[퍼온글] Slavoj Zizek: Live Theory

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렉스 버틀러가 쓴 'Slavoj Zizek: Live Theory'(Continuum, 2005)는 165쪽의 컴팩트한 지젝 입문서이다. 국역본이 나올 법도 한 책인데, 라캉닷컴에서 책의 요약을 제공하고 있기에 자료 정리차원에서 옮겨온다. 정리하다 보면 읽고 싶은 생각이 들 수도 있지 않을까...  

The subject of philosophy

The authors of books like this are often reluctant to speak of the private lives of their subjects. After all, what has this to do with their work? How is this to help us understand what they write? Our doubts, however, are soon overcome when we consider the Slovenian cultural analyst Slavoj Zizek. For what can we say about him that he does not already say himself? What secret can we reveal that he has not already turned into the punchline to one of his many well-rehearsed jokes? Which other theorist, for example, would allow himself the following one-liner to illustrate the psychoanalytic concept of the phallus: 'What is the lightest object in the world? The penis, because it is the only one that can be raised by a mere thought' (TS, 382-3)? Who else, in a parody of the anthropologist Claude L?i-Strauss, would observe:

In the traditional German lavatory, the hole down which the shit disappears is up front, so that it is first laid out for us to inspect; in the traditional French lavatory, it is in the back, so that the shit is meant to disappear as soon as possible; while the Anglo-Saxon (English and American) lavatory presents a kind of synthesis, with the basin full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible but not to be inspected? (PF, 4)

Or, most famously, would confess that, eating in a Chinese restaurant, his greatest fear is not that he will somehow fall into an orgy with his fellow diners but actually end up sharing a meal with them: 'How many people have entered the way of perdition with some innocent gangbang, which at the time was of no great importance to them, and ended up sharing the main dishes at a Chinese restaurant' (E!, ix)? Or would cheerfully admit to a whole range of bad habits: not just the usual 'private repulsive rituals' of smelling one's sweat or picking one's nose (AF, 80), but the slightly more social ones of watching pornography (PF, 177-80), engaging in cybersex (IR, 191-3) and even reading Colleen McCullough (LA, 160)?1

Now, Lacanian psychoanalysis will recommend as part of its cure a process of radical externalization. It is the idea that we must accept that we are entirely responsible for the situation we find ourselves in; that it is our actions, not the motivations behind them, that define us; that there is no inner core of our being, inaccessible to others. It is what Lacan came to call towards the end of his teaching the identification with the symptom, and it meant that we are not to hide the idiosyncrasies and sometimes embarrassing tics and quirks that make us up but acknowledge that they are part of who we are. And this is undoubtedly what Zizek is doing here. But, if we can say this, there is one thing that Zizek does not admit to in that list above - and that is the very symptom of theory itself. For it really is the most extraordinary spectacle, seeing Zizek lecture. There he stands, this wildly gesticulating, bear-like man, tugging his beard and shirt, dark circles of sweat growing beneath his armpits, his neatly-combed hair growing lank and dishevelled, his eyes staring blindly around the room. He speaks rapidly through a strong Central European accent and a lisp, constantly circling back upon himself to try to make himself clearer, threatening never to stop. We feel he is making the same point over and over, but we cannot quite grasp it, and in order to do so he must take in the entirety of Western philosophy and culture, both high and low: from Schoenberg to sci-fi, from quantum mechanics to the latest Hollywood blockbuster, from now-forgotten figures of 18th and 19th century German philosophy to the notoriously obscure writings of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan... Indeed, Lacan once cruelly quipped of James Joyce that, although what he wrote was almost psychotic in its refusal to fix meaning, this writing was also the only thing that saved him from actual psychosis - and we think the same is true of Zizek as well. Zizek's fellow theorist Judith Butler writes on the back cover of one of his books: 'Slavoj lives to theorize', but we suspect the opposite is true and Zizek theorizes to live. Although, as his public performances and writings attest, his work is endlessly shifting, open-ended, refuses to close itself down or draw conclusions - in a word, is psychotic - it is also only the activity of theorizing that saves him, saves him from the very thing this theorizing brings about.

But, for all of our mockery, seeing Zizek speak takes us back to a possibility only rarely glimpsed since the origins of Western civilization. For he reminds us as much as anyone of the ancient Greek heroine Antigone, who insists beyond all reason and ends up sacrificing herself for a tragic cause. That is, we seem to have here a man who is, in the words of Lacan, 'between two deaths' (S7, 270), his outer being reduced to a mere shell or remainder. And yet he is also a man who, like Antigone, appears infused by some unstoppable power, possessed by some extraordinary cause in a world that lacks causes.2 We might say that Zizek is filled with a kind of death drive, a desire for self-extermination, except that what he reveals is that life itself, life in its profoundest sense, is not possible before this going-towards-death; that what we think we sacrifice when we live life like him only has value when seen from the other side. As Lacan says in his Seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, in which he discusses Antigone's case, from this other side we can see and live life 'in the form of something already lost' (S7, 280). And perhaps even beyond Antigone - who, after all, still did believe in something, still did have a cause - what are we to make of Zizek, who constantly changes his position and ultimately believes in nothing except the 'inherent correctness of theory itself' (CU, i)? What would it mean to sacrifice ourselves and everything we believed in (even our cause) for this 'nothing'? And why would we nevertheless go ahead and do it? Is this death the very life of theory, Theory itself as Cause?

The life of theory

Zizek first announced himself to the English-speaking world in 1989 with the publication of The Sublime Object of Ideology. It is an at-the-time unexpected fusion of Marx's notion of the commodity, Althusser's concept of interpellation and Lacan's idea of the split subject, in order to elaborate what we might call the social symptom. This symptom is for Zizek a way of bringing together - a long-running problem for progressive politics - the specifics of individual psychology with a wider analysis of the social. The fundamental insight of the book - adapted from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's ground-breaking Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) - is that the social is essentially divided, antagonistic, unable to be given closure. This has the consequence that the various terms that are used to understand and construct it are themselves provisional, contingent, continually fought over. Thus a term like 'democracy', which is constantly invoked as a desirable goal of society, is not ideologically neutral or unquestionably positive, but the subject of various groups attempting to claim it (SO, 98). Each of these attempts necessarily fails, because no one signifier can speak for the entirety of the social; but each group looks for an explanation of this failure to some external and intrusive element, whose removal would restore an imagined wholeness. It is this element that Zizek calls the 'sublime object of ideology': that ambiguous symptom-element that is 'heterogeneous to any given ideological field and at the same time necessary for that field to achieve its closure' (SO, 21).

Zizek follows this up two years later with For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. This densely theoretical text - as if to underscore its political relevance - was originally delivered as a series of two-part lectures over the winter of 1989-90 to a general audience in the months leading up to the first free Slovenian elections after the fall of Communism. These were elections in which Zizek himself stood as a pro-reform candidate for the Liberal Democratic Party. For They Know Not is, in part at least, a continuation of the enquiry into that fantasmatic 'sublime object', typically a Jew or foreigner, that allows the social to constitute itself as a whole. As Zizek writes in the Introduction, in his typical manner of making a serious point with a joke, if in Sublime Object he was able to count on the humour of the Jewish man who, wishing to emigrate from Russia and giving as one of his reasons his fear of anti-Semitic violence with the rise of the new nationalisms and being told that there is nothing to worry about because Communism will last forever, was able to reply: 'Well, that is my second reason!', this is no longer the case (TK, 1). Today, it is precisely the upsurge of racist violence with the collapse of Communism that is the reason for the Jewish man wanting to leave. And here Zizek speaks of the way that, along with the apparently non-ideological 'enjoyment' that allows ideology, there is also underlying this racism the fear of the theft of our enjoyment by others, the resentment of foreign invaders who threaten our way of life because of the strange new ways they have of enjoying themselves (TK, 37-8, 213-4).

The innovative aspect of both of these books is the way they are able to revive the traditional category of ideology-critique in these supposedly 'post-ideological' times. Indeed, they are able to demonstrate that it is our very distance from ideology - whether this is understood in terms of post-modern cynicism or pre-ideological 'enjoyment' - that allows ideology to do its work. The other striking thing about the two books is the way they are able to recast the psychoanalytical concept of fantasy and turn it into a tool for ideological analysis. The French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser was perhaps the first to show that fantasy is not to be understood as a merely subjective error or delusion, the simple refusal to recognize things as they are. Rather, for Althusser, fantasy is objective. It is not so much in what we believe as in our external social practices that fantasy is to be found. Thus, in terms of commodity-fetishism, it does not matter that we know money is not an immediate expression of wealth but only an abstracted version of social relations. All that matters is that in our actual behaviour we continue to act as though it is (SO, 31). This is the radical meaning behind Marx's analysis of the commodity form: that 'things (commodities) believe in our place' (SO, 34). This is also the conclusion to be drawn from Zizek's introduction of Lacan's notion of the split subject to Althusser's concept of interpellation, for what we see is that ideology works in an unconscious way, which is not to be understood as saying that its subjects know nothing of it - they do - but that the form of their behaviour escapes them (SO, 15). They are 'decentred' not because there is some aspect of their behaviour that they misrecognize or misperceive, but because from the beginning they are able to act or believe only through the agency of another (not only the Other as embodied in the fetish but also as embodied in social customs (SO, 36)).

These two books, although strikingly original in the context of the English-speaking reception of Continental philosophy, were in fact the outcome of a larger body of work done by Zizek and a group of like-minded Yugoslavian theorists, principally centred around the University of Ljubljana, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. (These theorists, with whom Zizek continues to maintain his ties, often either collaborating with them or writing the forewords to their books, include the philosopher Miran Bozovic, author of An Utterly Dark Spot and editor of Jeremy Bentham's The Panopticon Writings; philosopher Mladen Dolar, author of The Bone in the Spirit: A Lacanian Reading of Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit' and co-author with Zizek of Opera's Second Death; legal theorist Renata Salecl, author of The Spoils of Freedom and (Per)versions of Love and Hate; and philosopher Alenka Zupancic, author of Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. Zizek in interviews speaks of the various orientations of philosophy in the former Yugoslavia against which he and his colleagues pitched themselves:

In the Republic of Slovenia, there were two predominant philosophical approaches: Frankfurt School Marxism and Heideggerianism. Both were unacceptable to us Lacanians, not only generally, but in Slovenia the Communist Party was intelligent enough to adopt Frankfurt School Marxism as its official ideology. Heideggerianism was from the beginning linked to right-wing populism, and in other parts of Yugoslavia to the darkest Stalinist forces. For us, Althusser was crucial.3

Why Althusser? Because the old Yugoslavia was the proverbial 'socialism with a human face', in which the problem was not the direct imposition of ideology, but the fact that the old regime did not appear to take its own ideology seriously, and incorporated its own criticism in advance (IR, 3). It is exactly the same problem of private cynicism and public obedience that we find in contemporary capitalism (with same question of why this cynicism, far from undermining the regime's hold on power, actually strengthens it).

Indeed, after studying at the University of Ljubljana, Zizek was at first unable to find a job teaching because he was deemed by the authorities to be 'too unreliable'. He spent a number of years in the 1970s unemployed, before finally, his intellectual brilliance unable to be denied but prevented from having any actual contact with students, he was given a research position at the Institute of Sociology attached to the University. Zizek now ironically describes this period - during which he was supported by the State but not forced into normal academic duties - 'in Michael J. Fox terms as the secret of my success'.4 It is a situation he has been able to maintain, thanks to his frenetic publishing schedule and his burgeoning world-wide reputation:

Every three years I write a research proposal. I then divide it into three one-sentence paragraphs, which I call my yearly projects. At the end of each year I change my research project's future tense verbs into the past tense and then call it my yearly report. With total freedom, I am a total workaholic.5

After obtaining a Doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana in 1981, Zizek then went to Paris to study at the famous Seminar of Lacan's designated heir Jacques-Alain Miller, by whom he was analysed and with whom he would take out a Doctorate in Psychoanalysis in 1985. The book Le plus sublime des hyst?iques - Hegel passe (1988) is a product of Zizek's French period, in which he first puts forward his unique blend of Lacan and popular culture, as well as his unorthodox reading of Hegel. (It also includes much of what was to become Sublime Object and For They Know Not.) It sees Hegel not, as a generation of French post-structuralists have, as a thinker of the dialectical reconciliation of opposites, but as the most profound theorist of difference - a difference that is not to be grasped directly but only through the very failure of identity (HP, 89-90).

Immediately following For They Know Not, three new books appear. They are the first we would say that specifically come about as a result of Zizek's new English-speaking audience, that are not simply the outcome of his previous study or direct circumstances. They are perhaps less charged politically, less filled with the urgency of their task. As their titles indicate, they are essentially popularizations - virtuosic, pop-encyclopaedic, sublime-bathetic couplings of the highest and the lowest cultural themes. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Lacan through Popular Culture (1991) takes the reader through a number of Lacanian concepts ('Real', 'Gaze', 'Sinthome') by illustrating them with examples taken from popular culture. Thus we have Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun used to speak of the 'answer of the Real' (LA, 29-30), Michael Mann's Manhunter to speak of the perverse 'gaze' (LA, 107-8) and Patricia Highsmith's short story "The Pond" to speak of the pathological 'sinthome' (LA, 133-6). This is followed by Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (1992), which consists of a series of two-part lectures, the first elaborating some Lacanian concept through an example taken from Hollywood cinema - what Zizek calls 'for the other' - and the second treating the same concept in terms of its inherent content - 'in itself' (E!, xi). Thus we have a discussion of Lacan's notion of the suicidal 'act' through a consideration of the films of Roberto Rossellini (E!, 31-66), the post-modern loss of the 'phallus' in terms of David Lynch's Elephant Man (E!, 113-46) and woman as a 'symptom' of man with regard to the femmes fatales of 1950s film noir (E!, 149-93). The third book that appears in English during this period, although it was originally published in French in 1988, is the edited anthology Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (1992). It includes essays by the French film critic Pascal Bonitzer on Hitchcockian suspense, Zupancic on the way in which 'theatre' reveals the truth in Hitchcock and a long essay by Zizek on how the spectator's gaze is already included in Hitchcock's films. All of these books, which are absolute academic best-sellers and begin to bring his name for the first time before a wider audience, establish Zizek's lasting popular public image as a devoted pop-culture aficionado. There appears to be in his work a deliberate inversion of aesthetic categories, an upending of cultural hierarchies. Thus we have the putting together of Stephen King and Sophocles (LA, 25-6), Wagner and Westerns (LA, 114-5) and Colleen McCullough and Kant (LA, 160-2). There is obviously a kind of provocation to all of this, very close to that distinctive postmodern sensibility of camp, but Zizek claims an exalted pedigree for his procedure: Diogenes, Walter Benjamin and even Kant himself (LA, vii).

