Liberation Hurts: Žižek on Superego, Masochism and Enacted Utopia

Abstract

What emerges from our analysis so far is that the difference between an act proper (radical agency) and performative activity within a certain hegemonic structure, hinges on the way in which we position ourselves towards the excess produced by the discursive field. Radical agency is first of all conceived by Žižek in classic Hegelo-Marxist dialectical terms (also articulated by the Frankfurt School), as a way of ‘reading the troubling excess that occurs in the realization of some global [universal] project as the symptomal point at which the truth of the entire project emerges’ (Žižek, 2000a, 347); then, crucially, as a kind of endorsement (which the Frankfurt School did not subscribe) of this very ‘troubling excess’, implying that the subject suspends its immersion in the socio-symbolic order (its alienation) by way of assuming the very abyssal negativity that structures such order (separation). Thus the subject truly ‘identifies with the exception’: the best way to undermine power, for Žižek, lies in overidentifying with the negativity (the structural exception/excess) which (su)stains its space. What remains to be seen is what this act of endorsement actually (concretely) entails.