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Abstract
Slavoj Žižek’s view of the Balkans has recently been critiqued as procolonial, in that he casts the Balkans as the unconscious of Europe and therefore deprives it of the cogito, which remains definitive of Europe. This critique, with its Cartesian and Lacanian implications, bears on the very constitution of Žižek’s critical gesture, because it tends to homogenise both psychoanalysis and the philosophy Lacanian psychoanalysis engages with into colonialism. Taking up Žižek’s Marx, particularly the way in which his Marx comes together with the Balkans in The Fragile Absolute, I argue that the Balkans in Žižek traces the metonymic logic of the international which dehomogenises Europe to begin with and displaces the logic of colonialism. What emerges instead is a political imaginary where Žižek’s Lacanian script registers a shift towards configurations formative to the work of Deleuze: the shift mobilised already in Žižek’s engagement with Hitchcock’s cinema where Hitchcock labours as the specimen story of Žižek’s philosophy cum psychoanalysis.
Notes
1. In a recent interview Žižek offers a few retakes on this Cartesian place in Lacan: ‘I am not where I think’, ‘I do not think where I am’ (2010: 419). Also, Žižek says that Hitchcock is ‘no less a Cartesian than Lacan himself’, for ‘whom, as it is well known, the subject of psychoanalysis is none other than the Cartesian cogito’ (1992b: 258, 272).
2. Contrary to Žižek, some Hitchcock scholars claim that The Man Who Knew Too Much ‘is the one “Hitchcock” film he would enigmatically remake’ (Cohen, Citation2005: 8).
3. I would therefore be hesitant about adopting Bjelić’s claim that, by describing the Balkans as the unconscious of Europe, Žižek ‘links the Balkans to global capitalism and multicultural democracy and thus circumvents Balkan exceptionalism’ (2011: 315, emphasis added).
4. Žižek cites the same sentence from Deleuze in Enjoy Your Symptom!, where he focuses on The Man Who Knew Too Much, with regard to ‘the revealed phallus’. It is ‘the phallus which is not yet “sublated” (aufgehoben) in the signifier: the maternal phallus, the phallus qua sign of the incestuous link’: ‘a kind of brand attesting that the subject is caught in the desire of the other (mother), entrapped in her dream’ (Žižek Citation1992a: 128).
5. Felman demonstrates this when she argues that the promise of fatherhood, contained for Lacan in the-name-of-the-father, itself a cornerstone of the symbolic, resides in metaphor (2002: 24).
6. When Kolozova says that there is no Balkans for Žižek, only balkanisation (2011: 302), this in fact is an apt description of the metonymic labour that Žižek attaches to the Balkans. One could equally claim that, for Žižek, there is no Balkans without balkanisation. Kolozova however misplaces the Žižekian Europe, because she identifies (Western) Europe in Žižek as the normative agent of the Cartesian cogito (2011: 301). Yet Europe for Žižek seems to come into effect, as Europe, as and when it is spectrally mobilised by balkanisation; what transpires as Europe in Žižek is therefore of the same order as the Balkans; it is assembled in the metonymic and the imaginary and does not side seamlessly with the Cartesian cogito of the symbolic, or – for that matter – with the impossible inside of Freudian Todestrieb.
7. Dolar warns that ‘[t]he voice ties language to the body, but the nature of this tie is paradoxical: the voice does not belong to either’ (2006: 72). In a comment specifically on Hitchcock and Chion, Dolar says that ‘[t]he acousmatic voice is simply a voice whose source one cannot see, a voice whose origin cannot be identified, a voice one cannot place’ (2006: 61). Chion in turn designates the acousmatic mother in Hitchcock as Acousmère (see Chion, Citation1992: 196).