1993 sees the publication of arguably Zizek's magnum opus, the extraordinary Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology. In it, we find his most extended treatment of Hegel so far, again arguing, against a whole generation of post-structuralists in general and Derrida in particular, that Hegel does not attempt to do away with all difference within a 'restricted' economy, but rather seeks to theorize a fundamental 'crack' in the world, which forever resists dialectical synthesis (TN, 21). In the chapter "Hegel's "Logic of Essence" as a Theory of Ideology", Zizek makes the case for the importance of Hegel's notion of 'positing the presuppositions' (TN, 126) for any serious work in ideology analysis. He also looks at the way Hegel reconceptualizes Kant's notion of the 'sublime' not as some transcendental 'beyond' out there but as a kind of fantasy image brought about by a split in here (TN, 35-9). This strange logic, which Zizek will go on to connect with a certain feminine 'not-all', as opposed to a masculine 'universality produced through exception' (TN, 53-8), will have the widest implications for the rest of Zizek's work. It will allow him to criticize, for example, the usual notion of human rights as a universality only possible on the basis of a series of exclusions (women, children, the mad, the primitive), a universality from which ultimately everybody is excluded (ME, 157-8), as opposed to a conception of human rights as non-universal but applying precisely to these exceptions (L, 267-8). Or it will allow him to think why, although any opposition to it is swallowed up or absorbed by it, the current capitalist order is necessarily incomplete, unable to be realized (TS, 358; L, 266-7).

This interest in a particular 'feminine' logic is continued in the subsequent Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (1994), the first of three new books that have a partial, essay-like quality after the systematic exposition of Tarrying with the Negative. In Metastases, Zizek explores this logic in a number of fields, from the masculine construction of woman in mediaeval courtly poetry and film noir to the radical 'feminism' (in a typically perverse and counter-intuitive reading) of Otto Weininger's notorious turn-of-the-nineteenth-century anti-Semitic and misogynistic tract Sex and Character. In Metastases, following it must be said the pioneering Lacanian feminist Joan Copjec, Zizek takes a distance from the usual 'constructivist' accounts of contemporary feminism, which argue that woman is merely a performatively enacted or historically contingent fiction. For Zizek, this essentially 'symbolic' conception of woman - which condemns her either to mimic parodically the various clich? of femininity or to a silence outside of language - excludes the 'Real' of sexual difference. Rather, instead of this choice, what we see, to put it in Zizek's still too-condensed formulation, is that, whereas 'it is man who is wholly submitted to the phallus (since positing an exception is the way to maintain its universal domination), only woman through the inconsistency of her desire attains the domain "beyond the phallus"' (ME, 160-1).

Zizek's next book, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (1996), both signals a shift in his work and makes explicit what was previously only implicit in it. It is an extended analysis of a now slightly marginal figure from the history of German philosophy, F.W.J. Schelling (1775-1854). Zizek's polemical point is that Schelling in fact played a pivotal role between the idealism of Kant and Hegel and the materialism of Marx (IR, 4). But in what exactly does this materialism consist? Zizek insists that tracking it down is a tricky business. It is not to be found where we might expect. It is to be seen in that moment in Schelling when he admits that God is not eternally given but has as it were to posit Himself, contract Himself out of some obscure impenetrable 'Ground' (IR, 61-2). That is, Schelling is concerned not with the problem of how to pass from the perfect to the imperfect, how God enters the world, but on the contrary with the problem of how to pass from the imperfect to the perfect, how God arises in the first place (IR, 16, 112-3). Schelling's crucial realization is that God is imperfect, that there is always something missing from Him: a gap that might be understood as the human itself (IR, 67). It is a realization that Schelling himself came to shrink from. By means of an analysis of the successive drafts of the great Weltalter fragment (whose unfinished character for Zizek is the very sign of its materialist status), Zizek shows how Schelling moves from a position in which God comes about through a primordial contraction of 'Ground', which is materialist, to one in which God is a kind of pre-existing essence, which is idealist. And in 1997 Zizek reissues as The Abyss of Freedom, accompanied by a long introduction written by him, Schelling's second draft of the Weltalter fragment, in which his thinking of this 'free' positing by God of His own existence goes furthest, and draws a perhaps surprising conclusion: that materialism is not to be understood as a form of determinism, in which everything can be exhaustively explained, but as what keeps causality open, what allows the possibility of freedom.

Also in 1997 The Plague of Fantasies is published, which is very much a collection of disparate pieces, including a version of the introduction first written for the collection Mapping Ideology (1994) and essays on such diverse topics as virtual reality, the sexual act in cinema and the possibility of an ethics beyond the Good. (Indivisible Remainder, for its part, already included an essay entitled 'Quantum Physics with Lacan'!) It is interesting to observe here how Zizek has moved on from his earlier attempts to analyse ideology in terms of the fetish in Sublime Object and For They Know Not. Even bearing in mind the vastly expanded, intrapsychic conception of ideology at stake there, in Plague it is even more intrusive and extreme. We have the sense of something that penetrates even the deepest recesses of our bodies, that colonizes even our most private fantasies. We have an 'interpassivity', as in computer games and simulations, in which the Other not only knows and believes for us but even enjoys for us (PF, 113-7). It is a world in which we risk psychosis because that gap between the world and our various constructions of it becomes increasingly filled in (PF, 157-9). Ideology becomes a total and seamless screen, as we realize that what we understand as 'reality' was always already virtual. And yet, says Zizek - in a formulation that might remind us of Jean Baudrillard - this is only because of a certain 'Real' that is excluded (PF, 163). It is at this point that another 'ethics', an 'ethics' beyond the Good, might be thought.

The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, published in 1999, is another attempted summa of Zizek's philosophy. This massive, 400 page tome, reputedly written in a mere six months, is divided up into three parts: the first, which treats Heidegger and his reading of the Kantian Transcendental Imagination in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (this a continuation of the enquiry into that 'gap' which allows freedom in Schelling); the second, which takes up the fate of three post-Althusserian French political thinkers (Alain Badiou, ?ienne Balibar and Jacques Ranci?e); and the third, which consists of an extended engagement with the feminist deconstructionist Judith Butler. Or, as Zizek says in his "Introduction," the book addresses three distinctive philosophical traditions: German philosophical Idealism, French political philosophy and Anglo-American cultural studies (TS, 5). Ticklish Subject marks an advance on Zizek's previous work in several respects. First, the opening section sees a detailed explication of the thought of Heidegger, who is to become a more and more common reference in Zizek's writings to come. Second, following the path-breaking book by Badiou, St Paul, or, The Birth of Universalism, Zizek is more and more willing to define his political project - against Laclau and Mouffe - in terms of a certain universality. Third, the book constitutes Zizek's closest encounter yet with feminist-queer 'constructivism' and a defence against the emerging criticism that his use of the Lacanian 'Real' is 'ahistorical'. We see him in his debate with Butler seeking to negotiate a way simultaneously against historicism and any simple anti-historicism. And all of this he does, finally, by means of a spirited and unexpected defence of Cartesian subjectivity, the object of critique of virtually every contemporary philosophical orientation (deconstructionism, feminism, New Age spiritualism, scientific cognitivism).

This is followed soon after - with no sign of fatigue or let-down - by the short polemical pamphlet The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (2000). It can be seen as a continuation of Ticklish Subject's defence of Pauline Christianity and its insight (as opposed to multi-culturalism, ethical relativism and even orthodox Christianity) that a universal truth is worth fighting for. It is a truth, however, that is only to be obtained from a position of engaged particularity. In this we might see a shift from the earlier defence of the 'absolute particular' (LA, 156) of the other's enjoyment, akin perhaps to traditional liberal tolerance, to an assertion of the 'particular absolute' of our own partisan position, akin to St Paul's famous militancy. This argument for a newly committed 'universality' is seen also in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, which appears the following year. This book is a withering attack upon the contemporary tendency to level the charge of 'totalitarianism' against any attempt to propose a political 'Grand Narrative', an accusation that functions precisely as a way of discouraging any real social change (for example, the argument that any attempt to propose a unified political position against capitalism can only lead to a new form of dictatorship). At this point a more and more explicit Marxism enters Zizek's work, indeed, an argument for a form of Communism involving an organized party structure and the socialization of economic resources. Zizek's politics here have moved well beyond any notion of an always unrealizable 'democracy', in which the locus of power must always remain empty (TK, 267-70), to an admiration for such figures as Lenin, who were willing to seize power and impose their political will. But it is a Lenin, surprisingly - as Zizek argues in the long Afterword he writes for his 2002 collection of Lenin texts, Revolution at the Gates - who is not at all inconsistent with a certain notion of Christianity.

Throughout this period, Zizek continues to publish a whole series of other texts and interventions: an essay on David Lynch, a long-time favourite, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime (2000); a lecture series on the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski for the British Film Institute, The Fright of Real Tears (2001); a short text updating his thoughts on ideology, On Belief (2001); a response to the attacks on the World Trade Center, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002); essays in books he has either edited himself or been included in, On the Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (1996), Cogito and the Unconscious (1998) and Sexuation (2002); a joint volume with Butler and Laclau, in which each debates the others' position, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000). It is simply an extraordinary outpouring of material, which shows no signs of slowing down and, indeed, even seems to be speeding up. In 2000, Zizek publishes three books; in 2001, four; in 2002, four again. One of the paradoxes of this is that it seems that, as his work becomes more and more explicitly anti-capitalist, it is also becoming more commodified. That is, we might not only speak of Zizek himself in terms of a certain excremental identification, but also of his work. In its very excessiveness, unmasterability, relentless accumulation and the difficulty of knowing what to do with it all, does it not resemble excrement, or even the hoarding of capital itself? It is a paradox he explores in his recent work: that not only is capitalism its own critique, but this critique always ends up returning to capital itself (L, 277). But Zizek could only get the effects he does by going as close as possible to his own personal dissolution, his fusion with the Other. As he writes in Ticklish Subject:

This is the domain 'beyond the Good', in which a human being encounters the death drive as the utmost limit of human experience, and pays the price by undergoing a radical 'subjective destitution', by being reduced to an excremental remainder. Lacan's point is that this limit-experience is the irreducible/constitutive condition of the (im)possibility of the creative act of embracing a Truth-Event; it opens up and sustains the space for the Truth-Event, yet its excess always threatens to undermine it. (TS, 161)

How to read Zizek?

Of course, it is absurd to suggest that a thinker as prolific and popular as Zizek needs an introduction. After all, what can any commentary say about him that he does not already say? How to explain Zizek any more clearly than he does himself? (Or, to put this another way, what is to guarantee that we can make any clearer what Zizek fails to? How can we be sure that we get to the bottom of what drives him on through all those endless repetitions and re-elaborations that run throughout his texts?) In that process of radical externalization that characterizes Zizek's work, this striving to make himself absolutely clear, Zizek compares what he is doing to the Lacanian procedure of the passe, in which the analyst-in-training has to pass on their findings to two uninitiated members of the general public, who in turn have to transmit them to the examining committee. 'The idiot', he says generously, 'for whom I attempt to formulate a theoretical point as clearly as possible is ultimately myself' (ME, 175). But it is undoubtedly also us. Perhaps all we can offer in this book, paradoxically, is to make Zizek less accessible, less popular, less easily understood. We do not try to find other examples to explain his work - always a worthless academic exercise. We do not try to write in the same exuberant style. We do not try to be funny. (Think of all those endless, dreadful attempts to imitate Derridean ?riture.) In a sense, we try to be faithful to Zizek's own self-assessment from his Preface to the collection The Zizek Reader:

In contrast to the clich?of the academic writer beneath whose impassive style the reader can catch an occasional glimpse of a so-called lively personality, I always perceived myself as the author of books whose excessively 'witty' texture serves as the envelope of a fundamental coldness, of a 'machinic' deployment of a line of thought which follows its path with utter indifference towards the pathology of so-called human considerations. (ZR, viii)

But what is this 'machine'? What is the internal, non-human, non-pathological logic of Zizek's work? Here we meet perhaps the second difficulty that arises in any consideration of Zizek. Introductory texts like these inevitably excuse themselves before the author they discuss. In a mock-heroic version of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, they wish only to disappear before the greatness they present. In a performative contradiction, they are nothing, they insist. It is much better to read the 'real' author; their only hope is that the person buying their book goes on to read the 'real' author; and so on. But is this really the case with Zizek? In another side to that radical externalization we spoke of before, is it not possible that Zizek's own books are merely, as he himself puts it, an 'introduction to Lacan through popular culture' or 'everything you always wanted to know about Lacan (but were afraid to ask Hitchcock)'? That is to say, is there any point in actually reading Zizek? Might there ultimately be no difference in status between our introduction to Zizek and Zizek himself? And might this not even be to suggest that there is no need to read Zizek if we have already read those authors he writes about? Perhaps this book should be entitled "Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Zizek (But Were Too Lazy to Read Zizek)" or "Everything You Already Knew about Zizek (Because You Have Already Read Lacan and Hegel)".

