Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? by Slavoj Zizek

Author:Slavoj Zizek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

4 Melancholy and the Act

in which the reader will be surprised to learn that anyone who is not a melancholic, or does not agree that we are thrown into a contingent finite universe, can today be suspected of ‘totalitarianism’

The Lacanian ‘big Other’ does not designate merely the explicit symbolic rules regulating social interaction, but also the intricate cobweb of unwritten ‘implicit’ rules. One such rule in today’s radical academia concerns the relationship between mourning and melancholy. In our permissive times, when transgression itself is appropriated – even encouraged – by the dominant institutions, the predominant doxa as a rule presents itself as a subversive transgression – if one wants to identify the hegemonic intellectual trend, one should simply search for the trend that claims to pose an unprecedented threat to the hegemonic power structure. With regard to mourning and melancholy, the predominant doxa is as follows: Freud opposed ‘normal’ mourning (the successful acceptance of loss) to ‘pathological’ melancholy (where the subject persists in his or her narcissistic identification with the lost object). Against Freud, one should assert the conceptual and ethical primacy of melancholy: in the process of loss, there is always a remainder which cannot be integrated through the work of mourning, and the ultimate fidelity is fidelity to this remainder. Mourning is a kind of betrayal, the ‘second killing’ of the (lost) object, while the melancholic subject remains faithful to the lost object, refusing to renounce his or her attachment to it.

This story can be given a multitude of twists, from the queer one (homosexuals are those who retain fidelity to the lost/repressed identification with the same-sex libidinal object) to the postcolonial-ethnic one (when ethnic groups enter capitalist modernization and are under threat that their specific legacy will be swallowed up by the new global culture, they should not renounce their tradition through mourning, but retain their melancholic attachment to their lost roots).

Owing to this ‘politically correct’ background, the ‘mistake’ of depreciating melancholy can have dire consequences – papers are rejected, applicants don’t get jobs because of their ‘incorrect’ attitude towards melancholy. For this very reason, however, it is all the more necessary to denounce the ‘objective cynicism’ that such a rehabilitation of melancholy enacts: the melancholic link to the lost ethnic Object allows us to claim that we remain faithful to our ethnic roots, while fully participating in the global capitalist game – one should ask how far the whole project of ‘postcolonial studies’ is sustained by this logic of objective cynicism. Melancholy is thus an exquisitely postmodern stance, the stance that allows us to survive in a global society by maintaining the appearance of fidelity to our lost ‘roots’. For this reason, melancholy and laughter are not opposed, but stricto sensu two sides of the same coin: the much-praised ability to maintain an ironic distance to one’s ethnic roots is the obverse of the melancholic attachment to those roots.

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