6 - Infinite reflection and the shape of praxis

Summary

Žižek's Lacanian analysis of pleasure (“enjoyment”) as a political factor represents one of the most ingenious attempts to rethink some of the practical questions that originate in the theory of aesthetic reflective judgment associated with Kant's third Critique. Beginning from the familiar deconstructive notion that structures are shaped by a constitutive absence or lack, and then specifying the ways in which the object-substitutes for that lack tend to produce an irrevocable distortion of desire, Žižek transforms the question of reflective judgment into a theory of ideology that bears striking resemblances to a symptomatology of cultural forms. Given the particular “difficulty” associated with aesthetic judgment and its dissociation in Kant from any determinate object-sphere, the linkage between the aporetic “object” of aesthetic reflection and Žižek's Lacanian notion of the symptom is not altogether surprising. Since nothing positive, no substantive “beauty,” can be found underlying the passions of pleasure and pain, the aesthetic domain may well appear to be like a realm of symptoms: both are effects ungroundable in any determinate cause. In Kant's language, beauty may be the symbol of morality (CJ, sec. 59), but it is in no sense the cause of pleasure. Likewise, Žižek's analysis of ideology is consistent with Kant's account of the peculiar “purposelessness” of art. As Kant explains in his discussion of finality in the Critique of Judgment (sec. 10), we find ourselves in the realm of the aesthetic when the representation of an effect precedes, “takes the lead,” over its cause (p. 61).