At stake here is the status of Zizek's thought. Is there anything beneath the glittering brilliance of its writerly surface, its extraordinary and eclectic range of references, its argumentative brio? Is it merely an extended explication of Lacan, a fusion of Lacan and Hegel, a politicization of Lacan through Marx? Does it possess that 'oneness' or unifying trait that we take to characterize all authentic philosophy? Or must all this be thought another way? Is significant thought characterized by any identifiable oneness, or is it rather always split, introducing a kind of split into the world? And is this what Zizek's thought forces us to consider? Is it something like this 'doubling' or 'antagonism' that is at stake in it? In order to answer these questions, let us listen in fact to the words of one of Zizek's critics, the 'post-theory' film writer Ed O'Neill. Here he is reviewing the Zizek-edited anthology Cogito and the Unconscious:

Example after example is supplied, but the principle that makes them examples is not itself given. Appeals are implicitly made to Lacan's authority, but the source of that authority is never mentioned. The truth of Lacan's theories is urged by showing how other people's theories support that truth but without explaining why these theories have the same object. One concept is defined in terms of another, which is then described the same way, ad infinitum. What's being explained is mixed with what's doing the explaining in a circular fashion so striking that it may well count as both a novelty and a technical innovation in the history of interpretation.6

What exactly is going on here? O'Neill in his na?et?perhaps comes close to putting his finger on the two striking though contradictory impressions we have when reading Zizek. The first is that, as in the confusion of theory and examples he observes, it is not some literal fidelity to Lacan's psychoanalysis that is at stake there. It is not some pre-existing orthodoxy or body of precepts that is being 'applied' to various examples. Rather, Lacanian psychoanalysis is caught up from the beginning in other fields of knowledge, establishing a potentially endless series of analogies between them: 'One concept is defined in terms of another, which is then described the same way, ad infinitum'. And this undoubtedly has the strange effect that, even when Zizek is not directly speaking about Lacan, he is speaking about Lacan. Lacan is not so much being translated as he is the very medium of translation itself. The second impression we have is that the total presence of Lacan in Zizek's work means that his actual authority disappears. Just as with that confusion between theory and examples O'Neill observes, there is a confusion between Lacan and those who cite him: 'The truth of Lacan's theories is urged by showing how other people's theories support that truth'. That is to say, it is precisely through Zizek's dogmatic fidelity to Lacan, through his absolute identification with him, that he is able to become original himself. Unlike so many other commentators who through their criticisms of Lacan reveal themselves to be attached to him, it is only Zizek who through his literal adherence to him is finally able to break with him.7 As Zizek says, it is our very desire to look for mistakes and inconsistencies in the Other that testifies to the fact that we still transfer on to them, while it is only something like this identification with the symptom that might allow us to avoid the fantasy (SO, 66). Or, to put this in the slightly blasphemous form of the Jesuits' relationship to God, Zizek 'believes that the success of his undertaking depends entirely on him and in no way on [Lacan]; but, nonetheless, sets to work as if [Lacan] alone will do everything and he himself nothing' (B, 125)

What is radically posed by Zizek's work - both as a theme within it and by the very existence of the work itself - is the relationship of thought to the Other, to the subject who knows. How to become original when one's great influence is Lacan, who has already thought of everything (not so much because he actually has as because, within the structure of transference that characterizes thought, he will be seen as having already done so)? Let us take here the example of those two thinkers who are constantly invoked in this regard, Marx and Freud. It is they who are seen to constitute an unsurpassable horizon to thought, impossible to go beyond. It is they whom we can only ever be seen to repeat. But what is it that characterizes the particular quality of their thought? And how is it that we might somehow think 'after' it? The specific concepts that Marx and Freud introduce, class and the unconscious, are not simply empirical, demonstrably either true or not, but rather challenge the very limits of scientificity. In a way, they 'double' what is by an undemonstrable yet irrefutable hypothesis that not only lies within the existing discursive field but also resituates it, giving all the elements within it a different meaning. As a result, these concepts are present when they appear to be absent (the field as it is is only possible because of them) and absent when they most appear present (any naming of them from within the current set-up is only to stand in for them). So what could it mean, therefore, to relate to Marx and Freud, to continue their work, as perhaps Althusser and Lacan did? It must mean that what they do has a similar quality, that it does not so much either follow or refute them as 'double' them, at once completing them and showing that they must be understood for a entirely different reason than the one they give themselves. And it is this that we would say characterizes all significant 'postmodern' thought: the problem of what to say about closed systems, systems of which there is no external standard of judgement, in which the Other already knows everything. (The whole question of the 'end to metaphysics' is misunderstood - even by Badiou and Deleuze - if it is not grasped in this sense.) It is this that distinguishes all philosophical thought worthy of the name: the fact that it does not merely lie within the empirical field but is also the 'transcendental' condition of it. And it is this that constitutes the unity and originality of this thought - not that it is 'one' but that it endlessly doubles and splits the world (and itself): Derrida's diff?ance, Deleuze's deterritorialization, Irigaray's woman, Baudrillard's seduction and perhaps something in Zizek...

In fact, Hegel was the first philosopher to speak of this 'end' of philosophy. This 'doubling', as Zizek so brilliantly brings out, is what is at stake in Hegel's notion of dialectics and not any reconciliation with the world. And, indeed, it is something like this 'end of philosophy' in the sense of having nothing to say that we see in undoubtedly one of the most interesting attempts to account for what is 'original' about Zizek: Denise Gigante's "Toward a Notion of Critical Self-Creation: Slavoj Zizek and the "Vortex of Madness". She writes:

But where Zizek is unique, and where he makes his radical break with other literary theorists who take up a position, any position at all that pretends to some notional content or critical truth, is in the fact that he fundamentally has no position.8

This, we would say, is a fascinating insight; but we disagree with Gigante when she suggests that this condition is somehow unique to Zizek himself. On the contrary, we would argue that all post-Hegelian philosophy, or indeed all philosophy in the light of Hegel, begins with this 'nothing to say'. It is what we will come to speak of as the 'contraction' of the primordial void in Schelling (IR, 22-7). It is that 'empty' speech that for Lacan precedes and makes possible 'full' or authentic speech (S1, 51). It is even that vouloir-dire or undeconstructible 'Yes!' that motivates deconstruction in Derrida. It is at once an attempt to follow or be faithful to what is, adding nothing, and it is the saying or re-marking of this nothing as something, thus opening up the possibility of something to say. (It is perhaps no coincidence that Lacan speaks of the special status of the great philosophers' knowledge, the way it advances not singly but always 'two by two, in a supposed Other' (S20, 97), mentioning in this regard Marx, Freud and even himself, in the Seminar Encore, devoted to the question of woman. For, as we will see, this structure in which the symbolic order is total, allowing no exception, and yet we are entirely outside of it, unindebted to any Other, is precisely the 'feminine' logic Lacan is trying to elaborate there.)

Zizek gives another hint as to what he considers philosophical originality - the difference between authentic philosophy and mere academic commentary - in his book on Kieslowski, The Fright of Real Tears. He writes:

In philosophy, it is one thing to talk about, report on, say, the history of the notion of the subject (accompanied by all the proper bibliographical footnotes), even to supplement it with comparative critical remarks; it is quite another to work in theory, to elaborate the notion of the 'subject' itself. (K, 9)

Zizek speaks here of the elaboration of the philosophical notion of the subject as an example of the distinction he is proposing between first- and second-order philosophical systems; but we suggest that it is more than an example: it is the very distinction itself. To elaborate the subject is what philosophy does. But what exactly does this mean, to elaborate the subject? And in what ways, if any, does Zizek do it? It would involve not only elaborating a particular subject as the name of a philosophical system or a philosophy that will come to be known by a particular name, but - although this is not strictly speaking opposed - the subject as a split subject, what Lacan indicates by the symbol $, the subject as gap or void. All significant philosophical systems, that is, introduce a certain gap or void into what is - a gap or void that we would call the subject. Repeating the essential Hegelian gesture of translating 'substance as subject', what is is understood as standing in for a void (SO, 201-30; TN, 21-7). And it is around this 'subject' that the essential connection between philosophy and psychoanalysis might be made. It is around this 'subject' - the subject as split and the subject as introducing a kind of split - that the originality of Zizek's philosophy is to be found.

'Why is every act a repetition?'

But in order to see what all of this might mean in more detail, let us turn to a text of Zizek's originally entitled "Philosophy Traversed by Psychoanalysis", and now reprinted in Enjoy Your Symptom! as "Why is Every Act a Repetition?" In this text, Zizek addresses the relationship of psychoanalysis to philosophy, which is precisely not a matter of psychoanalysing philosophy or particular philosophers but of psychoanalysis constituting philosophy's frame. As he writes: 'It [psychoanalysis] circumscribes the discourse's frame, i.e., the intersubjective constellation, the relationship toward the teacher, toward authority, which renders possible the philosophical discourse' (E!, 92). That is, if psychoanalysis is external to philosophy, it is an externality philosophy cannot do without and which philosophy from the beginning takes as its subject - Zizek in his text cites Plato's Symposium as the first attempt by philosophy to speak of its intersubjective (psychoanalytic) origins. In "Why is Every Act?", however, it is a short text by Kierkegaard, "Philosophical Fragments," that Zizek considers at greatest length in order to speak of this transferential aspect to philosophy. In "Philosophical Fragments," Kierkegaard makes a distinction between theology (not psychoanalysis) and philosophy (even Plato) over the question of this transferential, intersubjective relationship to truth. Whereas in traditional philosophy, according to Kierkegaard, a philosopher like Socrates is only the 'midwife' for a timeless and eternal truth, in Christian doxa the truth of a statement lies not in what is said but in the authority of the one who speaks. The truth of Christ's message lies not in any actual content but in the very fact that Christ said it. This is the meaning behind Kierkegaard's insistence, undoubtedly a little strange to our ears, that anyone who believes what Christ is saying because of what He says reveals themselves not to be a Christian: a Christian, on the contrary, believes what Christ says because it is said by Christ (E!, 93).

However, it is not quite as simple as this, for at the same time as this absolute emphasis on Christ's personal authority, He is also only an empty vessel for the word of another. In other words, Christ only possesses the authority He does because He carries the higher, transcendental Word of God. It would be in what He transmits and not in Christ Himself that His power lies. Or, to use Kierkegaard's distinction, Christ is not so much a 'genius' as an 'apostle' (E!, 93). (We might think again here of what Lacan says in Encore about those special agents of knowledge, Marx, Freud and implicitly himself: that, if they are great and singular figures, whose ideas cannot be separated from them as founders, it is also 'clearly on the basis of the Other that they have constituted the letter at their own expense' (S20, 97-8).) We thus appear to have a kind of dilemma, for the authority of Christ lies not in what He says but only in His personal authority, and yet He only retains this authority insofar as He transmits directly and without mediation the Word of God. What then lies at the impossible intersection of these two sets - Christ's life and His teachings? How to think together these two elements that at once exclude and are necessary to each other? Zizek seeks to represent what is at stake by means of the following diagram (E!, 96):

What is important about this diagram? In the first part of his essay, Zizek takes up the question of what Lacan calls the 'forced choice' (E!, 69): the idea that underlying the symbolic order in which we live there is a choice whether to enter it or not. As a result of this choice - which in a sense is forced because the only alternative to it is psychosis - a situation that arises after it is able to be presented as though it already existed before it. A situation that relies upon the assent of the subject is able to be presented as though the subject is unnecessary, as though the decision has already been made for them. For example, we recognize the king because he is the king, even though he is the king only because we recognize him. Or we acknowledge the interpellation or hailing of authority - 'Hey you!', as shouted by a policeman - even though it is specifically meant for us only after we acknowledge it.9 And this 'conversion' of the arbitrary and conventional into the regular and natural is made possible by what Zizek calls the master-signifier: that by which an implicit order or prescription is made to seem as though it is only the description of a previously existing state of affairs. As he writes in "Why is Every Act?":

The Lacanian S1, the 'master-signifier' which represents the subject for other signifiers, is therefore the point of intersection between the performative and the constative, i.e., the point at which the 'pure' performative coincides with (assumes the form of) its opposite. (E!, 99)

Zizek's point, however, is that in a way we can repeat this forced choice and thus expose this process. We can go back to that moment of our original entry into the symbolic and relive it as though it has not already taken place and thus think what is lost by it.10

It is this possibility, Zizek argues, that is to be seen in Kierkegaard's conception of our relationship to Christ. What we glimpse there in the laying bare of the transferential relationship to knowledge, in the way the Word of Christ relies upon a certain blind authority, is a moment 'before' we enter the symbolic order, as though we could somehow choose whether to recognize the king or accept that interpellation by which we become a subject. (Of course, the paradox of this is that there is in fact no 'choice' involved here at all, because we only become subjects possessed of free will as a result of this decision to enter the symbolic order. And it is precisely in this split not so much between various choices within the symbolic as between the symbolic and what comes 'before' it that the subject in the proper philosophical sense emerges. As Zizek writes: 'In this split, in this impossibility of a "pure" performative, the subject of the signifier emerges' (E!, 99).) In other words, according to Zizek, what we witness in Kierkegaard's model of Christian authority, with its absolute emphasis on the physical presence of Christ, is a momentary 'separation' of prescription and description, something that is not simply reducible to the symbolic order. And this is why, in that diagram above, Zizek represents the intersection between 'personal description' (prescription) and 'teaching' (description), which would normally be occupied by S1 or the master-signifier, by what Lacan calls object a or a 'little piece of the real' (E!, 101). Again, as opposed to traditional philosophy, in which the teacher or the means of expression is finally dispensable as the mere medium of an eternal truth, in Kierkegaard it is the unsurpassable condition for access to Christian revelation, which is not to be grasped outside of the actual present in which it occurs.

For Zizek, it is just this emphasis on the material presence of the analyst that also characterizes psychoanalysis, and why that 'trauma' it discovers is not merely to be understood as some repressed and timeless memory the analyst helps us to recover but as something that is played out for real within the psychoanalytic session, something that does not exist before analysis and actual contact with the analyst (E!, 102). And, again, it is this 'repetition' of the forced choice that might allow psychoanalysis, like Christianity, to break the transferential relationship, to bring out the separation between the analyst and the position they occupy, to see the prescription (transference, personal authority) 'before' it becomes description (the way things naturally appear to be, teaching). It is not perhaps here simply a matter of getting rid of the master-signifier, for the symbolic field is unable to be constituted without it - again, the question of the paradoxical split 'subject' - but of somehow rendering present that empty prescription that 'precedes' and 'allows' it. As Zizek observes of Lacan's clinical practice and the way he attempted to theorize the position of the analyst as holding the position of object a in that diagram above:

The unmasking of the master's imposture does not abolish the place he occupies, it just renders it visible in its original emptiness, i.e., as preceding the element which fills it out. Therefore the Lacanian notion of the analyst qua envers (reverse) of the master: of somebody who holds the place of the master, yet who, by means of his (non)activity, undermines the master's charisma, suspends the effect of 'quilting', and thus renders visible the distance that separates the master from the place he occupies, i.e., the radical contingency of the subject who occupies this place. (E!, 103)

And the same would go for all great thinkers in the relationship of their personal authority to their teaching: they too ultimately seek to 'render visible the distance that separates the master from the place he occupies'.11 It is this that constitutes the anti-authoritarian thrust of our contemporary 'masters of suspicion'.

