When Molly Anne Rothenberg states that “In Žižek’s view, the political meaning of one’s acts has nothing to do with one’s “sincerity or hypocrisy” — that is, one’s “subjective self-experience” is irrelevant to the objective truth of one’s actions.” She is pointing out a basic psychoanalytic fact that the subject is split, between the stories it tells itself at the level of conscious life, and the unconscious ‘truth’. For example Žižek in numerous lectures never tires of making this point, and somewhat irrepressibly cites as an example the movie United Flight 93. As is well known the story of United Flight 93 is about the lone plane on September 11, 2001 that did not make it to its destination. It crashed. Žižek makes the point that the calls from the plane to relatives and family all professed love. Žižek, not wanting to sound callous and cruel, voices the proper caveats before stating that those who take from these phone calls the St. Paul expression about the universality of love, how, “when the chips are down” love is all that matters. Žižek’s point being that no, this is a lie. Why? Žižek always makes the point that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are lies. Citing the refrain he claims to have taken from the mutlicultualists (Žižek is opposed to liberal multiculturalist politics), that says, “An enemy is only someone whose story you haven’t heard.” Žižek claims that this is false and cites the example of Hitler, is this the case that he is merely and enemy because we have not heard his story. Hitler’s own story, Žižek points out (guardedly), is probably sympathetic and ‘nice’, of how he cares about the German people etc. And so to get back to United Flight 93 Žižek claim is that none of these phone calls represent a Lacanian ethical Act. So what would have been an Act? Žižek’s response is to claim that a man knowing that the plane is hurtling towards the ground and is going to crash, phones his wife and tells her, “Listen, our marriage was awful, I hate you, good-bye.” Now the larger point that has to be made is that this is part of an ongoing debate between Žižek and Judith Butler regarding her argument in Giving Account of Oneself that describes becoming fundamentally ‘undone’ by the other. Whereas Žižek would argue that one never can truly know her other (what he labels the neighbor), and this is a good thing, as it ensures, for Žižek, a modicum of distance, discreetness and impersonality that he claims is key to getting along in a human community.
To a subject of drive from a subject of desire
Instead of the subject of desire, Rothenberg argues that Žižek promotes the subject of the drive. From page 177 of her book:
Rather, the subject of the drive institutes a gap between itself and its symbolic subjective dimension. The subject’s identification with objet a re-casts it, not as a set of symbolic properties, but as connected directly to the order of objectivity. Introducing a distance towards one’s own symbolic identity puts one in a position to act in an “objective-ethical” way (OWB 182). Presumably, it is this link to the objective that makes solidarity possible. The manifold differences or symbolic properties of individuals move to the background, while each subject, as identified with the object of the drive, finds its way to the objective order, the only terrain on which meaningful change can occur. Solidarity, then, emerges not from intersubjective relations but rather from the relations of subjects purified of their symbolic identities, subjects who meet on the ground of objectivity, as objects (177).
Molly Anne Rothenberg is here slowly building up her case for the ethical component of the Möbius subject. What she takes from Žižek is this attention to drive as opposed to desire, but more importantly the notion of subjective destitution, of a subtraction from all ontic qualities and a focus on meeting on the ground of objectivity. However, Rothenberg sees this much differently from Žižek, whom she describes as not entirely clear how this formulation distances itself from fascism plain and simple.
