Class/Antagonism

Submitted for Slavoj Zizek dictionary, edited by Rex Butler Class/antagonism (1597 words) Yahya M. Madra and Ceren Özselçuk

Given the slash sign that separates class and antagonism, the entry can be approached in three ways that correspond to three theoretical moments in Slavoj Zizek’s discourse. First, there is the post-Marxist moment of “antagonism” qua the Real whereby Zizek affirms the thesis of the impossibility of society as such, as irreducible to class antagonism, and yet gives this impossibility a thoroughly psychoanalytical inflection by explaining how enjoyment (jouissance) is organized around it. Second, there is the post-Marxist moment of “class antagonism” which refers to the impossibility of achieving a harmonious social organization of class relations through a translation of Lacan’s well-known formulae regarding the nonexistence of sexual relationship. And finally, there is the Marxist moment of “class” as a particular content, which, through its fundamental exclusion, overdetermines and grounds a certain historical horizon. The first moment that refers to Zizek’s development of the notion of antagonism qua the Real can be traced, in part, to his earlier conversations with the post-Marxist discourse of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (Zizek 1990). Zizek seems to be broadly in agreement with the manner Laclau and Mouffe resignify the concept of antagonism as “the limit of all objectivity” by distinguishing it from the Marxian notion of contradiction—which Laclau and Mouffe argued to harbor an essentialist ontology as it subordinated the effects of all social antagonisms to the mediating determination of class antagonism. At the same time, Zizek offers a favorable critique by pushing the framework of Laclau and Mouffe towards a psychoanalytically precise definition of this limit as the Real: “the traumatic kernel the symbolization of which always fails” (1990, 251). Signification produces a cut, a remainder, a surplus that, acting as the anchorage point of enjoyment, permanently disrupts from within the operation of imaginary and symbolic identifications, thus, is responsible for why (a transparent organization of) society does not exist.

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Zizek’s crucial point is that in so far as discourse theory is unable to give an account of jouissance and remains merely at the level of deconstructing meaning, it runs the risk of moderating and curtailing the radical implications of antagonism as the Real of the social. It also misses the constitutive role of fantasy in patching up the fundamental antagonism of society by providing a particular “solution” to the organization of jouissance in the figure of an external cause that brings social harmony into ruin. For instance, in the supreme fantasy of anti-semitism, it is the corrosive identity of the Jew, associated with finance/merchant capital that exploits the “‘productive’ classes,” which functions as this external obstacle. Zizek introduces “class” as an adjective that modifies antagonism precisely at this stage, when he reads “the Jew” as a fantasmatic figure that displaces the “source of […] class antagonism” away from “the basic relation between the working and ruling classes” to the relation between a corporatist, productive social body and the corrosive financier/merchant (the Jew) who exploits this social body (1989, 125-126). Nonetheless, the notion of class antagonism as a binary opposition that informs this pivotal example still falls short of capturing the psychoanalytical notion of “antagonism” in its most radical meaning. If, rather than focusing on this example, we look at a main tendency which runs through Zizek’s writings, we find that Zizek does not in fact locate the “source of class antagonism” in the particular antagonism “between the working and ruling classes.” On the contrary he repeatedly argues against such a theorization since this would be conflating the psychoanalytical concept of antagonism as the ineradicable obstacle that throws into disarray every identity with the notion of antagonism as the particular relation between oppositional identities. In the subject position model of class antagonism between the proletarian and the capitalist, each identity is presented as what prevents the other from achieving its identity, e.g., capitalist is the obstacle, the external enemy preventing the proletarian from realizing its full human potential. Zizek argues, however, that one should “invert” the relation between these two terms: it is not the external enemy who is preventing me from achieving identity with myself, but every identity is already in itself blocked, marked by an impossibility, and the external enemy is simply the small piece, the rest of reality upon which we ‘project’ or ‘externalize’ this intrinsic, immanent impossibility. (1990, 251-252)