Yet, as Zizek is undoubtedly aware, Marx, Freud and Lacan are not straightforwardly anti-authoritarian or anti-transferential. In fact, what their work - which is arguably the final outcome of that critique of authority that characterizes the Enlightenment - reveals is that the Enlightenment is not, as is usually thought, opposed to authority but inseparable from it. The truth is arrived at not through the careful weighing up of the reasons for and against a certain proposition, but by the unappealable fiat of authority. Indeed, as we have already seen, insofar as the statements of these thinkers are not just empirical but also assert the 'transcendental' conditions of their respective fields, they cannot be tested or questioned but only followed. As Zizek writes:

Since Marx and Freud opened up a new theoretical field which sets the very criteria of veracity, their work cannot be put to the test in the same way one is allowed to question the statements of their followers... For that reason, every 'further development' of Marxism or psychoanalysis necessarily assumes the form of a 'return' to Marx and Freud: the form of a (re)discovery of some hitherto overlooked layer of their work, i.e, of bringing to light what the founders 'produced without knowing what they produced'. (E!, 100)

But it is at this point that we must ask: why this coincidence of transference and anti-transference? Why are these master-thinkers not simply anti-transferential but also transferential, indeed, more transferential than ordinary thinkers? Is it not merely that the authority of transference is to be overcome by another transference but that the very attempt to uncover transference leads to transference? And how, to come back to our original question of Zizek's relationship to his sources, are we to imagine Zizek 'going beyond' them, when every 'further development' of them can only assume the form of a 'return' to them, a '(re)discovery of some hitherto overlooked layer' of their work? Can any such 'breaking with' or 'overturning of' them only take the form of a certain 'return' to them? And what, finally, is the role of object a in all of this? Is it to be thought of as exposing the 'original emptiness preceding the element that fills it out' in that diagram above, or must all this be thought another way?

In order to begin answering these questions, let us turn to the passage in "Why is Every Act?" immediately after Zizek discusses the attempted psychoanalytic breaking of the transference. He speaks there of the Lacanian procedure of the passe, in which, as we have seen, the analyst-in-training does not immediately pass on their findings to the examining committee but only through two uninvolved middle-persons or passeurs. In this way, Lacan sought to break any initiatic contact between the analyst and the committee; but there is also something else produced. For, of course, these passeurs get things wrong, distort the message. The message does not arrive intact at its destination. And yet, if we can say this, this just is the knowledge of the unconscious that the analyst-in-training possesses. It is just this that they are able to pass on intact to the examining committee. In other words, the knowledge of the unconscious that the analyst possesses lies not so much in anything they actually say as in their saying of it. It is nothing that can be lost or distorted because it is this very loss and distortion. And it is this, finally, that the analyst-in-training must realize - just as earlier we spoke about the way that 'trauma' does not exist as something recollected, but as what is produced in the relationship with the analyst - that the meaning of their words is nothing that can be grasped by them but comes about only in the relationship between two. This is the experience of 'decentrement' that Lacan called 'subjective destitution', which is the realization that our meaning does not originate with ourselves but only with our mistakes and distortions, as what we have produced without knowing it or what is in us more than ourselves. That is to say, what the analyst must in the end realize is that they are themselves a passeur: that they transmit knowledge from the Other to the Other without knowing what it is; that all they add is a certain distortion, a particular way of speaking, a characteristic enunciation.

Do we not see the same thing with our great philosophers? For perhaps unexpectedly - to go back to that original distinction Kierkegaard makes vis-?vis Christ - Zizek calls them at a certain point not 'geniuses' but 'apostles' (E!, 101). But of whom are they the apostles? In what way is it not merely a matter of their personal qualities but also of them being the carriers of the word of another? And how is this a clue to what we have just seen about them: that they are unable to be surpassed, or surpassed only in their own name? Again, what is it that defines the particular contribution of our major thinkers? What is it that separates their thought - authentic philosophy - from that of others - academic commentary? If we can repeat ourselves, it is because they do not simply offer concepts from within an already existing field but also redefine this field, or as Zizek puts it they 'circumscribe the discourse's frame'. It is this Zizek calls, with regard to Plato and Kierkegaard - as an example of this - the 'subjective constellation, the relationship toward the teacher, toward authority, which renders possible the philosophical discourse'. But, once more, we would say that this is not so much an example of as the very thing that authentic philosophy does: it speaks of, takes into account, the intersubjective dimension of philosophy. It grasps, understands, that from the beginning it is caught up in a transferential - dialogical - relationship with its interpreters. Its word lives on - and it recognizes this - not because of some concrete doctrine set out in advance but because it is seen in retrospect to be what its interpreters say it is. To put this another way, what exactly does Marx mean by class, the specific concept that he introduces? Class is not something that is either present or not, but what is present in its absence and absent in its presence. The meaning and even the existence of class is always being disputed, but class just is this struggle (ME, 181-3; T?, 228). And, similarly, Freud's unconscious, as Lacan demonstrates, is not so much something that is either present or not as what comes about in the relationship between it and its interpreters, whatever it is that they speak of. It is as though Marx and Freud (and Hegel too, as Zizek shows in his Le plus sublime des hyst?iques) have undergone the passe and now realize that they are merely the empty transmitters or apostles of the word of another. But of whose word are they the apostles (and this undoubtedly applies to Christ too, as St Paul shows)? Precisely of us, their interpreters or analysts.

But, to get back to our main point, the paradox here is that it is in remarking upon transference that our speakers produce transference. It is in speaking of the way that their message is always distorted that their message is never distorted. The intersubjective element of philosophy, the fact that its authority comes from us, is not simply irreconcilable with the authority of philosophy but is its real basis. And this is the ambiguity of object a as at once what is in the subject 'more than themselves' and the stand-in for that 'act' that would repeat and thus reveal the 'forced choice'. For let us go back to that 'act' by means of which we are able to relive this forced choice as though it has not yet happened, and which opens us up to something 'before' or 'outside' of the symbolic order. The example Zizek gives of it in "Why is Every Act?" is Antigone's famous 'No!' to King Creon's refusal to allow her brother Polynices a proper burial. It is a gesture that places her outside of the social, that proposes a radically different set of values, and which therefore can only be judged in its own terms. As Zizek writes:

This 'law' in the name of which Antigone insists on Polynices' right to burial is the law of the 'pure' signifier prior to every positive law that judges our deeds: it is the law of the Name which fixes our identity beyond the eternal flow of generation and corruption. (E!, 92)

And yet, ironically, to all intents and purposes, this 'No!' is exactly like the word of the master-signifier itself, which can also only be judged tautologically and requilts the social field, forcing us to read everything in a new way. And this, again, is the difficulty we have with our master-thinkers and why it is so hard to think 'after' them, for in a sense the concepts they propose are nothing positive but only the 'inscription of a pure difference' (E!, 91), already naming their own difference from themselves. That is, as we have seen with the concepts of class and the unconscious, we could no sooner name their absence, our difference from them or even the fact that they arise only in their relationship to us, than these would return to them as what they are already about. It is they that would remark before us their own absence and difference from themselves.12

As Zizek admits, this standing outside of the forced choice can only end up repeating it. This act comes down finally to a choice not whether to enter the symbolic or not but between two alternatives already within the symbolic. As Zizek makes clear in that other diagram he reproduces in the chapter (E!, 76), object a still lies within the set defined by S1 and S2, two different master-signifiers. Or, as he puts it there: 'The subject cannot "have it all" and choose himself as nonbarred; all he can choose is a partial mark, one of two signifiers, the symbolic mandate that will represent him, designate his place in the intersubjective network' (E!, 76). Or, as he will elsewhere say, paraphrasing Lacan, the choice comes down to that between 'bad' and 'worse' (E!, 75), which perhaps is not simply that between a master-signifier within the symbolic order and a psychotic act outside of it, but is always echoed - insofar as we are a 'split' subject - in the choice between two signifiers within the symbolic order. But it is in this context that we must read Zizek carefully - and perhaps even against himself - when he states that in Lacan's 'suspension' of the master-signifier we might somehow see '[the master's-place] visible in its original emptiness, i.e., as preceding the original element which fills it out'. For, as Zizek himself argues, this object a only 'comes into being through being lost, i.e., it is not given prior to its loss' (E!, 75). In other words, this empty place is never given as such but is only ever a retrospective effect of it being filled in. The repetition of the forced choice never really comes up with a different decision, never actually chooses otherwise; but this repetition itself testifies to something always not chosen. Again, as Zizek says with regard to the notion of the working through of 'trauma' in psychoanalysis, it is not so much some prior existing alternative that is either recollected or not as a fleeting possibility that arises in the present, at the very moment it is not chosen. As in Kierkegaard's notion of the religious, we do not so much repeat some particular thing or even decision as the very failure to make a decision: 'Insofar as repetition is not possible, it is possible to repeat the very experience of impossibility' (E!, 79). And in repeating it as impossible, we do not merely render it possible, change the course of events, but think what is excluded to ensure that things are as they are, what is allowed by this always unchosen alternative. This is the very 'transcendental' philosophical gesture as such, understanding how what is stands in for a certain fundamental impossibility.

It is for this reason too that this act of which we are speaking is not some 'exception reconciled in the universal' (E!, 84), or at least not in any obvious sense. For this repetition of the forced choice is not in the end a breaking or transgression of the symbolic order. It is not directly opposed to or outside of it. As we have already seen, we can only overturn one prescription by another prescription, one transference by another transference. Rather, what this 'possibility' opened up by the act suggests is that, even though there is no actual outside to the symbolic order, even though any attempt to think something prior to it can only choose an alternative already within it, all this is only possible because of a certain 'outside', a certain 'alternative' forever excluded. It is precisely what Zizek means by the Real as a kind of 'transhistorical kernel' (E!, 81), for which object a stands in. Again, it would not be so much anything prior to the symbolic as what is excluded at the very moment it is included, what each of these master-signifiers tries to speak of, what each of these 'doublings' or 'requiltings' seeks to respond to. And what this forces us to think is both that there is nothing outside of the symbolic order (this object a will always turn into another master-signifier) and this symbolic is empty, contains nothing (in a way does not exist until the 'free' decision to enter it). At the very moment the symbolic order 'doubles', names its own difference from itself, there is also something that 'doubles' it, which cannot be named. As opposed to any 'exception reconciled in the universal', there is at once no exception and all is exception. And this is the ambiguity of object a as that 'law of the name', let us say of the master-signifier: it is both only a new master-signifier, which cannot be lost, and what allows this loss to be recorded, that without which this loss would not exist. It is this equivalence that Zizek speaks of throughout his work in terms of the Hegelian formulae 'the Spirit is a Bone' (E!, 88) and the monarch as the identity of the 'State qua rational totality and the "irrational", biological positivity of the king's body' (E!, 86). It is also the particular rhythm that characterizes Zizek's work: a kind of 'Schellingian' simultaneous contraction and expansion, in which proper names and concepts at once channel the disseminatory drift of the writing and argument and open it up to the loss of coherence and sense.

To return finally to that diagram with which we began, we might say that it is the very image of philosophy - or at least philosophy as seen from a Hegelian perspective. For what we see in the impossible intersection of personal description and teaching there is the attempt to make enunciation and enunciated equal in order to speak of that void or emptiness that makes the symbolic order possible. In other words, its 'doubling' of the system before (whether it be social reality or a philosophical construct) takes the place of an always excluded enunciation: it speaks of that position from which the equivalences of the system before are possible. And yet it could no sooner speak of this enunciation than lose it, turn it into an enunciated, allowing another to 'double' it in turn. Object a, that mysterious object of desire of philosophy, is just this equivalence of personal description and teaching, enunciation and enunciated, no sooner spoken of than lost, like that famous paradox, so important to Lacan, of 'I am lying' (S11, 138-41). And the great philosophers, those who join in this conversation, realize this, and in so doing lose it again. Philosophy is always the same story told differently, but this story is nothing but these differences. We come back to our original insight that perhaps all Zizek adds is a certain argumentative brio, a new range of references, a brilliant writerly style - in short, a new way of speaking - but all this only to stand for that nothing (object a) that at once completes those systems (Hegel, Lacan, contemporary capitalism) he analyses and ensures that they can never be completed. In this, he perhaps touches on the proper definition of the act as outlined in "Why is Every Act?": he at once only repeats what is already there before him and reveals that what is does not exist before this repetition (we can only choose to enter the symbolic order and this order would not exist without us). He therefore demonstrates both that nothing is outside of the symbolic order and that we are completely undetermined by it. This is what we might call the real 'suspension' of transference at stake in philosophy: not the simple end or breaking of transference, the revealing of some original 'emptiness', but a 'suspension' that exists only in retrospect, no sooner spoken of than lost, and thus always to be taken up again. To express it formulaically: just as transference itself is only possible because of a certain breaking of transference, so this breaking of transference only exists within transference.

The reader's forced choice

How is all this to relate to what we say about Zizek here? What does all this leave us to say? Zizek on many occasions speaks about what he feels to be the overall objective of his work. It is, as we have seen in 'Why is Every Act?', to contest the naturalness and authority of every ideological construction of reality. As he says in The Fright of Real Tears, the aim of philosophy is not so much to argue for the reality of fictions as to make us 'experience reality itself as a fiction' (K, 77). Or, as he argues in the Introduction to Tarrying with the Negative, the philosopher should attempt to 'step back' (TN, 2) from actuality to possibility, to show how things might be otherwise. In this, as he puts it there, they must seek to 'occupy all the time the place of the hole, i.e., to maintain a distance toward every reigning master-signifier' (TN, 2). And yet - to go back to the lesson of that diagram - this hole is always turning into a master-signifier; this hole can only be seen through a certain master-signifier. As Zizek states elsewhere, object a is the master-signifier seen 'anamorphically' (SO, 99; T?, 149). How then to maintain this distinction between object a and the master-signifier? How to keep 'looking awry' upon reality? It is not, as Zizek seems to be suggesting at times, a matter of an act or void before the master-signifier. So is object a merely a master-signifier in waiting? Is it a matter of keeping object a from turning into a master-signifier? Or must the relationship between the two be thought otherwise? s the only way of keeping them apart to argue that they arise at the same time? That object a is a kind of 'possibility' born at the same time as the master-signifier? That object a, to use a language that Zizek will increasingly have resort to, is not so much opposed to or outside of the master-signifier as what makes the master-signifier both possible and impossible (IR, 144-5; L, 274-5)?

