The introduction of Lacanian thought into contemporary philosophy, political thought, literature, and film criticism can be majorly attributed to the work of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. However, Žižek’s Lacan is distinctive, acquiring emphases and associations between ideas that are not explicit (and perhaps not present at all) in Lacan’s own writing. In particular, Žižek has popularized Lacan’s psychoanalytic thought by applying it to a series of famous popular films, particularly the work of Alfred Hitchcock.
Psychoanalysis and Philosophy
The history of the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy is an erratic one. It is a connection plagued by philosophers’ partial recognition of the philosophical import of psychoanalysis and, more often still, by the total dismissal of psychoanalysis. In the other direction, psychoanalysts have persistently (though not as insistently, perhaps, as in the other direction) de-emphasized the overlap between their discipline and philosophical study. Certainly, it was Lacan—among the major figures of psychoanalysis—who most unabashedly drew connections between his work and the philosophical tradition with essays like Kant avec Sade (1963) and the seminar paper The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-60).
However, Žižek’s reading of Lacan goes further than the man himself in anchoring psychoanalytic discourse to post-Kantian philosophy. For Žižek, Lacan’s thought is inextricably bound up with the work of the German philosopher Georg Hegel. In Žižek scholarship, the resulting amalgam has variously been described as a Hegelian reading of Lacan, or a Lacanian reading of Hegel, usually in accordance with the scholar’s own disciplinary allegiance.
It is not so much that Žižek seems to see points of affinity between Hegel and Lacan, but rather that he is happy to draw the connections himself, unflinchingly appropriating the terminology of one in describing the other, or pairing off terms from each of their specialized vocabularies and attaching them to notions belonging to neither historical figure but to Žižek himself. As discussed below, Žižek deploys the Lacanian concept of the “Real” as a kind of Hegelian absolute negativity. He also turns Lacan’s “quilting point”—the occasional but psychically essential moments where signifier and signified fleetingly intersect—to his own purpose in describing the way that ideology operates.
As Žižek frames it: “the only way to ‘save Hegel’ today is through Lacan.” But as the scholar Anders Burman notes, Žižek’s process of saving Hegel operates on a radically recontextualized and selective reading of Hegel’s thought.
Lacan and Popular Culture
It would be an oversight to label Žižek’s focus on films and popular culture as a quirk irrelevant to his reading of Lacan, or a strategy of vulgarization. For Žižek, it is not just that the history of cinema affords us plenty of good examples of what Lacan is talking about. There is also a fundamental affinity between cinema and psychoanalysis. Films are not simply convenient touchstones through which we get to examine human thought and behavior, but are rather exemplary cases in their own right, themselves meaningfully constituent of the “big Other”: an object of the gaze that gazes back. Žižek writes: “What we call ‘culture’ is therefore, in its very ontological status, the reign of the dead over life.”
For Žižek, Hitchcock’s films capture perfectly the Lacanian relationship between the Symbolic and the Real, always hinging on some “MacGuffin,” an incidental object that anchors the symbolic world of the film. This object—which may be a key, a lighter, etc.—is at once absolutely central and wholly empty. In Žižek’s writing on film, the Lacanian Real is omnipresent, always lurking just beyond or beside the frame, always the animating force behind the film’s sense of threat. The MacGuffin, in Žižek’s work, is the Lacanian objet petit à: the empty, unreachable center that brings desire into motion. Its emptiness both allures and terrifies. It is at once the source of narrative obsession and an abyss, always threatening to consume and denature the world of structure and language.
Lacan and the “Real”
Žižek places particular emphasis on the order of the “Real” in Lacan’s thought. Lacan himself is remarkably cautious and ambivalent when speaking about the Real, which only enters extended discussion in his work around 1964. The Real continues to grow in importance for Lacan from this point, but the concept features minimally in the formulation of many of Lacan’s most influential ideas. Even in Lacan’s later work, the Real appears to constantly shift between meanings and referents. By contrast, for Žižek, the Real is central to Lacan’s thought from the outset, and is articulated in fairly consistent terms throughout Žižek’s extensive writing on Lacan.