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Zizek draws further conclusions regarding class antagonism when he translates the Lacanian formulae regarding the impossibility of sexual relationship into the context of class politics: “There is no class relationship” (Zizek 1989, 126; 1990, 251; 1998, 81). He does not mean that there are no concrete class structures, but that any attempt by participants to institute a ‘‘normal’’ way of organizing class relations is bound to fail. Class antagonism does not refer to the particular antagonisms between the serf and the lord, the proletariat and the capitalist, the slave and the master. Rather, class antagonism is the very impossibility of achieving an ideal class structure that can ultimately fix class relations. Approached from the perspective of the Real of class antagonism, it is possible to view various concrete articulations of class positions as socially invented (symbolic and imaginary) identities that make up for the nonexistence of class relation. Each concrete class structure, or a particular class antagonism like the one Zizek mobilizes in the example mentioned above, between “the working and ruling classes,” is ‘‘already a ‘reactive’ or ‘defense’ formation, an attempt to ‘cope with’ (to come to terms with, to pacify…) the trauma of class antagonism’’ (Zizek 1998, 81). Nevertheless, these particular defense formations inevitably fail to stabilize the Real of class antagonism. A key indication of this is whenever class antagonism is translated into the “opposition of classes qua positive, existing social groups,” such as bourgeois versus working class, or the top elite versus middle class, “a surplus, a third element that does not ‘fit’ this opposition” emerges, such as the lumpenproletariat, or the immigrant workers (Zizek 2002, 74). It is important to stress that “class antagonism” is not merely another venue (adding to the series of gender, racial, ethnic antagonisms and so on) for Zizek to restage his position on the deadlock of sexual relation. If “antagonism” qua the Real is Zizek’s reinterpretation of the post-Marxist attempt at undoing class essentialism, “class antagonism” is his psychoanalytical in(ter)vention enabling him to persist within, while radically transforming the field of post-Marxism. This is to say “class antagonism” is not simply Zizek’s psychoanalytical application of antagonism to the issue of class, but rather his provocation for rethinking Marxian class politics since it puts into question the myriad utopian reoccupations which draw their moral force from fantasies of class reconciliation. Zizek especially takes issue with communist fantasies that represent capitalism as a selfrevolutionizing movement which would bring its own end and deliver a society of producers free of enjoyment (i.e., aggression, envy and resentment) (Zizek 2007). He supports his 3

critique by drawing from Lacan’s homology between surplus jouissance and surplus value. Just like surplus jouissance is not an assimilable excess that can be done away with in order to render signification whole again, surplus value is not an assimilable excess that can be rid of so as to assist the passage from capitalism to communism. This homology opens up a space to pose a series of crucial questions for class politics, such as how to relate to, enjoy the irreducibility of class antagonism, and what it would mean to traverse the fantasy of class reconciliation. At the same time, the homology, in so far as it collapses the different roles the concepts of surplus value and surplus jouissance play within their respective problematics of Marxian political economy and Lacanian psychoanalysis, also raises some intractable questions for Zizek: If surplus value, just like surplus jouissance, is ineradicable, then does that mean capitalism is here to stay as the only possible defense formation for organizing the “class antagonism”? Third and final moment refers to the particular way Zizek mobilizes the idea of “class” as a specific repressed content, describing it sometimes as foreclosed and sometimes as disavowed. This idea appears especially in his conjunctural formulations on the overdetermination of the social by class antagonism. In such formulations the complex interweaving of different theoretical investments (which have their diverse sources in a combination of the Althusserian concept of structural causality, Hegelian concept of oppositional determination and Lacanian concept of foreclosure, as well as possibly others) implicates at times a diversion from the notion of class antagonism qua the Real and results in some confusion and possible tension in Zizek’s work. These are the times when, for instance, Zizek treats class antagonism as a specifically privileged entity, which, while “certainly appears as one in the series of social antagonisms,” simultaneously “‘predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colors and modifies their particularity’” (Zizek 2000, 320). In such contexts, where class antagonism is characterized as “one touchy nodal point” that stands apart from other antagonisms in its constitutive force to “secretly overdetermine” the social horizon that it is also a part of, the accent moves away from “antagonism” qua the Real towards a more traditional notion of “class” as deep structure. Here, class, through its exclusion, provides a condition of possibility for what Zizek designates as postmodern radical democractic politics (2000, 96, 108; 2002, 73). This 4

renders Zizek vulnerable to the accusations of positing a new version of the Marxist basesuperstructure model; nevertheless, Zizek’s writings on class/antagonism should be read as a symptom of his complex relationship to contemporary Lacanian left and Marxian tradition.

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References Zizek, S. (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. Zizek, S. (1990). Beyond Discourse-Analysis. In Laclau E. (ed.) New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London: Verso, pp. 249–260. Zizek, S. (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso. Zizek, S. (1998). Four Discourses, Four Subjects. In Zizek S. (ed.) Cogito and the Unconscious, Sic 2. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 74–113. Zizek, S. (1999). The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso. Zizek, S. (2000). Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please! In Butler, J., E. Laclau, and S. Zizek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso, pp. 90-135. Zizek, S. (2002). The Real of Sexual Difference. In Fink B., and S. Bernard (eds.) Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality. New York: SUNY Press, pp. 57-75. Zizek, S. (2007). Multitude, Surplus, and Envy. Rethinking Marxism 19 (1): 46-58.

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