It is these questions that lie at the heart of this book, for as we have already seen one of the crucial questions at stake in any evaluation of Zizek is to what extent does he simply oppose the master-signifier and object a and their equivalents and to what extent does he think their relationship otherwise? It is this alternative that opens up that 'void' or 'emptiness' around which Zizek's work is organized and that might allow us to say something 'new' about it ourselves. In Chapter 2, we take up the ideological master-signifier or quilting point as it appears in Zizek's work and see that it is neither some transcendental signified nor despotic authority that forces us to obey it, but - this is the particular problem Zizek addresses - something that as it were 'doubles' reality, that we follow whether we want to or not, that incorporates our own distance on to it. It is a distance that is to be seen not only within the master-signifier itself but in the way we relate to it - and, in both cases, it involves the object a. That is, if object a can be seen as undermining the master-signifier, imposing a certain distance on to it, it can also be understood as extending or strengthening it. The master-signifier's distance on to itself and ours on to the master-signifier paradoxically extends its reach even more, denying us any critical perspective on to it. And yet - this is the ambiguity we trace throughout here - this necessarily means that the master-signifier comes close to its own unveiling or dissolution. The very element that allows the ideological field to be sutured, that means there is no outside (that the outside is already inside), also desutures it, opens it up, ensures that there is always a certain 'distance' on to it that is necessary for it to be constituted and that can never be finally incorporated.

Accordingly, in Chapter 3, we begin the complex task of thinking object a as the 'opposite' or 'inverse' of the master-signifier with regard to Zizek's notion of the 'act' as that which breaks with or resituates the ideological field. But already here we might think how this act does not so much break with or resituate this field - for in that case it would be merely another master-signifier - as represent a kind of 'virtuality' or 'possibility' forever excluded from it. The act is not something that is deferred or impossible; but neither is it, as Zizek sometimes implies, something that can definitively be accomplished. Rather, it is something that is always as it were coming into being or taking place; something that, in Lacan's words, 'doesn't stop (not) being written' (S20, 59), without being thought of in terms of some potential becoming actual. The act, as we have seen before, is what we might call object a or stand-in for the Real. And, in Chapter 4, we go on to explore this notion of the act as a kind of 'virtuality' that 'doubles' every actuality, as what not only actually occurs but what allows all else to take place. That is, again, the act as object a is neither opposed to the master-signifier nor an interregnum between master-signifiers but arises at the same time as the master-signifier as its 'transcendental' condition of possibility. To put all this in Hegelian terms, if the master-signifier is seen as the subject of this book, in Chapter 2 we look at the master-signifier, in Chapter 3 at the 'negation' of the signifier and in Chapter4 at the 'negation' of this 'negation' of the master-signifier (which does not simply return us to the master-signifier). Or, if object a is seen as the subject of this book, in Chapter 2 we look at it 'for-the-other', in Chapter 3 at it 'in-itself' and in Chapter 4 at it 'in-and-for-itself'. Finally, in Chapter 5, in an attempt to summarize these issues, we look at the various critics of Zizek (principally the 'radical democrat' Ernesto Laclau and the feminist-queer theorist Judith Butler, but also briefly the Frankfurt School Marxist Peter Dews). We see raised in the arguments between them the question - the underlying subject of this book - of how to think the relationship between the master-signifier and the act: whether the act is outside of the symbolic and how then to name it; whether the act is within the symbolic and how then it could fundamentally change anything. What we see there is a problem we have touched on before: the difficulty of Zizek thinking the Real (or its stand-in, object a) as a kind of 'empty space', preceding that element which fills it in.

Our reading here - though this is not to imply any simple development in Zizek's thinking - is broadly chronological. In Chapter 2, we look extensively at Sublime Object and For They Know Not; in Chapter 3, at Indivisible Remainder and Ticklish Subject; in Chapter 4, at Fragile Absolute and On Belief; and, in Chapter 5, at Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Or, to put it another way, this time placing the emphasis not so much on what is said as its saying, we might suggest that this book divides into two contrasting approaches or tonalities. The first is what we might call, following Lacan's schema of the 'four discourses' (CU, 74-81), the discourse of the 'master' or the 'university', in which, transferring on to Zizek, we seek to systematize his work, making it the source of a stable and consistent authority, explicating it as though everything had already been said by him, as though the answers to all our objections will eventually be found there. The second is what we might call the discourse of the 'hysteric' or 'analyst', in which we seek to bring out our moments of doubt, confusion and frustration before the work, which we then attribute to Zizek himself, or in which we seek to catch him out in his shortcomings or inconsistencies. But, as we have tried to show before, these two attitudes are not strictly separable: one is always turning into the other; both are true at once. It is at that very moment when we think we see flaws in Zizek's argument that we most transfer on to him (for it is at just these moments that we feel we might one day be like him, that we are 'more in Zizek than Zizek himself'); and it is only by transferring on to Zizek that we might somehow go beyond him (it is only by completely internalizing him that we might end up saying something different from him, that we might end up becoming ourselves). Again, we come close to the secret of all significant systems of thought: at once they allow us to think - as though we could for a moment step outside of the symbolic order - that something is lost by transference, that they are not entirely saying what we think they are saying, and it is this that not only strengthens our transference on to them but leads to transference in the first place. It is not only the creators of the great philosophical systems who are split subjects in this sense, who repeat a kind of forced choice, but those who read them as well.

Footnotes

1. There is perhaps only one thing that Zizek will not admit to: looking up his own sales figures on Amazon.com. In a classic example of what he calls 'interpassivity' - enjoyment through the other - he will attribute this to his friends, who then tell him. See on this Christopher Hanlon, 'Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj Zizek', New Literary History 32, 2001, p. 7.
2. Or, because anyone who believes anything today runs the risk of being seen as kitsch, we might compare Zizek to another of his literary heroes, the architect Howard Roark from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead:
"Roark stood before them as each man stands in the innocence of his own mind - and they knew suddenly that no hatred was possible to him. For the flash of an instant, they grasped the manner of his consciousness. Each asked himself: do I need anyone's approval? - does it matter? - am I tied? And for that instant, each man was free - free enough to feel benevolence for every other man in the room." (AF, 86)
3. Cited in Peter Canning, "The Sublime Theorist of Slovenia", Artforum, March 1993, p. 85.
4. Cited in Guy Mannes Abbott, "Zizek within the Limits of Mere Reason", The Independent, May 3, 1999, p. 42.
5. Cited in Robert S. Boynton, "Enjoy Your Zizek!", Lingua Franca 8(7), October 1998, p. 48.
6. Edward R. O'Neill, "The Last Analysis of Slavoj Zizek", Film-Philosophy 5(17), June 2001, p. 7.
7. As Zizek puts it: "The only way to produce something real in theory is to pursue the transferential fiction to the end" (H, 10). This might be compared to the acquisition of a language: it is only when we have completely internalized it that we can begin to think for ourselves (ME, 43-6).
8. Denise Gigante, "Toward a Notion of Critical Self-Creation: Slavoj Zizek and the "Vortex of Madness", New Literary History 29, 1998, p. 453.
9. Some of Zizek's examples of the false 'free' choice that arises after the fundamental 'forced' choice include: that between Nutra-Sweet and High & Low for artificial sweetners, between Jay Leno and David Letterman for late night TV, between Coke and Pepsi for beverages (T?, 240-1) - and we even might say between the two political parties in most modern democratic duopolies. This is the meaning behind the famous Marx Brothers' joke quoted by Zizek: 'Tea or coffee? Yes, please!' (CHU, 240), which operates as a refusal of this false choice.
10. As a perfect instance of this, we might think of Cavell's notion of the 'comedy of remarriage', which signifies not so much any actual break-up of the couple as a free repetition of the original 'forced' decision to marry. That is, each of the parties behaves as though they were not married and can choose again whether or not to enter into a relationship with the other. See Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1981.
11. Zizek is perhaps the opposite to Lacan in this regard. He attempts to bring out the 'disparity' between the empty place and what fills it not through his absence but through a kind of over-presence: the split between the mathemic purity of his thought and his physical and emotional 'grossness', his sexist and non-'pc' jokes. His strategy is perhaps not dissimilar to that of contemporary artists, who seek to maintain the sacred 'void' by putting a piece of excrement in its place (FA, 30-1).
12. This is also the conclusion Foucault reaches in his essay "What is an Author?", in which he considers a special class of authors he calls the 'initiators of discursive practices', principally Marx and Freud. In their work, we have not only a 'certain number of analogies that could be adopted by future texts, but they also make possible a number of differences', Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980, p. 132.

[퍼온글] 지젝과 함께 가을을?

전출처 : 로쟈 > 지젝과 함께 가을을?

지젝 입문서 한 권이 출간됐다. 사라 케이의 <슬라보예 지젝>(경성대출판부, 2006). 토니 마이어스의 <누가 슬라보예 지젝을 미워하는가>(앨피, 2005)에 이어서 두번째이고, 이안 파커의 책도 근간 예정인 것으로 안다. 조만간 서너 권의 입문서를 우리는 갖게 될 것이다(영어권에서 나온 지젝 입문서가 현재 댓 종 가량이다). 알라딘의 저자 소개는 엉터리로 떠 있기에 참조할 바 없고(사라 케이는 캠브리지 대학의 불문과 교수이다), 번역자는 영문학 전공자이다. 기존의 번역서들을 참조했다면 무리없는 번역서가 나왔을 법하다.

표지 이미지가 눈에 확 띄지는 않는데, 원서는 아래에서 보듯이 오히려 원색에 가까운 편이다. 원서 'Zizek: A Critical Introduction'(Polity Press, 2003)은 'Key Contemporary Thinkers' 시리즈의 한 권인데, 이 시리즈엔 쟁쟁한 동시대 서구 사상가들이 망라돼 있다. 이전에 한번 소개한 대로 콜린 데이비스의 <엠마누엘 레비나스>(다산글방, 2001) 등이 이 시리즈의 국역본들이다. 근간 예정인 책으로는 올 12월에 나온다는 레이다 안드레아스 듀의 <들뢰즈>(Polity Press, 2006)가 있다(아마도 국역본 판권이 벌써 입수되었는지도 모르겠다).

지방대학의 출판부에서 지젝 입문서가 나온 건 좀 의외인데, 경성대출판부는 사실 가장 '전위적인' 책들을 출간하고 있긴 하다. 미술비평가 할 포스터의 책들이 포함돼 있는 '경성대문화총서'가 대표적이다. <슬라보예 지젝>은 그 총서의 16번째 책이었고, 지난달에 나온 14번째 책이 폴 비릴리오의 <탈출속도>이다. 역자는 이미 <정보과학의 폭탄>은 옮긴 바 있는 배영달 교수. 비릴리오의 난삽함이 얼마나 덜어졌을지는 의문이지만 하여간에 이런 책들을 출간하는 대학출판부를 '전위적'이라 하지 않을 도리는 없다.

지방인 만큼 책을 주문하면 거의 열흘 가까운 시일이 소요된다. 태풍이 북상하는 속도보다 몇 배는 느리다. 하니 그걸로 여름을 '탈출'하기는 이미 틀린 듯하다. 독서의 계절에나 읽을 책들이다. 지젝과 함께 가을을?..

06. 08. 22.

[퍼온글] 라캉 읽기에 관하여

전출처 : 로쟈 > 라캉 읽기에 관하여

2002년 가을에 라캉 읽기에 대해서 몇 자 적어둔 글을 옮겨놓는다. '라캉 읽기의 몇 가지 방식'이란 제목을 달고 있었는데, 말투로 보아 라캉 입문서를 묻는 질의에 대한 응답이었던 듯하다. 그 사이에 변화된 사정에 대해서 얼마간 보충하도록 하겠다.

현재 라캉 읽기에 있어서 대표적인 선두 주자들이라면, 슬라보예 지젝과 브루스 핑크를 들 수 있을 겁니다. 국내 출판계에서도 프로이트 전집 발간 이후 차츰 라캉 읽기쪽으로 독서층의 관심을 이동시키고자 하는 경향이 뚜렷합니다. 물론 그 독서층이라는 것이 몇 줌이나 되랴 싶지만, 푸코나 들뢰즈의 대한 열광적인 반응을 재연할 수만 있다면(그래봐야 1만부 미만일 거라는 제 짐작이지만) 그리 손해보는 장사는 아닐 겁니다. 그것이 출판계의 요구/관심일 테고, 다른 한쪽에는 서구의 첨단 이론이나 철학을 수입/소개하는 데에 어떤 소명의식을 느끼는 일련의 지식인(지식분자)들이 있습니다.

이미 플라톤이나 프로이트 등과 같은 '거장'의 반열에 들어가 있는 라캉은 20세기가 산출한 가장 난해한 저작(들 중의 하나)의 생산자이기도 합니다. 그래서 마치 문학에서 제임스 조이스가 대학이란 제도 안에서 박사/교수들이 생활해 나갈 수 있는 일용할 양식을 제공해주었듯이 라캉 또한 알 듯 모를 듯한 이론과 도식(수학소)들을 통해서 (라캉을 아는)지식인들과 (라캉을 모르는) 일반인들을 가르는 준거 역할을 충실히 해나갈 것입니다.

물론 현재로선 라캉에 대한 앎이 우리 사회에서 대단한 상징적 권력을 갖고 있지는 못하지만, 그의 이론이 대중화될수록, 그래서 대중에게 라캉이 누군지는 잘 모르겠지만 하여튼 중요한 사상가로 각인될수록, 즉 그에 대한 수요가 증가할수록 라캉에 대한 지식은 곧 권력화될 수 있을 겁니다. 이것은 정신분석학에 대한 사회학적 관심과 연구의 대상이 되겠지요. 아시다시피 이미 프랑스 정신분석학과 라캉에 대해서는 셰리 터클의 <정신분석적 정치>(<라캉과 정신분석혁명>(민음사, 1995)으로 번역됨) 같은 책이 나와 있습니다.

