Response to Creston Davis' "Zizek on Love and Lack

Creston Davis

http://crestondavis.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/zizek-on-love-and-lack/#comments

Paul of Tarsus attempts to define love in a famous passage from the New Testament:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; …. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end…. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.[1]

Here it is important to grasp the opposition that Paul frames while he defines the indefinable–love: There are prophecies, language (tongues), and there is knowledge each of these are finite and bounded. By contrast there is love, which is infinite and unbounded. We can grasp the meaning of prophecies (future predictions and so forth) in the present, we can understand the complex nuances of language, and we can understand knowledge—how it functions, where it fails etc. But notice that all three examples are defined by their definability—that is, their “meaning” which only reaches the limit defined by our finite understanding. In this precise sense, meaning is limited to its own structure and this repeats the same security centered logic stated above.

( In other words, meaning is devoid of risk and the only thing left for meaning is its own death. Truth and Love, on the other hand, are uncontainable—and inherently defies the desire to contain and define it (within the borders of a security-state). Love by contrast is excess, endless and never ending excess.

One recent interpretation of Paul’s passage on love is worth repeating. Slavoj Zizek sets up a dialectical opposition between the universal “All” (which includes Knowledge and prophecies) and its exception the void of the “nothing” (Love). Here Zizek introduces us to a twist when he says that “…even if I were to possess all knowledge, without love I would be nothing, is not simple that withlove, I am ‘something’—in love, I am also nothing but, as it were, a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing paradoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack. Only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love: the ultimate mystery of love is therefore that incompleteness is in a way higher than completion…. [O]nly an imperfect, lacking being loves: we love because we donot know all.”[2]

Here again we see the same motif rise to the surface but in paradoxical form: Because we can know the universal-All (knowledge, language, science, etc.) in reality we cannot know it-All. In the heart of the universal there is a trick—what we think we possess and control we actually don’t control it. Love thus presents to us the crack in the universal that exposes the exception to the universal—the exception that founds the lack—the incomplete—the abyss. Zizek’s insights show this paradox of knowledge well, but here I would like to push his interpretation one step further. Zizek says that in the lack we become aware of ourselves –the “lack” if you will becomes conscious of itself as lack. But is this not another way to sneak knowledge (consciousness, etc.) in through the back door? Could it not be that what precisely defines “lack” is its unknowable nature hidden deep within—wholly out of reach—the abyss of nothingness? This is why we must persist that when Zizek says that the “ultimate mystery of love is its incompleteness” is always incomplete. For is not Zizek wrong when he tries to unite consciousness (even a “humble” consciousness) with the lack which would make lack conscious of itself as lack and this would instantly turn “lack” into knowledge? And, again, if lack comes to terms with itself as lack it can no longer be lack but a positive, possessive form of knowledge. And here we find ourselves back into the security-state of mastery. In sum, Zizek doesn’t risk enough here instead he go up to the limit and retreats back into the domain of knowledge falling short and thus giving up on the very possibility of the impossible—love.

I would propose a different possibility—a possibility that most fundamentally becomes impossible: lack must always resist its self-enclosure—its exposure in the full light of day. The mystery of lack must remain beyond the security zone of knowledge despite the great temptation to surround and destroy it with the weapons of reason. This procedure is, I believe, more faithful to Hegel’s thesis in The Phenomenology of Spirit where he attempts to account for the unaccountable that gives rise to how the world comes to terms with itself as above all a contingent and fragile world. Inherently built into this fragile world there is risk a risk that could bring the whole house-of-cards down at any moment. The fragility of the world is a world left without guarantee or an insurance policy.

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[1] 1 Corinthians 13. NRSV

[2] Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), p. 146-47.

I agree that “meaning is defined by our finite understanding of it,” but I would add that the limit is not a closure, but rather an inherent porous boundary. Rather than meaning and knowledge having an internal structural logic or process that controls its own content, meaning is tied to the contingencies of social practice, which therefore induces a temporal dimension (its historicity).

The most profound consequence of the historicity of meaning, which in its everyday practice opens it to the contingencies of its temporal unfolding, is the axiom that it always remains open ended, contested, and able to be falsified, (the latter most associated with science, better technology, etc). I take the “security centered logic” as the constant policing and political power employed to buttress certain interpretations (to fix meaning once and for all, though this seems to always eventually fail due to unstoppable transformations of meaning). Likewise, there are always attempts to “normalize” the status quo: “we are at the end of history once free markets and democracy rule”; fix the meaning of a text: the Catholic Church is not very supportive of alternative readings of scripture; or attempts to ground the contingencies of cultural belief into knowledge, for example Western categories of race, transposed into the rise of “scientific racism” of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

That said, I think the above more or less coheres with Zizek's immanentist (atheist) understanding of the relation between the “universal All” and its exception, the lack or “void.” I understand that when Zizek starts talking about the “void” and a “lack,” he is referencing “our” (universal transcendental subject's) relation to the “real.” This way we both constitute the “real” and its “lack” vis a vis our subject position and its inevitable “failed” apperception, which is more obvious when considering “traditional” modes of apperception: religion, art, myth embedded within the master symbolic system of language. Nonetheless, for Zizek, even science ultimately has no epistemological advantage in the final analysis, a point Zizek takes up in the “Parallax View,” by arguing that neuropsychology (physics as archetype) is caught in a web of words and tropes, mediating to the end the “subject--real” divide. If this is the case (which it may not be...), it is the starting point from which Zizek theorizes the nature of “love.” In structural terms, as I understand it, Love comes into being through an internal relation to the fundamental lack/ void. However, it is not clear to me why subjects' relations to the “real,” an eternal relation of “lack,” has as a consequence that “[O]nly an imperfect, lacking being loves: we love because we do not know all.” For me, this is another Lacanian moment of obfuscation. Is Love some sort of compensatory mechanism to assuage anxiety? And how exactly can love, as a breaking down of the rational ordered ego and the breaking down of intersubjective barriers, be described as such: “the ultimate mystery of love is therefore that incompleteness is in a way higher than completion.”

Love then for Zizek seems more of an unintended consequence or by-product of the subject-real relation. Love for Zizek also appears to be the sine qua non of being human, that has impulses uncontrollable by the State, ideology, and structure because of its excess and unboundedness. Whatever Love is precisely, it is here that I question whether or not Zizek is “sneaking knowledge (consciousness, etc.) in through the back door.” The lack Zizek spells out, originating in a primordial structure consisting of the subject-gap-real cannot be overcome. As human beings we are inescapably constrained by the symbolic realm, and though we have several modes of approaching the “real,” (Ernst Cassirer's modes of apperception come to mind: myth, religion, art, science, and language), we are left ultimately to face an existential void, though many, via attachment to various “big others” and “subjects supposed to know,” ameliorate their anxiety.

But if one is honest about humanity's existential condition in the face of the real, the Void, even having an “advanced” understanding of a fundamental “lack” and being able to explicate its origin and consequences in psychoanalytical (Lacan, Zizek) or philosophical (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche) terms, such knowledge hardly has the traction to return “ourselves back into the security-state of mastery.” And perhaps you could even argue that the epistemology behind “knowledge of the lack” in the final analysis undermines its own claims. At a minimum, knowledge of the “lack” may provide some basis for ethics, responsibility, authenticity and all that.