Kaye B. Žižek and Freedom: Utopia and the Parallax View

Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. — 204 p.This book is an exploration of Žižek's theory of freedom. By examining key passages in Žižek's work the aim is to provide a functional, serviceable philosophy of power and ideology and show how this philosophy of power relates to freedom. Although some, like Noam Chomsky, have criticized Žižek's work as having no guiding principles, it is suggested that this misses the fact that Žižek's philosophy utilizes a dialectical methodology that often appears contradictory. Though a highly astute reader with a background in the philosophical texts he frequently cites (the German Idealists, Freud, and modern philosophers), it becomes clear that there is a uniquely Zizekian philosophy that mobilizes a radical hermeneutics of freedom.Introduction
What Is the Parallax View?
Interpassivity: Parallax View of Symptomal Figures
Parallax View of Pleasure
Capitalism: Order Without Social Norms
Drives and Desires
The Voice: Who Analyzes Whom?
What About Life?
Anatomy of Man and Ape: The More Developed Form Is the Key
Repressive Desublimation
Life, the Contingent Stuck and Retroactive Detachment
Schelling’s God/Ages of the World
If God Does Not Exist, Then Nothing Is Permitted
God Has Been Refuted, but Not the Devil
Did Kantian Ethics Produce Poe’s Black Cat and the ‘Spirit of Perverseness’
Exiting the Garden of Eden, Regressing Back Towards it
The Law that Mirrors the Public Law Is the Super-Ego
Oedipal or Christian Anxieties?
Terror and Mercy: “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword”
The Law at Home Is Evil
“Misunderestimating” the Neighbors: Infantilizing the Other
What Is Ideology?
Antoine deStutt de Tracy (1754–1836): Originator of the Term “Ideology”
The Marxist Turn in Ideology
Ideological Superstructure
Althusser: Interpellation
Althusser: Overdetermination
Lacan, Discourses and Social Bonds I: Graphs of Desire
Discourses and Social Bonds
Graph I
Graph II: “Aggressivity that becomes the beam of the balance…”
Graph III: Che Vuoi?
Graph IV: Completed Graph
Lacan, Discourses and Social Bonds II: Aggressivity and Narcissistic Rage
How Does Aggressivity Differ from Aggression?
Language
Paranoia of Dispossession
Lacan’s Theses on Aggressivity
Thesis 1: Aggressivity Manifests Itself in an Experience That Is Subjective by Its Very Constitution
Thesis 2: Aggressivity in Experience Is Given to Us as Intended Aggression and as an Image of Corporal Dislocation, and It Is in Such Forms That It Shows Itself to Be Efficient
Thesis 3: The Springs of Aggressivity Decide the Reasons That Motivate the Technique of Analysis
Thesis 4: Aggressivity Is the Correlative Tendency of a Mode of Identification That We Call Narcissistic, and Which Determines the Formal Structure of Man’s Ego and of the Register of Entities Characteristic of This World
Thesis 5: Such a Notion of Aggressivity as One of the Intentional Coordinates of the Human Ego, Especially Relative to the Category of Space, Allows Us to Conceive of Its Role in Modern Neurosis and in the ‘discontents’ of Civilization
Cynicism/Ressentiment as the Function of Ideology
What Is a Symptom?
Rehabilitating the Master-Signifier
Populism Is Ressentiment
Subject Supposed to Believe
Cynicism and Slave-Morality
Hysteric and Pervert
Structure and Event
Political Correctness as Cynical Detachment
What Does It Mean to Be Free?: Hermeneutics of Freedom
Guilt-Free and Still Unfree
Freedom and Sadness
Freedom and Automatons: Robo-Rats “doing it, but they do not know”
Freedom as “Revolution without a Revolution”
Free to Articulate the Conditions of Our Unfreedom
Freedom: Interconnectedness and Security
Freedom-From Money
Freedom as Calvinist Predestination
Stay Positive, Things Only Get worse
Real Subsumption, a Problem Rendered Invisible
Documents of Capitalism/Barbarism
Are we Captured in the Other’s Dream?
Utopia and the Parallax View
Escapist Utopianism
Utopia and Free Will: Un-Cracking an Egg Is Impossible
Utopianism Relies on “Determinism”
Dissolve the People and Elect Another?
Index