다시 지젝과 핑크로 돌아옵시다. 혹자는 지젝에게서 임상이 결여되어 있음을 지적하는데, 사실 그것이 지젝의 라캉 읽기/해석에 치명적인 약점이라고 생각되지는 않습니다. 그렇게 말하자면, 한국에서의 모든 라캉 읽기가 결여하고 있는 것이 임상입니다. 임상은 임상에 관한 책을 읽는다고 되는 게 아닙니다. 또 프랑스에서 라캉식 정신분석의 자격증을 따온다는 되는 것도 아닙니다. 국내에서 법적으로 그러한 정신분석이 공인되어 있지 않는 한 말입니다. 국내의 일부 정신분석의들이 라캉식 치료법을 어깨너머로 응용/적용한다고 해도 사정은 별반 다르지 않습니다. 그것은 잘 해야 '흉내'이고 대개는 '사이비'에 지나지 않을 테니까요. 지젝은 라캉을 임상과는 다른 관점에서 접근해갔고, 그의 생산성이 보여주듯이 그러한 접근은 꽤나 성공적으로 보입니다.

 

<향락의 전이>에서 지젝 자신이 고백하듯이 그가 대중문화 텍스트를 읽는 데 라캉을 이용한 것은 일차적으론 그 자신이 라캉을 이해하고 싶었기 때문입니다. 우리가 어떤 이론을 보다 잘 이해하기 위해서 사례를 찾듯이, 아니 사례를 통해서 더 잘 이해하게 되듯이, 지젝은 (자신이 읽기에도) 난해한 라캉을 이해하기 위해서 영화나 대중소설들을 동원한 것인데, 뜻밖에도 성공을 거둔 것이고, 그것은 라캉 이론을 더 풍부하게 확장시켜 나가는 데 기여합니다.

보다 정통적인 의미에서 라캉의 '주석가' 역할을 하는 핑크는 이러한 지젝의 작업을 상당 부분 보완해 주는 듯합니다(이들은 알렝 밀레르가 모는 라캉 정신분석학이란 쌍두마차의 두 마리 말과는 같아 보입니다). 핑크는 이미 국내에 번역된 <라캉과 정신의학>(원제는 <라캉식 정신분석에 대한 임상적 입문>)과 <라캉의 주체>를 통해서(*국역본이 근간예정이다), 그리고 세미나에 대한 주석서들의 편찬을 통해서 새로운 라캉 읽기를 주도하고 있습니다. 곧 그가 새로 번역한 영역판 <에크리>도 다시 나온다고 하지요(*핑크의 완역본 <에크리>는 올해 출간됐다).

이 두 마리 말, 지젝과 핑크는 꽤 절친한 사이로 보이는데, 그것은 아마도 똑같이 밀레르의 세미나를 통해서, 즉 후기 라캉을 통해서 라캉에 접근해 나간다는 공통점을 갖고 있기 때문으로 보입니다. 그리고 사실, 제가 라캉에 대해 다시 흥미를 갖게 된 것도 순전히 이들의 작업 때문이고, 이들에 의해서 소개받은 후기(70년대의) 라캉 이론이 갖는 파워 때문입니다.

아시다시피, 라캉 이론은 일관된 체계를 가지고 있는 게 아니라 수십년간 몇 차례의 탈바꿈, 혹은 이론적 방점의 이동에 따라 진화해 온 것입니다. 단순화시키면, 상상계-상징계-실재(계) 순으로 그 방점이 이동해 왔고, 밀레르 사단은 실재에 대한 라캉의 이론을 중심에 놓고 그 이전의 작업들은 재해석 혹은 '번역'(핑크 자신이 쓴 용어입니다)합니다. 그리고 이 후기의 라캉은 사실 <에크리>(1966) 이후의 라캉이기도 합니다. 그래서 사실 <에크리>가 국역된다고 해서 라캉에 대한 우리의 기존의 이해(구조주의자 라캉!)가 크게 달라질 것 같지는 않고, 후기의 세미나들이 마저 번역돼야 할 듯합니다. 물론 그 세미나들에 대한 주석서들과 참고서들도 함께 소개돼야 하겠지요.

지젝과 핑크, 그리고 다리언 리더의 만화책(<라캉>)을 제외하면, 국내에 나와 있는 대부분의 라캉 연구서들은 상상계와 상징계를 중심으로 라캉을 소개하고 있습니다. 그리고 그에 근거해서 라캉에 대한 평가와 비판을 진행합니다(<철학의 외부>에서 이진경도 그렇게 한정된 라캉의 상을 소개하고 그의 '구조주의'를 비판하더군요). 조금 과장되게 얘기하면, 우리가 접하고 있는 것은 어떤 동일한 라캉이 아니라 라캉'들'입니다(*지젝은 '라캉 대(對) 라캉' 이라고 말한다). 그래서 라캉 이해에 가장 시급한 것은 그 라캉'들'을 윤곽지어줄 수 있는 교재라고 저는 생각합니다(왜냐하면 라캉 자신은 그러한 차이들에 대해서 친절하게 해명하고 있지 않으니까요). 부분적인 라캉에 대한 소개로 이해를 대신하려는 시도들은 그간의 것으로 충분해 보이기 때문입니다.

지젝과 핑크의 책들이 보다 많이, 그리고 정확하게 번역되기를 기대합니다. 그것은 그들의 작업에서 비춰지는 라캉이 우리 자신과 우리 사회를 이해하는 데 굉장히 유용할 거 같다는 판단 때문입니다. 그러한 유용성에 비추어 볼 때, 몇몇 라캉 연구자들의 젠체하는 태도도 충분히 용인해줄 수 있을 겁니다. 그마저 없다면, 무슨 보람으로 그 머리아픈(!) 일들을 해나간단 말입니까?...

02. 09. 30/ 06. 08. 22.

P.S. 다리언 리더의 <라캉>(김영사, 2002)에 기대어 국내에서 라캉 읽기의 지름길(?)에 대해 소개해 보고자 한다. 다리언 리더는 라캉의 법적 상속자인 자크 알랭 밀레르(밀러) 사단의 일원으로 보이는데, 런던에서 개업하고 있는 정신분석가라고 한다. 책의 말미에 더 읽기(Further Reading)로 라캉의 1차 문헌과 그에 관한 2차 문헌 해제를 싣고 있다.

라캉의 <에크리>(1966)는 방대한 분량의 저서인데, 영어권에는 셰리단의 발췌 번역(1977)으로 소개돼 있고, 이 책은 국내에서도 쉽게 구할 수 있다. 하지만, 리더에 의하면 그 번역이 썩 좋지는 않은 편이고 또 내용도 난삽하다(*지금은 핑크의 완역본이 나왔으니 셰리단의 영역에 의존할 필요는 없어졌다). 그래서 권하는 것이 세미나인데, 밀레르에 의해 20권 가량(?)으로 편집되고 있는 불어본 세미나는 대학 도서관들에서 찾아볼 수 있다. 하지만 나처럼 불어를 못 읽는 독자는(그의 책은 웬만큼 불어를 하는 사람들도 읽어내지 못한다) 영어본에 의지하는 수밖에 없는데, 1,2,3,7,11,20권까지 5-6권 정도가 영역돼 있고, 브루스 핑크가 주석서가 2-3권 나와 있다(1,2권, 11권). 참고로 러시아어로는 <에크리>가 아직 번역되지 않은 상태이며 세미나만 5권 정도가 번역/소개돼 있다.

 

한국어본에만 의존하려고 할 경우 사정은 더 안 좋은데, <욕망이론>(문예출판사, 1994)이라고 발췌 번역된 라캉의 책은 셰리단의 책을 중심으로 번역한 것으로(그러니가 중역이다), 50년대 라캉의 중요한 글들을 포함하고 있지만, 읽기가 쉽지 않다(부분적으로 지나치게 의역하고 있다). 아니카 르메르의 <자크 라캉>(문예출판사, 1994)은 구조주의 시절의 라캉을 이해하는 데 도움을 줄 수 있지만(이 책엔 라캉의 서문이 실려 있다), 이 역시 읽어내기가 쉽지 않다. 그리고 당연한 말이지만, 소쉬르 이후의 구조주의 언어학에 대한 배경지식이 필수적으로 요구된다.

리더가 언급하고 있지는 않지만, 라캉의 초기 논문에 대한 자세한 분석으로 라쿠-라바르트와 낭시의 'The Title of the letter: a reading of Lacan'이 있다. 국내 도서관들에서 구할 수 있는 책이다(라캉이 칭찬했다는 책이다). 하지만 전문적이다. 일반 독자들로선 핑크의 'Lacan to the Letter'가 가장 요긴하겠다.  

다리언 리더가 적극 추천하고 있는 책은 벤베뉴토의 <자크 라캉의 저작>인데(하나의학사에서 김종주에 의해 <라깡의 정신분석 입문>으로 번역돼 나왔다), 이 역시 우리말 번역본을 전적으로 신뢰하기가 힘들다. 게다가 거의 절판된 책이다. 그리고 필수적인 참고서라 할 사전. 딜런 에반스의 <라캉 정신분석 사전>(인간사랑)이 번역돼 있는데, 국내 라캉학자들이나 호사가들이 번역진으로 망라돼 있지만, 편차가 심하고 용어도 아직 통일되어 있지 않아서 가급적이면 원서와 같이 보는 것이 좋을 듯하다. 요컨대 라캉에 대한 '안전하게' 접근할 수 있는 통로는 거의 없는 셈이다. 리스크가 필수적인 것.

그래도 라캉을 읽으려고 한다면, 그래도 번역이 괜찮은 지젝이나 핑크의 책을 권할 수밖에 없다. 지젝의 <이데올로기의 숭고한 대상>은 부분적인 오역과 불성실한 교정에도 불구하고(인간사랑에서 나온 모든 책에 공통적이다) 읽을 만하다. 하지만, 역시나 쉬운 책은 아니며, <삐딱하게 보기>나 <당신의 징후를 즐겨라> 같은 책으로 시작해 보는 것이 좋을 듯하다. 내가 가장 재미있게 읽은 책은 <향락의 전이>인데, 아쉽게도 이 책은 지젝의 번역본 가운데 최악이다. <라캉과 정신의학>이라 번역된 브루스 핑크의 책은 다 읽지 못했지만, 좋은 평을 얻고 있는 책이고, 다이언 리더도 적극 추천하고 있다. 그 책과 짝이 되는 것이 <라캉의 주체The Lacanian Subject>인데, 도서관 등에서 구해볼 수 있으며 두껍지 않은 분량이기 때문에 도전해 볼 만하다.

라캉의 전기서로는 루디네스코의 <자크 라캉>(새물결)이 가장 자세하다. 하지만, 다소 근거없는 사실들이 포함돼 있다고 한다. 그나마 라캉 읽기에서 다행인 것은 적극 추천할 만한 2차 문헌이 많지 않다는 것. 때문에 한줌의(?) 책만 열심히 읽으면 된다.

02. 10. 04.

[퍼온글] "돌이켜 생각해보니 왜 그가 그 일을 맡았던지"

전출처 : 로쟈 > "돌이켜 생각해보니 왜 그가 그 일을 맡았던지"

지난번에 소개한 사라 케이의 <슬라보예 지젝>(경성대출판부, 2006)을 어제 받았다. 이달말쯤 배달되는 걸로 알았는데, 생각보다는 빨리 배송되었다. 덕분에 나의 '가을'이 좀 일찍 시작되었다. 하긴 내일모레면 이미 '새학기'가 아닌가? 문학과 여성을 주제로 한 강의들을 맡은지라 지젝의 몇몇 책들을 재독하며 정리해둘 필요성을 진작부터 느끼고 있었는데 느낌만으로 뭐가 될 리는 만무하고 책을 손에 잡을 여가를 그간에 갖지 못했다.

다급한 처지에 '요약정리'라도 미리 읽어두기 위해 펼쳐든 것이 <슬라보예 지젝>이다. 책의 4장이 '성차이의 실재계'이기 때문이다. 한데, 조금 읽다가 곧 주마간산으로 뒤적거리게 됐다. 어제 서문을 읽으면서 번역본이 별로 미덥잖다는 생각을 했는데, 역시나 원서를 참조하지 않는다면 낭패를 볼 만한 대목들이 자주 눈에 띄어서이다. 그런 걸 몇 가지 지적하기 전에 먼저 번역본이 다소 무성의하다는 걸 꼬집고 싶다. 혹은 교만하다고 해야 할까? 다른 게 아니라 그간에 출간된 지젝 번역서들의 제목이나 내용이 상당 부분 반영하고 있지 않다는 점.

그런데 특이한 건 이 무성의/교만이 비일관적이라는 것이다. 역자는 <이데올로기라는 숭고한 대상>, <삐딱하게 보기>, <향락의 전이>, <까다로운 주체>, <무너지기 쉬운 절대성> 등의 번역은 기존의 번역서명을 갖다 쓰면서도 <그들은 자기가 하는 일을 알지 못한다>는 <그들은 그들이 하는 것을 알지 못한다>로, <당신의 징후를 즐겨라>는 <너의 증상을 즐겨라>로, <항상 라캉에 대해 알고 싶었지만 감히 히치콕에게 물어보지 못한 모든 것>은 <항상 라깡에 대해 알고 싶었지만 감히 히치콕에게물어보지 못한>으로, <진짜 눈물의 공포>는 <진정한 눈물의 공포>로, <환상의 돌림병>은 <환상의 역병> 등으로 다르게 옮겼다.

그런데, <이데올로기의 숭고한 대상> 대신에 <이데올로기라는 숭고한 대상>으로 옮기는 게 타당하지 않다는 점뿐만 아니라(나는 두번 읽어봤지만 책에서 그 근거를 찾을 수 없었다) 오역으로 범벅돼 있는 <무너지기 쉬운 절대성>도 제목이 참조된 걸로 보아 여기에 특별한 '규칙'이 적용되는 것 같지는 않다. 말 그대로 임의적인 것이다. 역자는 들뢰즈/가타리의 <안티 오이디푸스>도 국역본 제목인 <앙띠 오이디푸스>를 취하고, 버틀러의 책 <의미를 체현하는 육체>도 제목을 그대로 갖고 오는 것으로 보아 말 그대로 '랜덤'이다.

