The Psychotic Animal: From A to Ž

Where Agamen and Zizek are closest is in the valorization of potentiality. This emphasis is more obvious in Agamben, but in Zizek’s thought since at least The Indivisible Remainder, his central category of the psychoanalytic cure has been conceived as a model for tapping into the primordial freedom at the root of human subjectivity, which results in “rebooting” the subject.

The key difference between the two is their idea of how “far down” we can get. In the model that Zizek gets from Schelling, there is first the original void of freedom — pure potentiality. Beyond that there is the moment of the “vanishing mediator,” the sheer negativity of willing nothingness (as opposed to nothing), resulting in the circular movement of drive. This is the zero-level of human subjectivity. The intervention of the Word suppresses the drives into the eternal past (unconscious).

For Zizek, we can only get back to the level of drive, never back to the pure potentiality. The negativity that is the subject, once established, is ineradicable. To put it in different terms, humans are in essence animals who have become psychotic, and the social order is a supplement to keep the radical self-destructiveness of the human animal under control. All we can do is “reboot” the subject and thereby remake the structure of the subject’s relationship to jouissance and the big Other. The human can never become animal. To remain in the moment closest to “pure potentiality” is to become psychotic — “not yet” human insofar as the psychotic is not a properly social being, yet “no longer” an animal due to the sheer gratuitous negativity (death drive) constitutive of the human (which in Parallax View Zizek claims is rooted in human biology itself).

Agamben is more ambiguous on this front. Most likely owing to his loyalty to Heidegger, Agamben has a thorough-going nostalgia for the primordial void of pure potentiality, which for Zizek is constitutively inaccessible to us. The question is whether Agamben really thinks we can reach that void or whether it remains a kind of “regulative ideal” (the radical lack of clarity in Agamben’s The Open might be indicative of his own ambiguity on this front).

The possible linking point would come in Zizek’s work on Christianity, which in its most realized form (The Puppet and the Dwarf) is directly influenced by Agamben’s work. Perhaps Agamben’s enigmatic vision (taken from a medieval Bible) of the messianic humans who have animal heads but nonetheless sit down at a table to eat is a way of getting at what Zizek might mean by the possibility of a big Other that would be somehow free of the obscene superego supplement.