8. As symptomatic in this sense is Ropa, the 1934 name of the statesman to be assassinated. It gets heard alongside Sarajevo, as a kind of its acoustic metonym, in the same sweep of underanalysed sounds. This is so important to the film that the secret service agent spells out the name, emphatically, for the Lawrences, as if to bring out the irreducible difference between voice and writing. Though it spells out as R-O-P-A, it sounds like rupa, and ‘rupa’ to speakers of Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian – the languages of Sarajevo – designates a hole or a hollow or an orifice. This little excess of hearing, as eruptive as Žižek’s sara, adds however to the overvaluation of holes, crevices and orifices in the 1934 Hitchcock: the father’s quest starts with a visit to an unseemly London dentist, whose waiting room is covered with pictures of the oral orifice, the very hole where voice is produced and where the dentist is then drilling holes or is leaving them behind after tooth extraction. Also, Hitchcock’s camera repeatedly zooms to the door to his office, specially upholstered to muffle all sound yet punctured by bullet holes. Further, it is here that Abbott (Peter Lorre) lets on that the kidnapped child is ‘quiet like a little mouse, in the hole in the ground’. Finally, it transpires that the central element of the riddle, ‘the chap we’re looking for, A. Hall’, is ‘no chap at all; it’s a real hall, Albert Hall’. So A. Hall is a hall and, as such, precisely a hole, a hollow; also – as Albert Hall – it is a resounding chamber, the hole for the taking place of sound and voice, comparable to mouth. Not to mention that hall is therefore rupa, or else that rupa is hall; also that A. H. are Hitchcock’s initials.
9. Dolar hints at this position when he says that, in Hitchcock, ‘we find the mother where one would expect the father-figure’, identifying ‘Mother as the bearer of the law’ (1992: 37–9).
10. Deleuze identifies Stalinism as one such return (1998: 85–8). True, Žižek underplays this position, when he claims that it is in Stalinism, ‘in the terrible years after 1929’, that ‘one can discern a ruthless, but sincere and enthusiastic, will to a total revolutionary upheaval of the social body’ (2004b: 300). Still, the overenthusiastic portrayal of Stalinism here seems possible for Žižek only in terms of an equally enthusiastic effort to reject Deleuze: his argument is pervaded with critical references to Deleuze’s concepts, so that Deleuze remains the very terms in which to render the revolutionary.
11. One should be careful here about the distinction, in political theory, between politics and the political, or else between la politique and le politique. Further, when remarking on Europe as spectral to begin with, this ‘dramaturgy’, says Derrida, is ‘notably that of its great unifying projects’ (1994: 5). Implied in unifying however is not merely the spectral script where unification is mobilised, but also the function of spreading and adding. Hence Europe is by definition enlargement Europe: this is its constituent quandary.
12. This is why Derrida’s argument in Specters of Marx, where he analyses Marx alongside the (Freudian) logic of mourning, should be recast in terms of (Freudian) melancholia: because melancholia, in Freud too, plays up the question of bare life (see Jukić, Citation2011). Žižek too alludes to this position in The Fragile Absolute when he pairs Marxism with melancholia, although with a different twist. In melancholia, he says, ‘we get the object of desire deprived of its cause. For the melancholic, the object is here, but what is missing is the specific intermediary feature that makes it desirable.’ What if Marx’s mistake, continues Žižek, ‘was also to assume that the object of desire (unconstrained expanding productivity) would remain even when it was deprived of the cause that propels it (surplus-value)?’ (2001: 21). Žižek’s question however should perhaps be recast in the following terms: what if this mistaken productivity could be retrieved, in and for Marxism, as the labour invested in the management of (bare) life?
13. Symptomatic in this sense is Žižek’s repeated reference to Lacan having credited Marx with the origin of symptom (see, for instance, 1991b: 166).
14. Žižek’s chapter titles reverberate of course with Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993). This is important because Žižek’s analysis of the Balkans alongside the Derridean Marx of the 1990s pitches the Balkans as a likely synecdoche of what Derrida, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, accentuates as the functional legacy of the Marxist International. Further, by foregrounding the spectral properties of what in both amounts to the international, Žižek demands that the Lacanian description of the imaginary in and for psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on spectres and the spectral, be revisited as the haunt of the political. (I am alluding here to Lacan’s derivation of the imaginary from the narrative terms of Hamlet, in ‘Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet’. It is from the same narrative that Derrida derives his Marx, for philosophy.)
15. This is also the argument with which to address the failure on the part of communists to boycott World War I as nationalist in character: the failure which Žižek discusses in 1991b: 165–6.
16. This specific alliteration (the repetitive m/r sound sequences) pervades Hitchcock’s cinema and is not reducible to The Man Who Knew Too Much. Cohen notes the obsessive Mar- in the names of Hitchock’s characters, for instance in Marnie (2005: 72, 78).
17. The title of Deleuze’s book on masochism is Coldness and Cruelty; see also Deleuze (Citation2006: 52).