그리고 인명 표기의 경우 'Lacan'은 가끔씩 '라캉'이란 표기도 나오지만 대부분 '라깡'으로 통일시키고 있는데, 그게 '원칙'이라면 'Foucault'는 왜 '푸꼬'가 아니라 '푸코'이고, 'Guattari'는 왜 '가따리'가 아니라 '가타리'이며, 'Althusser'는 '알뛰세'가 아니라 '알튀세'일까?(그런 한편으로 '쥬디스 버틀러'는 '쥬디쓰 버틀러'로 표기됐다.) 또 지젝의 동료이자 슬로베니아 라캉학파의 주요 멤버인 'Mladen Dolar'는 어떤 표기 규칙에 의해 '믈라덴 돌라르'가 아닌 '밀러던 돌러'로 표기되는 것일까? 내가 잠정적으로 내릴 수 있는 결론은 그냥 임의적이란 것. "모두가 번역자 맘이다!"

그러니 나의 참견은 좀 주제넘은 것일 수도 있겠다. 하지만 독자의 맘 혹은 구매자의 맘이란 것도 함부로 무시할 건 아니라는 뜻에서 몇 마디 참견을 보탠다. 내가 잠시 들여다본 페이지들에 국한하자면, 먼저 133쪽에서 "그러나 그는 페니스(penis)와 남근(phallus)의 차이점에 대해 개의치 않기 때문에 종종 둘을 혼돈한다"라고 옮겼는데, 페니스/남근의 이분법을 택한 것은 역자의 권리이지만, '혼동한다'를 '혼돈한다'로 적은 것은 오류이다. 그런데, 이러한 혼동은 역자 자신의 것이기도 해서, 분명 역자후기에서는 'enjoyment'를 '향락'으로 'pleasure'를 '쾌락'으로 번역했다고 설명해놓고 있지만 상당수의 'enjoyment'는 그냥 '쾌락'으로 옮겨졌다(가령 <까다로운 주체>의 부제인 '정치적인 요소로서의 쾌락Enjoyment as a Political Factor'). 그런 차이점에 대해 별로 개의치 않는 것인가? 

"사실 지젝은 성 인식이라는 사회적 내용에 비교적 무관심한 편이다"에서도 '성 인식'은 (좀 놀랍게도) 'gender identity'의 번역이다. '성 인식'과 '성 정체성' 사이엔 그래도 개념상 얼마간의 차이가 가로놓여 있는데, 역자는 그런 데 비교적 무관심한 편이다. "마찬가지로 여자를 일반화하려는 모든 시도가 부분적일 수밖에 없는 운명이라면 아무것도 아닌 것으로서 보편성에 대해 도전하는 것은 여성이 될 수 있다는 것이다."란 문장에서도 "아무것도 아닌 것으로서 보편성에 대해 도전"한다는 표현은 "challenging the universal as non all"을 옮긴 것이다. 여기서 'non all'(흔히는 'not all'로 영역되는데)을 '아무것도 아닌 것'이라고 옮긴 건 역자의 부주의를 그대로 드러낸다.

이게 '무지'가 아니라 '부주의'인 것은 몇 페이지 뒤인 138쪽에서 "그러므로 이것은 여성적인 전부가 아닌 것(non-all)을 나타낸다"는 표현이 나오기 때문이다. 하면 '무성의하거나 부주의하거나'로 정리될 수 있을까? 아니면 그것은 '논증불능(undecidability)'(138쪽)인 것일까?('결정불가능성'으로 옮겨져야 한다.) "어떻게 실제로 경험된 보편성이 특수한 현실이 되는가라고 지젝은 묻는다."(133-4쪽)도 역자에게 묻고 싶은 문장인데, 원문은 "How, he asks, is the universal experienced as a lived, particular reality?"이다. "어떻게 보편성이 살아있는, 개별적인 현실로서 경험되는가, 라고 그는 묻는다."란 뜻 아닌가? 여러모로 영문학 전공자의 번역이라고 하기엔 믿기지 않다(교양과정부 학생들의 번역인가?).

사실 서문에서부터 몇 가지 암시/단서는 이미 주어졌었다. 저자 사라 케이가 '지젝 연구'의 창시자로서 엘리자베스 라이트와 에드먼드 라이트 부부에게 감사를 표하는 것으로 서문은 시작되는데(엘리자베스 라이트의 책들은 언젠가 소개한 바 있다), "<지젝 독본>과 그들이 편집한 지젝에 관한 <문단>은 통찰력과 권위를 가지고 이 미개척 분야의 서막을 열었다."(7쪽)고 한 대목에서 '문단'은 'Paragraph'란 원어가 병기돼 있지만 잡지명으로서 고유명사이기에 그냥 '패러그래프'지라고 해야 했다.

참고문헌에 나오지만, 라이트 부부는 패러그래프 지 24호(2001)의 슬라보예 지젝 특집호를 같이 편집했던 것이고, 그것이 <지젝 독본The Zizek Reader>(Blackwell, 2001)과 함께 '지젝 연구'의 서막이 되었다는 것. 그러니까 "지젝에 관한 <문단>"이라고 모호하게 옮길 게 아니라 "지젝에 관한 <패러그래프>지의 특집호"라고 옮기는 게 나았다.    

저자 사라 케이는 그 자신이 밝히고 있지만 불문학자이자 중세문학 연구자이다: "중세 연구가로서 살아있는 사람에 관해 글을 쓴다는 것은 내게 특별한 즐거움이었다." 하지만 그 '즐거움'이 적어도 우리말 독자들에게까지 공유되기는 어려울 듯하다. 왜? "비록 이와 같은 책을 쓴다는 바로 그 행위가 지젝 본인에게는 곤혹스러운 일이라는 걱정이 들지만, 라깡은 그의 통찰력을 저지시키고 그로 인해 그를 망쳐놓으려는 모든 시도에 저항했다."(8쪽)

인용문의 원문은 "Lacan resisted all attempts to arrest and therby stultify his insights."이고, '저지시키다'로 옮긴 'arrest'는 문맥상 이런 류의 '입문서'를 쓰고자 하는 시도를 가리킨다. 라캉은 그런 류의 시도들에 저항했다는 것. 다시 말해서 라캉은 입문서를 쓰기가 어렵고(폴리티 출판사의 이 시리즈 목록에 '라캉'은 아직 포함돼 있지 않다), 견적도 잘 안 나온다는 얘기겠다. 거기에 비하면 지젝은 그래도 양반이라는 것. 하지만, "그의 통찰들을 엉성하게 포획함으로써 결과적으론 망쳐놓으려는 시도들"이 어찌 저지들만의 것이겠는가.

애초에 폴리티 출판사측으로부터 지젝에 관한 책을 청탁받고 케이 교수는 자신이 저자로서 부적합하기 때문에 깜짝 놀랐다고 한다. "전공이 프랑스 중세연구인 나는 그런 일에 결코 알맞은 인물이 아니(었)다.(A French medievalist by profession, I might seem the last person in the world to take it on.)" 그리고 이어지는 문장. "Which is precisely why, on reflection, I did so."

역자는 "돌이켜 생각해보니 왜 내가 그 일을 맡았던지"라고 옮겨놓았는데, 거꾸로 아닌가? "돌이켜보건대, 바로 그것이 내가 그 일을 떠맡은 이유이다." 왜? 뒤이어 <삐딱하게 보기>에서의 <리처드 2세> 인용을 저자가 재인용하고 있기도 하지만, "겉으로 보기에 부적합하 듯 보이는 유리한 지점"이 지젝의 작업에서 보다 분명한 형태를 식별해낼 수 있는 좋은 지점이라는 걸 입증하고 싶었던 것이다.

하니, 내가 읽기에 "돌이켜 생각해보니 왜 내가 그 일을 맡았던지"라는 토로는 저자의 것이 아니라 역자의 것이다. 그걸 독자의 반응으로 옮기자면 이렇게 될 것이다. "돌이켜 생각해보니 왜 그가 그 일을 맡았던지." 이 책의 번역 또한 영문학 전공자가 아닌 중세 불문학 전공자가 맡아야 했던 것은 아니었을까?..

06. 08. 26.

P.S. 덧붙이자면, 사라 케이의 입문서는 토니 마이어스의 책보다 한 단계 높은 수준을 뽐낸다. 국역본에는 옮겨져 있지 않지만, 원서의 뒷표지에 보면 조운 콥젝과 맬컴 보위 같은 저명한 정신분석/라캉 연구자들이 격찬을 보내고 있다(보위는 "이번엔 지젝이 사라 케이에 관한 책을 씀으로써 보답하기를 기대해본다. 케이는 그럴 만한 가치가 있다"고까지 적었다). 좀더 정확하고 유려한 번역서가 나오지 않은 것이 거듭 아쉽다... 

[퍼온글] 최근에 나온 책들(77)

전출처 : 로쟈 > 최근에 나온 책들(77)

바쁜 일들을 핑계로 '최근에 나온 책들'을 외면해 왔는데, 그렇다고 해서 마음이 가벼울 리는 없다. 매도 일찍 맞는 게 낫다고 빨리 해치우는 게 제일 속편한 일일 듯싶다. 연재를 조금 늦추는 바람에 다루어야 책들이 좀 많다. 성큼성큼 보폭을 좀 늘려잡아야겠다.

 

먼저 짚고 넘어가야 할 책이 <서양의 고전을 읽는다>(휴머니스트, 2006)이다. 소위 '고전해제'류에 해당하는 책인데, 기획과 편집에 꽤 손이 많이 간 것으로 입시 논술 등을 준비하는 학생들뿐만 아니라 대학생, 일반인들에게도 '서양 고전'에 대한 유익한 길잡이가 되어줄 듯하다. 출판사 휴머니스트에서는 동양편으로 이미 2권을 출간한 바 있는데, 아마도 4권까지 나온 <세계의 교양을 읽는다>의 '성공'에 힙입어(내가 이 출판사의 책을 처음 접한 것도 <세계의 교양을 읽는다> 시리즈를 통해서였지 않나 싶다) '고전'에까지 손길을 뻗은 게 아닌가 싶다. 한편으로 '교양'과 '고전'은 거의 '한 식구'라고도 할 수 있으니(고전에 대한 식견이 바로 교양 아닌가?) 이 '손길'은 지극히 자연스럽다.   

 

잠시 소개를 옮겨보면, "총 네 권에 걸친 방대한 분량으로 각 분야/각 권마다 '시간과 문명의 파노라마', '정의와 권력, 정치 변증법' ,'영혼과 성장' 등의 주제에 따라 고대 그리스 철학자들부터 20세기 현대 지성들의 저서까지 고전들을 선정, 소개한다. '교과서적인 고전 편식'을 지양하고 우리 사회에 가장 깊고 넓게 영향을 끼치는 책, 21세기 한국의 문화 상황에서 다시 읽으면 좋은 작품을 선정했다."

그렇게 선정된 목록을 죽 훑어보았는데, 인문/자연과 정치/사회 분야에서 특별히 억지스럽게 들어앉아 있는 책은 보이지 않는다. 대개가 고전으로서의 평판을 얻고 있는 책들이란 얘기이다. '문학'쪽에는 다소 눈길을 끄는 책들이 몇 권 포함돼 있는데, 먼저 시집들. 릴케의 <릴케 시집>과 하이네의 <노래의 책>(이상 독일어권), 푸슈킨의 <서정시집>(러시아), 엘리어트의 <황무지>(영미권), 네루다의 <모두의 노래>(스페인어권) 등이 언어권별로 선정된 듯한데, 프랑스 시인들이 빠진 것이 좀 특이하다(요컨대, 보들레르가 빠져 있는 것). <모두의 노래>를 제외하면(음반에 부록으로 포함돼 있다) 모두가 번역본이 나와 있는 작품들이다(푸슈킨의 경우엔 단도직입적으로 운문소설 <예브네기 오네긴>을 꼽는 게 어땠을까 싶다).

소설의 경우에도 토마스 만의 <부덴브로크가의 사람들>이나 발자크의 <잃어버린환상>, 만초니의 <약혼자들> 등이 포함된 것은 안심할 수 있는 번역본들이 출간된 사실에 힘입은 바 클 것이다. 특이사항이라 할 만한 것은 프란츠 파농의 <검은 피부, 하얀 가면>, 피어시그의 <선(禪)과 모터사이클 관리술> 등이 포함된 것인데, 파농의 책이야 번역서라도 있지만, 생소한 피어시그(1928- )의 책은 어떤 연줄로 포함된 것인지?(굳이 지적하자면, 플로베르와 조이스도 빠졌는데 말이다. 프루스트는 분량 때문에 뺐다손 치더라도.)

물론 그의 작품 <선과 모터사이클 관리술(Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)>이 멜빌의 <모비딕>에 비견되기도 할 만큼 중요한 작품이라지만, 문제는 독자가 우리말로 읽을 수 없다면 말 그대로 '그림의 떡' 아닌가? '21세기 한국이 문화적 상황에서 다시 읽으면 좋은 작품'이 문제가 아니라 '읽을 수라도 있으면 좋은 작품'이 문제가 되는 것이니까. 여기서 '고전'에 대한 한 가지 원칙에 합의할 수 있는데, 그건 일차적으로 '번역'돼 있어야 한다는 것, 그래서 손쉽게 구해서 읽을 수 있어야 한다는 것이다.

그렇다고 번역본이 나와 있다고만 해서 문제가 종결되는 것은 아니다. 가령, 디킨스의 <위대한 유산> 같은 경우는 <영미명작, 좋은 번역을 찾아서>(창비, 2005)에 따르면 다수의 번역본들에도 불구하고 추천할 만한 번역이 한 종도 없는 걸로 돼 있는데(제목은 '막대한 유산'으로 하고), 이 해제를 읽은 (청소년을 포함한) 독자들은 어떻게 '고전'과 만나야 하는 걸까? 궁극적으로 '고전해제'라는 것은 고전 읽기를 대신하는 것이 아니라 그 읽기를 제안하고 유혹하는 것이 본연의 임무라고 할 때 말이다. 해서, 우리가 합의할 수 있는 또다른 원칙은 신뢰할 수 있는 번역이어야 한다는 것.

