Whither Ideology? Toward a Different Take on Enjoyment as a Political Factor

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Notes

I place the word democracy in parenthesis to underscore my provisional use of it, warranted only by my not having a better name.

In a recent essay, “Communism of the Intellect, Communism of the Will,” Peter Hallward has addressed deftly the deadening implications of this line of thought for the communist project.

This short forum piece may be rightfully read as a first attempt to flesh out in truncated form the second and third of my four theses on evental rhetoric (Biesecker 2010): one, evental rhetoric is more than performative in Derrida's sense since it is full speech in the Lacanian sense; two, evental rhetoric takes the form of the exorbitant demand; three, evental rhetoric works by and through the logic of sublimation and not by and through the logic of representation or articulation; four, 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.

Here I am compelled to highlight what is for me Ernesto's Laclau's exceedingly problematic conceptualization of the “demand” in On Populist Reason (2005). While he is to be credited for attending to the role affect plays in the rhetorical production of hegemony, and for being the first major theorist to take seriously the political implications of Copjec's work on sublimation, he seems to me to have imported a domesticated account of her theorization of sublimation, the consequences of which are disastrous for radical politics. In the midst of the production of chains of equivalence, he does not attend at all to the ways in which sublimation shatters the subject's previous sense of self and world. As a result, “demand” in Laclau's work is much more akin to “need” in Lacan's.

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Notes on contributors

Barbara A. Biesecker

Barbara A. Biesecker is Professor and Head of the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia in Athens.