, excavated from the hidden depth of the past, but constructed retroactively - the analysis produces the truth; that is, the signifying frame which gives the symptoms their symbolic place and meaning. As soon as we enter the symbolic order, the past is always present in the form of historical tradition and the meaning of these traces is not given; it changes continually with the transformations of the signifier's network. � it is this elaboration which decides retroactively what they 'will have been.'

&

If we want to spare ourselves the painful roundabout route through the misrecognition, we miss the Truth itself: only the 'working-through' of the misrecognition allows us to accede to the true nature of the other and at the same time to overcome our own deficiency - for Darcy, to free himselfofhis false pride; for Elizabeth, to get rid of her prejudices.


The first quote is interesting because it concludes with this inevitability or momentum we feel in these retroactive re-constructions that gives us the sense of confirmation, that it in fact always was that way. It's interesting how neutrally Zizek describes this process, because I would assume he'd be suspicious of it, given how much it sounds like this is a great recipe for getting contradictions and thus an ideology. But maybe we get some sort of answer in the second quote, namely that this misrecognition is something we naturally try to avoid when reconstructing the past, and so it's actually a place of paradoxical wisdom, rather than a breeding ground for ideological contradiction? But this forces me to ask: what's the difference between a Chestertonian paradox (which he loves to do, albeit in his own, Lacanian way) and an ideological contradiction? Is there not wisdom and folly in both?

And is there not to some extent great fun in playing the game, even if (or rather especially when) it's "false" or "fake" or "artificial" (or whatever loaded label you want to use)? When Zizek quoted "In other words: 'they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it'", I immediately thought of the entirety of Pride and Prejudice, which he mentions in this book. In a recent Letterboxd review of the movie, I asked myself why so many 'emancipated' young women love the movie. The conclusion I came to was that women simply want someone to play the old romance game with them. The game doesn't have obvious winners and losers, it's not that kind, which is how men often misunderstand it. It's also not pernicious in its artificiality, like a lot of killjoy feminists and incels like to assume. It's fun precisely because we're aware of the artificiality of the whole thing. It's thrilling because we aren't just animals who rape our mates, we're (supposedly) cultured people who "court" (whatever that looks like) potential partners in a long, convoluted, indirect, and ultimately fun way. Zizek himself is enough of a romantic that he would understand this, but I'm surprised he didn't remark on it; in my opinion, it was all sitting right there.

I would actually continue this train of thought even further: not only is ideology fun and not necessarily a bad thing, but it's also to some extent unavoidable. I'm here having in mind my own definition of "religion" (meaning worship of any "god" or "gods" which you value), but it even works in the narrower sense that Zizek is talking about. For example:

...the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not that of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way - one of many ways - to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.


The problem with Marxist analysis is that it's too sincere; it operates from a worldview which assumes that people sincerely follow ideology and that, when given the "spectacles" to "see through" ideology, they would naturally repudiate ideology. But we love it! Contrary to what the over-excited social critics warn us of, the Kool-Aid doesn't have any cyanide in it, or at least not enough that it's outright killed anyone at the party yet, so we're going to keep drinking it. The thing I've always been suspicious of is exactly the psychoanalytic assumption of suspicion. As Nietzsche would point out, it pays a pernicious fealty to platonic (and thus Christian, to some extent) notions of "truth" and "falsehood;" this drives psychoanalysis's moralistic seeking for illusion-smashing. That's one problem, plus Derrida's classic complaint that many people use "psychoanalysis to find psychoanalysis." I was reminded of all of this in the following quote:

...the positive reasons given by ideology to justify this request - to make us obey ideological form - are there only to conceal this fact: in other words, to conceal the surplus-enjoyment proper to the ideological form as such.


Though Zizek largely does a great job of avoiding this pitfall, here he slips straight into it, especially with that pernicious word "conceal," which I would argue ascribes agency and intentionality to whoever created an ideology. But that's the thing; rarely can you ever point to one person or group and say they made an ideology. They evolve too organically and diffusely (and if they didn't, they wouldn't catch on, like memes), and thus there's no wind in the sails of conspiracy theorists who argue to the contrary. This is the only remaining place where leftist criticism does still stink a little of such pseudointellectualism, but maybe I'm jumping the gun because I haven't this or that other critic who addresses this. I'm sure that if I asked Zizek a question about this, he'd reply with a long digression that would include several dirty jokes and wouldn't ever really answer my question. The thing is that I wouldn't really mind, since even if you don't understand everything that comes out of Zizek's mouth (or his pen), it's almost always still enjoyable, and it never feels like wasted time. Thanks Slavoj, you're a real one."