거기에 마지막 원칙을 하나 더 덧붙이자면, '가벼운 해제'와 함께 '부피 있는 독해'가 제시되어야 한다는 것을 들 수 있겠다. 필요에 따라 우리는 고전을 (다이제스트로) 줄여 읽을 수도 있지만 한편으로 그렇게 단순하게 요약되지 않는다는 걸 보여줌으로써 고전의 '본때'를 맛보게 해줄 만한 책들도 필요한 것이다. 나는 이 세 가지 원칙이 고전 읽기와 이해의 3박자라고 생각한다(우리네 인생살이는 네박자라지만, 교양은 세박자로 이루어진다). 그러니까 한 고전 작품에 대해서 우리는 적어도 3종의 책들을 구비하고 있어야 한다.

  

해서, '21세기를 사는 한국인에게 서양 고전을 어떤 의미인가'를 묻기 위해서는, 그보다 먼저 그런 물음을 가능하게 할 만한 조건을 우리가 충족시키고 있는가를 따져물어야 한다. 그건 우리 사회의 교양지수를 묻는 것과 같다. 바로 그런 의미에서 환영할 만한 것이 최근에 나온 <파우스트> 번역과 주해서, 연구서 3권이다. 이 책들은 교양 3박자에 대한 요구조건을 상당 부분 충족시키고 있기에 그러하다.

먼저, 이인웅 교수의 새번역 <파우스트>(문학동네, 2006). "괴테가 1773년 집필을 시작해 1831년 완성한 독일 고전주의 문학의 걸작 <파우스트>를 들라크루아의 석판화 연작, 막스 베크만의 펜 소묘 삽화와 함께 수록했다. 국내에서 이루어진 수많은 번역 및 연구 성과를 집적한 완결판으로서의 의미가 있는 책"이라는 것이 의의로 제시돼 있는데, 의당 기대해볼 만하지 않는가? 거기에 작품에 대한 상세한 해설을 담은 <파우스트 주해>(한국외대출판부, 2006)과 공동 연구서 <파우스트 그는 누구인가?>(문학동네, 2006)은 <파우스트>에 대한 이해의 폭을 넓히고 깊이를 심화시켜줄 것이다. 작년에 나온 <괴테 -그리고 그의 영원한 여성들>(서울대출판부, 2005)까지 챙겨두게 되면, 가히 전문가 수준의 교양이라 할 만하다.  

해서, <서양의 고전을 읽는다>에 한정하더라도 선정된 68종에 대한 이러한 검토작업이 필요하다. 번역되었는가, 신뢰할 만한 번역인가, 주해서가 나와 있는가, 새로운 독해/연구가 소개돼 있는가, 등을 따져볼 필요가 있다는 것이다. 이 자리에서 자세히 살펴볼 형편은 아니지만, 3박자가 고루 갖춰진 경우도 있고 2박자 정도의 빠른 템포에 엇박자인 경우도 드물지 않다. 가령, 소쉬르의 <일반언어학 강의>처럼 예전에 두어 종이 번역돼 나왔지만 모두 절판되어 현재 시중에서는 구할 수 없는 책들이 있는가 하면(역설적인 건 2차 참고문헌들은 다수 나와 있다는 것), 다윈의 <종의 기원>처럼 여러 종의 번역본이 출간되었지만 전공자들로부터 신뢰를 얻지 못하고 있는 책들도 적지 않다(일반인들은 '대에충' 읽으면 된다는 뜻인가?). 때문에 우리사회는 분류하자면, '아직도 교양이 고픈 사회'이다.  

<서양의 고전을 읽는다>의 취지는 이렇다: "단순한 고전 해제를 넘어서 21세기 한국이라는 시공간에서 동시대인들과 청소년들에게 걸맞는 새로운 문제의식으로 고전들의 가치를 재발견하는데 주안점을 두었다. 이들 대표독자들이 제시하는 고전에 대한 시각과 문제의식을 통해 독자들로 하여금 보다 새로운 고전과 사유의 세계로 나아가게 한다." '고전해제'를 읽고서 '새로운 고전과 사유의 세계'로 나간다는 건 물론 오버이고 과장이다. '새로운 고전과 사유의 세계'로 나가기 전에 '있는 고전들'만이라도 꼼꼼히 자신의 힘으로 읽어내는 것이 우선적이며, 그게 '진짜 교양'이다.

예컨대, 마르크스와 엥겔스의 <공산당선언>만 하더라도 수 종의 번역서 중 하나 정도는 읽어주고, <세계를 뒤흔든 공산당선언>(그린비, 2005)로 역사적 배경을 확인해둔 다음, <강유원의 고전강의 공산당선언>(뿌리와이파리, 2006) 같은 책을 통해 한 장이라도 자세히 따라 읽어보는 습관을 길러야 하는 것. 강유원에 따르면 그게 '근대인'의 기본조건이기도 하다.

"서양 근대인들은 인간의 힘으로 세계를 구축하자는 사람들이었다. 이들은 왕의 권력을 신이 준 것이라고 하는 왕권신수설을 부정하고 프랑스 혁명과 같은 정치적 혁명을 통해 인간 중심의 사회를 이룩하려 하였다. 이들은 긴간의 힘에 의해 파악된 지식을 바탕으로, 이른바 근대의 교양을 형성하였다. 이들이 부르주아로 불리는 근대의 시민인데 고전적 의미에서의 우파, 즉 오늘날의 의미에서 자유주의자다. 즉, 근대의 지식인이라 하면 일단 누구나 다 우파 수준의 교양을 갖춘 셈이다... 그러니까 일단 '근대인'이라 하면 우파적인 교양을 갖추는 게 기본이다. 우파적 교양을 기본으로 갖추고 거기서 좀더 나가서 골고루 먹고사는 문제, 그러니까 평등의 문제 등을 고민하면 좌파인 거다. 우파건 좌파건 근대인이라는 것을 반드시 염두에 두어야 한다. 이 사람들 모두 교양인이다."(50-1쪽, 강조는 나의 것)

흥미로운 대목인데, 일단 '근대인=교양인'이라는 것, 그리고 그때의 '교양인'이란 '우파 부르주아지(시민)'라는 것. '좌파'는 그 '우파 부르주아지'에서 나온다는 것(일단 기본 교양을 갖춘 우파가 평등의 문제를 고민하면 좌파라는 것이이니까. 그런 관점에서 보자면, '교양 대가리' 없는 놈들이 좌파 행세하면 안된다). 예전에 나는 강유원이 '배고픈 우파'가 아닐까란 지적을 했었는데, 크게 잘못 짚은 것 같지는 않다. 좌파가 되기 이전에 우리는 모두 교양있는 우파가 될 필요가 있다고 그는 말하는 것이니까('이사야 벌린' 정도 된 이후에 '칼 마르크스' 쪽으로 갈 수 있다는 것이니까. 마르크스 또한 일차적으론 '근대적 교양인'이었다).

조금 확대해석하면, 그는 고전적인 역사적 유물론에 따라, '프롤레타리아 혁명(=좌파 혁명)'보다 '부르주아 혁명(=우파 혁명)'이 반드시 선행되어야 한다고 주장하는 것이 된다(그런 관점에 설 경우, (조급했던) 러시아 혁명이 정통에서 일탈한 것임은 두말할 필요도 없다. 더불어, 교양이 아닌 '품성론'에 기초한 현실 사회주의가 '전근대적' 체제라는 진단도 가능하다).' 없는 것들'이 순서도 모르고 나서면 곤란한 것이다.  

아무려나 우파이건 좌파이건 간에 '근대인'이 되기 위해서라면 '근대인이 알아야 할 모든 것'으로서의 '교양'이란 문턱을 넘어서야 한다. <서양의 고전을 읽는다>는 그 문턱에서 요긴한 가이드북 노릇을 해줄 것이다(하긴 68종의 고전에 대한 3종 세트를 구입하여 읽을 만한 여가를 프롤레타리아가 마련할 수 있는 가능성은 거의 전무할 터이니 교양은 우파 부르주아의 전유물이 아닐 도리가 없다. 이건 혹 딜레마가 아닐까?).

교양 있는 분들을 위한 책으로 또한 꼽을 만한 것이 <브레히트 희곡선집1, 2>(서울대출판부, 2006)이다. 예전에 '한마당'에서 브레히트 선집이 나온 적은 있었지만, 이처럼 정격 번역이 두 권 분량으로 묶여서 출간된 건 처음이 아닌가 싶다(역자는 브레히트와 독일 희곡의 전문가이며 유려한 문장을 자랑한다). 사실, 폴 존슨의 보고에 따르면, 브레히트야 말로 '배부른 좌파'의 표본적인 작가였다(고가의 노동자복을 맞춰 입고 다녔던 브레히트는 자기PR의 귀재이기도 했다). '배고픈 좌파'라는 게 편견일 수도 있다는 걸 잘 보여주는 사례인 것. 그럼에도 불구하고, 그의 희곡들은 고전으로서의 '명망'을 유지하고 있다. 한 작가가 성공하기 위해서는 선천적인 재능(=문학적 재능) 못지 않게 후천적인 재능(=정치적 감각)도 갖추어야 함을 웅변해주는 것이 아닌가 한다. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

끝으로 <세계의 고전을 읽는다 -동양문학편>(휴머니스트)에 '해제'가 포함돼 있는 시선(詩仙) 이백의 시선집 <이백 오칠언절구>(문학과지성사, 2006)를 꼽아두기로 한다. 소개에 따르면, "이백 시세계의 백미를 담아낸 책. 현전하는 이백의 절구시(絶句詩) 전체인 187수를 우리말로 옮기고, 이백 시의 전문 연구자 황선재 씨의 주석과 해설을 곁들여 소개했다. 이백의 시 중에서 가장 짧은 형식인 '오.칠언절구시'만을 묶어 펴낸 것은 중국을 포함하더라도 이 책이 세계 최초이다." 이 어이 아니 주목할 수 있겠는가?

"오칠언절구(李白 五七言絶句)는 이백의 작품 1천여 편 가운데 가장 짧은 형식의 시로서, 작품 한 편이 오언절구는 20자, 칠언절구는 28자로 이루어져 있다. 시 한편은 비록 짧지만, 그 가운데는 오묘한 진리와 풍부한 음악성이 스며들어 읽으면 읽을수록 운치 있는, 즉 말은 다했지만 뜻이 무궁하게 남는 경지(言有盡而意無窮) 속으로 몰고 간다. 이백 시를 내용에 따라 15장으로 분류하고 후대의 연구자들에 의해 이백 시로 추정되는 17편을 추가해 이백 오칠언절구 전편을 이해할 수 있도록 편집했다. 한시 원문을 읊고 적확한 우리말로 음미한 뒤, 이백의 생애와 역사 등 시가 씌어진 배경 해설을 함께 읽을 수 있다."

 

 

 

 

 

 

러시아 문학에서의 톨스토이와 도스토예프스키처럼, 당시(唐詩)에서 '이백' 하면, 빼놓을 수 없는 이가 알다시피 시성(詩聖) '두보'이다. 이 기회에 두 시인에 관한 책들과 두보 시선도 몇 권 눈여겨 봐두도록 한다(두시에 대해서는 고전적인 '언해'와 현대적인 '언해'가 제법 출간돼 있다). 자, 이런 것들이 '고전'들이다. 이걸 읽고 음미할 만한 여유만 각자 마련하면 되겠다...

06. 05. 24-28.

P.S. 그럴 만한 여유/형편이 안되는 이들이 왜 없겠는가? 그런 이들은 '세계의 고전'이니 '서양의 고전'이니 다 (개)무시하고, 백석의 시집 한 권과 최근에 나온 고형진 교수의 <백석 시 바로 읽기>(현대문학, 2006) 같은 책 한 권 정도 사놓고 틈틈히 읽어보면서 노트에다 시와 자기만의 감상을 적어보는 걸로 '교양'을 대신하면 되겠다. 백석의 절창 '흰 바람벽이 있어'(1941)에 나오는 "외롭고 높고 쓸쓸한"은 시인 안도현이 자신의 시집 제목으로도 갖다쓴 시구이지만, 그가 멋있는 제목에서 빼먹은 것은 '가난하고'란 단어였다. 외롭고 높고 쓸쓸하지만, '가난한' 이들은 오늘도 '흰 바람벽'을 가지가지 외로운 생각과 함께 오래 응시해볼 일이다...

오늘 저녁 이 좁다란 방의 흰 바람벽에
어쩐지 쓸쓸한 것만이 오고 간다
이 흰 바람벽에
희미한 십오촉 전등이 지치운 불빛을 내어던지고
때 절은 다 낡은 무명셔츠가 어두운 그림자를 쉬이고
그리고 또 달디단 따끈한 감주나 한 잔 먹고 싶다고 생각하는 내 가지 가지 외로운 생각이 헤매인다
그런데 이것은 또 어인 일인가
이 흰 바람벽에
내 가난한 늙은 어머니가 있다
내 가난한 늙은 어머니가
이렇게 시퍼러둥둥하니 추운 날인데 차디찬 물에 손을 담그고 무이며
배추를 씻고 있다
또 내 사랑하는 사람이 있다
내 사랑하는 어여쁜 사람이
어느 먼 앞대 조용한 개포가의 나지막한 집에서
그의 지아비와 마조 앉어 대구국을 끓여놓고 저녁을 먹는다
벌써 어린것도 생격서 옆에 끼고 저녁을 먹는다
그런데 또 이즈막하여 어느 사이엔가
이 흰 바람벽엔
내 쓸쓸한 얼굴을 쳐다보며
이러한 글자들이 지나간다.
-나는 이 세상에서 가난하고 외롭고 높고 쓸쓸하니 살어가도록 태어났다
그리고 이 세상을 살어가는데
내 가슴은 너무도 많이 뜨거운 것으로 호젓한 것으로 사랑으로 슬픔으로 가득 찬다
그리고 이번에는 나를 위로하는 듯이 나를 울력하는 듯이
눈질을 하며 주먹질을 하며 이런 글자들이 지나간다
-하눌이 이 세상을 내일 적에 그가 가장 귀해하고 사랑하는 것들은 모두
가난하고 외롭고 높고 쓸쓸하니 그리고 언제나 넘치는 사랑과 슬픔 속에 살도록 만드신 것이다
초생달과 바구지 꽃과 짝새와 당나귀가 그러하듯이
그리고 또 ‘프랑시스 쨈’과 도연명과 ‘라이넬 마리아 릴케’가 그러하듯이.