Enjoyment as a Category of Political Theory

In an interview with Glyn Daly, Slavoj Žižek says that “all politics relies upon, and even manipulates, a certain economy of enjoyment.” ¹ Throughout his work, not only For They Know Not What They Do, which is subtitled, Enjoyment as a Political Factor, Žižek draws out the workings of enjoyment (what Jacques Lacan calls jouissance) in racist and ethnic ideological fantasies, in socialism’s bureaucratic excesses, and in the cynicism of the narcissistic subjects of late capitalism. Žižek frequently invokes the seemingly nonsensical ceremonies and redundancies that accompany political institutions: extravagant pomp and rhetoric, advice from committees of experts on ethics, the officiousness of paperwork, and the sanctimonious righteousness of perpetually ineffectual radicals. As he writes in The Parallax View, “our politics is more and more directly the politics of jouissance, concerned with ways of soliciting, or controlling and regulating, jouissance.” ² In this chapter, I introduce the category of enjoyment as the key to understanding Žižek’s political thought. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate as well the importance of enjoyment as a category of political theory.