Abstract

While remaining true to a Lacanian ethical framework, Slavoj Žižek has extended his commitment to the ethics of psychoanalysis by incorporating Christian materialism and St. Paul's "radical love" into his theory of the act; as that which unleashes the power of negativity capable of shattering the very foundations of our being and completely changes the coordinates of the fantasmatic supplement of the desire system. Žižek’s ethics is built around shrugging off the “Other of the Other” and is formed in sharp distinction and in conversation with Levinasian ethics, Judith Butler’s precarity ethics, Habermasian communicative rationality, and the primary target of his ethics is postmodern liberal multiculturalism. Ultimately, these modalities of ethics neglect, for Žižek, what is the fundamental ground of struggle and radicalism required to break the subject from the fantasmatic and ideological strictures in the symbolic from which it is enmeshed. This paper seeks to develop the contours of Žižek’s politico-ethical project. The ethical problem for any ethics of psychoanalysis is understanding the subject caught in the libidinal deadlock of the “death of the big Other.”