Distillations by Mari Ruti

Author:Mari Ruti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

4

Rupture or resignation?

Lacanian political theory versus affect theory

In the preceding chapters, I have outlined some of the revolutionary rhetoric that characterizes Lacanian political theory. We have seen that Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis as an ethics of the act, of rejecting “the morality of the master” (1959–1960, 315), has given rise to a rich, if at times contested, lineage of theorizing about revolt, defiance, self-pulverization, and event-driven ethics in the work of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Lee Edelman, Paul Eisenstein, and Todd McGowan. In this chapter, I return to some aspects of this lineage in order to consider its complex relationship to affect theory, arguably its most powerful contestant within today’s progressive critical-theoretical terrain. If back in 2000, the battle lines seemed to be drawn primarily between Žižek’s Lacanian and Butler’s Foucauldian approaches (see, for instance, Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 2000), the rapid rise of affect theory has changed—or at least recalibrated—the terms of the debate.

I do not mean to say that Butlerian theory and affect theory are at odds, for affect theory owes a great deal to Butler, not only to her early theorization of the relationship between the psychic and the social but also to her more recent theorization of the centrality of grievability and mourning to posthumanist ethics. I also do not mean to say that Lacanian theorists and affect theorists are engaged in an open scuffle, except perhaps in the 2014 exchange between Edelman and Berlant in Sex, or the Unbearable (to which I will briefly refer below). Nevertheless, as I demonstrated in The Ethics of Opting Out, the differences between Lacanian political theory and affect theory are responsible for some of the major rifts within recent queer theory, which in turn informs a whole host of other theoretical trends.

This is why I believe that it is impossible to understand the underlying reasons for the obstinate conflicts that characterize the contemporary critical-theoretical terrain without understanding the different inflections of Lacanian theory and affect theory. Lacanian theory—particularly Lacanian political theory, which will be the focus of this chapter—and affect theory find it difficult to speak to each other in anything but exasperated tones. Yet—as my discussion of Eisenstein and McGowan (Lacanian political theory) and Ahmed (affect theory) in Chapter 1 already illustrated—they both manage to speak to me, frequently for seemingly incompatible reasons, which is why I want to devote this chapter to an examination of some of their idiosyncrasies in the hope that doing so will open a theoretical clearing that allows for communication to flow between them without suffocating what is distinctive about each.

The event, the act

Because I have already discussed Badiou, Žižek, Eisenstein, and McGowan, I have provided the main outlines of the Lacanian approach. We have seen that the event, act, or rupture reconfigures the subject (or a collective “situation”) in ways that make its established manner of living (or the established version of the collective arrangement) unfeasible. As Žižek explains the event/act, “An Absolute intervenes which derails the balanced run of our daily

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