The Ticklish Subject, by Slavoj Zizek. Verso, 409pp. £20 in the UK
Recently Private Eye published a spoof Harold Pinter column protesting at NATO policy in the Balkans. He had written a poem, provocatively titled "Shit", and was attempting to publish it in one of the broad-sheets. His outrage mounted as editor after editor turned it down. But worst of all was when one finally accepted it: how dare the establishment try and buy him off with its pseudo-tolerance of such dynamite!
These are hard times for the Old Left. In its heyday it still had "false consciousness" and "repressive tolerance" to fall back on as explanations for the failure of the working classes to rise up and of liberal democracies to behave like fully-fledged police states. No more. These days, when Tony Blair uses a phrase like "the radical centre", it is the Old Left that is made to look conservative, quaintly clinging to principle rather than coming up with the populist goods. Depoliticisation in Ireland has given us Bertie Ahern's startling campaign slogan "People before Politics": power to the people, as long as they don't drag politics into it.
In times like these, who or what exactly constitutes a political subject any more? Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek begins The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, by reminding us of the abuse the concept has taken, not just from Blairite politics but across the whole spectrum of contemporary thought. Release a hare like "autonomous bourgeois subject" in an English or a Philosophy seminar room today and the hounds will come baying for blood: Heideggerians, deconstructionists, post-Marxists, feminists, New Agers, environmentalists, all are agreed that this imperious child of the Enlightenment had to go. At the same time, there is something almost superstitious in their continuing to bother with such an anachronism. No one feels compelled to debunk mesmerism and phrenology: why then, if subjectivity was such an illusion, has it lasted so long?
Zizek's analysis of the concept comes in three parts. The first confronts Heidegger's reading of Descartes, and the more than ticklish subject of his Nazism. Part two looks at contemporary versions of political subjectivity in the aftermath of Althusserian Marxism, and Alain Badiou's attempt to revive the notion of universality. The third section looks at postmodernism and the proponents of a "second modernisation".
Though far too restless to be described as a liberal humanist, Zizek holds fast to subjectivity as an antidote to totalitarianism on the one hand and post-modernist defeatism on the other. He is also uniquely readable for so heavyweight a philosopher, not to mention uniquely funny. Take Zizek on Viagra, for example. Does Viagra represent sexual Utopia? On the contrary, he argues. For Zizek, male sexual potency is primarily a symbolic commodity and only secondarily something that takes physical form in the penis. The knowledge that the penis will sometimes refuse to perform is, paradoxically, what potency is all about. Give a man Viagra and he simultaneously gains a penis and loses a phallus. "You can because you must," Kant used to say about the categorical imperative: nowadays this is inverted to "You must because you can."
Philosophical readings of popular culture are nothing new, but The Ticklish Subject goes far beyond au courant knowingness. For all the references to Hitchcock, Princess Diana and David Lynch, the core of this book is its profound engagement with Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud and Lacan. This makes for some highly demanding prose, but his ability to apply these readings to contemporary art, film or politics provides enough light relief to keep the non-specialist engaged throughout. Zizek is a rare sighting of a species feared extinct, the European Leftist intellectual: anyone who cares about ideas will want to read The Ticklish Subject.
David Wheatley is a poet and critic.