Another thought about why both this month in TNR, and over the summer in the Nation, Zizek finds himself the posterboy for “fascist discourse” on the left, even though that’s really missing the point, and why he is allowed so much forgiveness from the body he is criticizing. Zizek is performative and masculine (and performatively masculine) in the extreme, which is maybe more familiar and entertaining to watch than other dissenting voices from the left, though ultimately not as intellectually nutritious as others might be (Drucilla Cornell, for example). But it’s interesting to see him as the focal point of aggression here, singled out from other theorists who speak of similar issues in more feminized language. What is it that sees Zizek’s formulations rocket to a high-profile threat, while others rarely achieve the same kind of notoriety?
I wonder if that is because he is textually more “penetrable/penetrating” than the legalese of a Cornell, the murky density of Spivak/”post-marxism,” or the often too subtle differences between Daphne Patai’s critical rhetoric with fundamentalist misogyny (worth a discussion in itself). Each of those working writers offer approximately similar criticisms on the limitations of justice/theory based purely in alterity, and generally engage with discourse on the left by moving through post-structuralism and reacting to its weaknesses (maybe less so with Patai). Zizek’s view on one level performs a sort of erasure of the feminine from his narrative, ie “the Woman as The Thing,” a sort of flattening of experience that conflates all Otherness with the Feminine which, ultimately, do not exactly exist for Zizek (or, as he reads it, Lacan).
I agree largely, not because man=masculine and woman=feminine, but because in the symbolic order, all powerlessness is understood as effeminate and agency as phallic, all issues become sorted in terms of this. Regarding ‘lived experience,’ this is hardly the case; to my knowledge, rich, hetero white men of the first world are not too often seen clicking their heels in the streets with the sheer joy of being themselves. Significantly, the biological is not inextricable from the symbolic gender, and seems to me to be secondary at least. So, to be clear, we are not playing the “what’s worse” game that everyone seems to get a kick out of, a pissing contest of the oppressed. Nah.
However, I agree with this casting of roles only under the condition of not having yet appropriated and eventually deprioritizing “the gaze” for and to oneself. It’s problematic in that he pays too much attention to this one dimension of the sexual imagination and identity, and does not convincingly argue how women specifically are to recognize their own imagined spaces and redefine them, as they are, as he describes, significantly different from the masculine dilemma, which has its own sort of powerlessness and essential dignity to reimagine (and it’s here where I think sensitivity to the subjective is still of great value). It becomes an almost too-close reiteration of the Dworkian/McKinnon female sense of self, where she is told she has absorbed someone else’s fantasy and the story of her own sexuality is to end there. The identification with being the one who gets symbolically fucked is complex in unique ways, but in all fairness, I think it might be a ludicrous argument for Zizek himself to presume to solve.
I wonder if it is exactly this non-issue of the woman in Zizek which allows him the license to criticize politics of the left without, generally, being maligned simplistically as a structuralist/tyrant. Women with the same mistrust of the singularly subjective, if spoken from inside a familiarly feminine mode or primary subject of speech, have yet to be given the same treatment. It’s unsurprising obviously, but does not alone attest to the fundamentalist impulse somewhat legitimately associated with mainstream feminism. There’s also that ol’ lefty gag of subjugating the feminine under a discussion of “the greater good.”