Žižek’s Hegelianism is constantly apparent in his complete avoidance of Lacan’s earlier sense of the Real, whereas philosopher Adrian Johnston notes—the Real denotes something like the Kantian “thing-in-itself.” In Lacan’s early thought, the Real describes something like the material world as separate from our perception of it.
Žižek, meanwhile, implies that Lacan, like Hegel, is already unhappy with the Kantian noumena-phenomena split. For Žižek, the Lacanian Real is always to be understood first and foremost as that which limits and anchors the Symbolic order: that is, the register of language, meaning, and society. The Real for Žižek is the always peripheral sea of undifferentiated matter that lies—impossibly—outside the boundaries of signification.
For Žižek, the Real is always characterized as an abyss, a void, a gap. But this is a highly selective gloss of Lacan’s shifting usage. Notably, there is a stretch of Lacan’s writings where the Real is spoken of exclusively as absolute positivity, as an undifferentiated fullness, into which lack is only introduced by the symbolic order. It is hardly surprising, given Žižek’s efforts to marry Lacan and Hegel, it is a Real of absolute negativity that appears in his version of Lacan.
The “Big Other”
Lacan’s “big Other” is a notoriously elusive concept. Like many of Lacan’s coinages, it sustains a whole constellation of meanings, including ones that are apparently strictly contradictory. Roughly speaking, the big Other is a kind of hypothetical entity or observer that resides with the symbolic register. It is above all resident in language and the law, performing the authoritarian social function that Freud attributes to the superego (though this comparison should be taken only as a rough guide, neither notion is sufficiently static or straightforward to be neatly translated).
For Žižek, the big Other is always strictly hypothetical, an imagined other who is immaculately whole, hyper-observant, and who rigidly enforces societal convention: someone who is not just regulated but constituted by the law. The big Other is tyrannical in its exacting demands of normalcy and compliance, but most of all in its commandment to enjoy. It is this kind of Lacanian inversion that Žižek relishes. If the conventional-roughly-Freudian idea is that the superego is what is constantly restraining us from the base desires of the id, the Lacanian twist is to suggest that it is precisely in the commandments of the superego that we find the perverse pleasure of being thwarted: jouissance.
The pleasure we take in the big Other, however, is what for Žižek we must give up for analysis to be successful. The fantasy latent in the notion of the big Other is that there exists an Other who is whole in the way we yearn to be (this being the crucial anxiety of Lacan’s “mirror stage”), who experiences the symbolic order in its consistency and perfection: a subject for whom there is no peripheral horror of the Real. For Žižek, the success of analysis consists in the recognition that, as Lacan insists, “there is no big Other.”
Hegel and Lacan
While most of the account given above regarding the big Other is fairly consistent between Žižek and Lacan, it should be noted that here, as elsewhere, Žižek adjusts Lacan’s thought to fit his own purposes. As Burman notes, Žižek establishes that the analyst’s recognition of the big Other’s non-existence is identical to Hegelian “absolute knowledge.” In both cases the supposed goal of thought—that is, perfect or absolute knowledge—is supplanted by the acceptance of contradiction. Neither Hegel nor Lacan makes such a claim explicitly, and indeed the strong prescriptive tone of the Hegelian progress towards absolute knowledge sits poorly with Lacan’s ambivalence about therapeutic teleology.
The resulting philosophy is distinctively Žižek’s own, replete with inversions and counter-inversions, with a prevailing love of contradiction not only as a philosophical method but also as the endpoint of philosophy. Much of this approach is borrowed from Lacan, and the latter’s thought rings with twists and rejections of common psychological wisdom, but for Žižek there is a dialectical goal that never appears in Lacan’s work. Where for Žižek, the realization that the big Other does not exist is a kind of absolute knowledge, for Lacan it is simply a necessary precondition for his one clear prescription: to assume responsibility for one’s own desire.
