Matthew Flisfeder

Communism as our new common sense master code arises in Jameson and Žižek’s recent projects, from Žižek’s volumes on The Idea of Communism, to Jameson’s essay “An American Utopia”. What they both continue to demonstrate is that in the face of the absolute foreclosure of the signifier, the deadlocks of capitalist exploitation, as well as its own inherent internal contradictions, can only go on and transform into absolute excess. As Žižek has put it, “when people tell me that nothing can be changed [my response is] – no it can, because things are already changing like crazy. And what we should say is just this: if we let things change the way they are changing automatically we are approaching a kind of new perverse, permissively authoritarian society, which will be authoritarian but in a new way”.

Since the early 1970s, film, media, and cultural theorists have appealed to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in order to discern processes of subjectivization, representation, and ideological interpellation. However, beginning with the work of theorists such as Jacqueline Rose, Joan Copjec, and Slavoj Žižek, a new approach to Lacan has been advanced, one which pays closer attention to concepts such as sexual difference, the 'objet petit a', fantasy, the Real, enjoyment, and the drive. Žižek in particular has advanced a political-philosophical re-interpretation of Lacan that has spawned a whole new wave of film, media, and cultural theory that shows a marked difference from an early Lacanian approach. The contributors in this book take up a specifically Žižekian approach to studies of cinema and media, both old and new, raising questions about power, ideology, sexual difference, and enjoyment. Including chapters written by key figures in Žižekian film, media, and cultural theory such as Jodi Dean, Todd McGowan, Paul A. Taylor, and Fabio Vighi, it concludes with a response from Žižek himself.

This article investigates the work of Žižek and Ernesto Laclau on the topic of Emancipatory politics. Although the positions of each on this topic has recently been criticized by the other, the aim here is to locate the elements that can allow both positions to converge for the purpose of conducting ideological critique of the logic of emancipation and the necessity of utopia. In focusing on this debate, the opposition between populism and class struggle is considered, as well as notions of the universal and the particular as they relate to emancipatory politics and the critique of ideology and hegemony. Finally, the use of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is assessed in the work of both Laclau and Žižek as a way of positioning historical-political understandings of emancipation and utopia