Zizek, by way of example

[meant to post this last week] Zizek has been addressing his famously repetitive use of examples, according to F., who attended some of the early 'masterclasses' at Birkbeck. For those of you not familiar with this feature of Zizek's work, the same joke or anecdote is re-worked in several different contexts (sometimes within the space of 50 pages) often to 'exemplify' different points or conclusions. Apparently, says F., Zizek claims to be perfectly aware of this technique and its philosophical and pedagogical uses. It's by no means simply lazy recycling. The idea is to repeat with a difference, and in repeating to insist on instabilities and non-identities of meaning.

This argument is partly supported in his latest book. Take these two sentences:

"the explanation of a universal concept becomes 'interesting' when the particular cases evoked to exemplify it are in tension with their own universality" &
"One practices concrete universality by confronting a universality with its 'unbearable' example".

The idea then is:
-To keep open the tension between the universal and the particular examples (which never can never simply 'exemplify' it but retain a substantiality of their own).
-To find and insist on the Particular which the Universal cannot quite assimilate or which renders the Universal comic (zizek's example is applying the Hegelian dialectic to sex).

But this business of allowing the particular to breath, of endlessly revising or expanding the universal (and therefore questioning its universality), this seems to be the very reverse of Zizek's practice, where - it so often seems - the particular is gleefully embraced precisely in so far as it illustrates the same neo-Lacanian conceptual matrix. Kafka's Odradek is 'jouissance embodied'; something else is 'object petit a at its purest', and so on. Zizek's readings - and this is hardly news - are scarcely sensitive to the specifics of form and context.

Thus, on the one hand, we have the errant examples slipping their conceptual marker to turn up in some other unexpected place; on the other, the self-same conceptual matrix endlessly seizing on supporting examples. But the willful imposition of meaning & the re-usable non-meaning-specific example are in two sides of the same script.

Let's re-cap:
Yes odradek signifies jouissance but could (with a little tweaking), one imagines, just as equally have signified 'objet a'; a passage from Hamlet illustrates the nature of Symbolic mandates, but this Lacanian subscriptio will tomorrow be inscribed elsewhere. There is a line in Yeats where he exclaims "another emblem there!", performatively creating what he claims (perhaps ironically) merely to discover. And this gesture - "Another Objet a (etc) there! - is the silent accompaniment to much of Zizek's analysis.

What this ends up drawing attention to, as with Benjamin's allegorist, is less the object itself than the plastic powers of the author to impose and remove meaning by fiat. Objects, says WB, are 'enslaved' in the "eccentric embrace of meaning" by the allegorist, in whose world "any person, any object" "can mean absolutely anything else." Zizek's world is not quite as open and indeterminate as this. The interpretive matrix is finite, the range of concepts to be coupled with objects and examples relatively small; but he appetite is gargantuan.

This isn't of course to suggest that Zizek's practice isn't illuminating, but the illumination is fitful, often accidental, and the suspicion always what what has flashed before you is less some hidden recess of the object than the interpretive elan of the virtuoso.

Having said all that, there is a 'logic of example' visible in Zizek which he may or mayn't be aware of. What I noticed when I was trying to compile the (now more or less abandoned) Critical Dictionary is that Zizek's definitions - of the 'Big Other' or whatever - frequently don't square with one another. This he will triumphantly proclaim is what Lacan means by the subject (etc)! But 'this' is not quite the same as the definition implied in his previous example. The new example or context will suggest a different model of the concept. This is what I mean by the logic of example. There are, for instance, many subtly different definitions of the Big Other. There will always be something in the example that deflects, resists revises the conceptual matrix you bring to it. No matter how vampiric the concept, it will always bear the colour of its victims' blood.

But perhaps (and Z. would probably profess agreement here) this refunctioning of the concept, its contextual transformation, its 'transmigration' through particular examplifications, this is the concept.