Running on Empty: Žižek's Concept of the Subject

In the following pages I argue that Slavoj Žižek's concept of the subject is ideological and that his arguments in support of it are obscurantist and incoherent. Far from developing a materialist Lacanian theory of the subject, as he claims, Žižek empties Lacan's theory of its material content and its scientific form in order to identify it with an existentialist notion of the subject as “empty” and with idealist notions of the subject as Cartesian cogito and Kantian self-consciousness.1 In the course of defending this conception of the subject Žižek willfully confuses distinctions between subjective and objective perspectives, between natural, social, and existential facts, and between epistemological and psychoanalytic categories. The result is not so much a theory as an Escher-like representation of a theory, a representation that is best understood by exposing the devices by which it deceives the reader into accepting the absurd as logical and the impossible as actual.

In order to provide a background against which Žižek's errors will stand out clearly, it is necessary to outline a few basic principles and distinctions necessary for a coherent, realist theory of the Lacanian subject. Let us start with the notion of the human brain as the material embodiment of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic registers. We simply have to get used to the fact that memory, desire, drive, identification, and jouissance are all properties of high-level, interconnected neural networks acting in parallel within an astoundingly complex system that is the human subject.2 As schematized by Lacan's L- and R-Diagrams, the Lacanian subject is the simultaneous functioning of Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary registers—that is to say, the Lacanian subject is a totality (the RSI). Neither the Real, the Imaginary, nor the Symbolic subsystems taken individually can be thought of as a subject, even less as the “true” subject or as the “Lacanian subject.”