Žižek’s Critical Theory of Society without Sociology

In this paper I argue that Žižek’s critical confrontation with contemporary cultural shifts, institutional logics and ideological conflicts lacks a theory of society. Žižek circumvents the problem of ‘the constitution of society’ (Giddens) by recourse to the antinomies that ensue from a parallax-based epistemology: Drawing on Adorno’s critique of sociology’s description of society he presents the social as a parallax effect antinomy (i.e. society as an organic whole vs. society as a contractual arrangement among atomized individuals). Yet, the problem of society’s transcendental conditions/imperatives haunts his project, despite masterful elisions (i.e. the idea that the parallactic view of society, i.e. the antagonism between ‘agency’ and ‘structure’, is the form of the thing-in-itself). As I argue, the systemic levels of Žižek’s engagement with the Social are glossed over by his grand Lacanian gesture that thematizes ‘lack’ and, consequently, repeals the sociality of the Social (condensed as the Big Other, but also reemerging as the inaccessible Reality of the Real). At the same time, Žižek regrets the Social’s confiscation by dubious representations of it in various moral and identity fundamentalisms and their flipside: namely, eruptions of id-Evil into the social fabric. This view of society emerges as a result of Žižek’s apophatic bracketing of sociology: for him the Social is scrutinized by recourse to German idealism and Marx’s materialism, Lacan, theology, cinema, refracted also in his political interventions which figure as counter-intuitive instantiations of immanent critique. Notwithstanding Žižek’s brilliant insights into facets of injustice in what is a mix of radical reversals, often tinged with a latent sobriety, the Social is ultimately explained away in terms of a social ontology, despite Žižek’s radically materialist critique of it; it mainly reappears as a residual form in Žižek’s critical problematization of how society thematizes its own self-description to conceal the epistemological ‘gap’.