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Political Representation in Slavoj Žižek’s Antigone and Marvel Studio’s Black Panther

2018; Penn State University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.3.2.0342

2380-7687

Aleksandr Andreas Wansbrough,

Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

With violations of due process in Donald Trump’s United States and the reactionary, subterranean rage of “the deplorables,” the rise of the #MeToo movement, and reports of student wannabe radicals disrupting lectures, it is little wonder that Slavoj Žižek’s theoretical and literary encounter, The Three Lives of Antigone has found a stage. Published in 2016, the work was performed in 2017 by the Broom Street Theater in Madison, Wisconsin, which I discovered after an online search and I was also able to locate an experimental video interpretation of the play on Vimeo. What I find truly surprising is that Žižek’s rendition has not received more critical attention. Žižek’s play appears, published by Bloomsbury, in Antigone with a foreword by Hanif Kureishi and an introduction by Žižek. Žižek’s framing of the problem of Antigone centers on political representation, and in so doing he addresses his claim that the task of the philosopher is not to provide answers (in contrast to the merely functionary role of the expert) but rather to pose questions that have not been asked.In posing questions and presenting problems, Žižek borrows heavily from the postmodern narrative conceit of Tom Tykwer’s movie Run, Lola, Run! (1999). The forking path of narrative possibility allows for the latent content of Sophocles’s text to be exposed. Žižek’s work presents three possible narrative outcomes. The first is the conventional close: Antigone kills herself and catastrophe befalls Creon’s household. The second entails a narrative break whereby Creon changes his mind, spares Antigone, but with the result that Thebes experiences violent revolt and mob anarchy ensues. The third situates the chorus as a revolutionary actor that simultaneously is deeply conservative. The chorus enacts a people’s revolution, recognizing that both Antigone and Creon are dangerous fanatics, deluded and zealous.For Žižek, a text must be transformed in an act of radical reconstruction as its initial context dissipates. He cites an anecdote concerning appropriation to buttress his claim:Žižek’s analysis thereby argues that any attempt to preserve a cultural product unchanged is inauthentic because cultures themselves are adaptable:This last remark situates the very question that his rendition of Antigone poses; namely, whether to take the risk of political transformation.Žižek’s work, his play, thereby freely relinquishes any claim of theoretical innocence. Like the work of Bertolt Brecht, it belongs to theoretical discourse. Žižek, however, cannot encounter Antigone only from the vantage of praxis but also as a philosophical enquiry. Antigone has been a central vitality for European philosophy’s investigation of philosophic modernity. Friedrich HÖlderlin wrote a version, a translation of Antigone, whereby Antigone became a monstrous figure, a mutagenic being who challenged patriarchal law and thereby also the ordinances of naturalized custom to embrace and channel nature’s infinite possibility and freedom.3 Such a reading opened the way for Martin Heidegger’s uncanny Antigone, a woman who represents the unrevealed and unhomely secret of Being’s destructive violence.4 G. W. F. Hegel’s reading is perhaps the most well known, with Antigone becoming the embodied split of social reasoning: Antigone incarnates the chthonic realm of the family and Creon is the embodiment of severe unflinching law.5 For Jacques Lacan, Hegel got it wrong; Antigone berates and disavows her living family, including her own sister, and claims that she would not die for other family members such as a husband. Instead, Antigone is the incarnation of the death drive, pushing beyond the bounds of any reasonable mode of representation.6 Judith Butler disagrees with both Hegel and Lacan: Antigone is not embodied death drive or an incarnation of the family. Rather she is a protoqueer protagonist who subverts the family—being the product of incest.7 As the title of George Steiner’s celebrated intervention Antigones makes clear, there is no one Antigone.8 Whatever character traits she may have, she also is composed of “Negative Capability” whereby her contradictory nexus serves to refract the tensions that motivate the responder’s thinking. She can then function as a mirror to project ideological anxieties.9Žižek’s Antigone is the problem of today’s liberal left: vocalizing different vapid humanist mantras such as “My nature is to love. I cannot hate,” “No matter what you say, it’s horrible to kill a human being,” and “I’m a good person, I can’t be bought!” These utterances reflect the liberal left indulgence in both identity politics (which risks framing political subjectivity on the wrongs of hereditary feuds), and a humanism without political substance. Antigone lacks a political program and her stances are ultimately vacuous, demanding that her feelings be acknowledged, performing her subjectivity, and propelling herself toward self-righteous martyrdom. As Žižek observes,For Žižek, it may be that the problem of Antigone is the problem of liberalism and its obsession with political representation. Liberal politics affirms representation and participation, but such an affirmation curtails a broader concern for the commons (by which Žižek means resources such as the environment; genetic code, and that which should be owned by all) and political systems themselves. Resources are the core issue for Žižek’s program of revitalizing communism. Communism is not itself a solution, as Žižek puts it, but the name of a problem, the problem of common ownership.In this vein, Žižek’s work introduces the theme that radical action may in fact be necessary to subvert disaster. It is all very easy to judge the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution by the rubric of current liberalism; but couldn’t the outcomes of not acting have been even worse than the thousands and millions slaughtered? We can never know, but Žižek is far from Simon Critchley’s unjust caricature of him as a Slovenian Hamlet.11 The accusation was a reaction to Žižek’s scandalous claim in his book Violence that sometimes we ought to be truly violent and do nothing. Thinking is needed more than action. His point however was not that we should never act but rather that we must think of some way to reject the violent logic of liberal inclusion, where the point is to be included in the very exploitative machinery of capitalism.12 The more we protest, the more we demand our voice, the more we in turn place ourselves within the economic system, the more we accept the authority of its regimented order.It is from this vantage point that we can see that many of the supposed strategies of the left and its embrace of popular culture are nothing more than a capitulation, a piteous and pitiable cry for inclusion. Ethical consumerism limits protest to buying products. Effective altruism places the onus on the individual to spend wisely on charity. Other obvious cases of consumer morality include the Bechdel test in movie casting and arguments for more diversity. Even the radical and partially disruptive boycott and divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) often limits protest to corporations being pressured into ending their alleged sponsorship of the Israeli government. These modes of resistance actually encourage corporations to pitch to consumers based on ethical norms, and thereby cater and further assimilate politics into public relations.Nevertheless, Žižek has made clear that rights, including liberal human rights, although merely formal freedoms (as opposed to actualized, realized freedoms), are important. It is through formal freedom, argues Žižek, that the disparity between rhetoric and actuality presents itself.13 This question of form is precisely why The Three Lives of Antigone is of such interest. As a play it works well, moving at a quick pace. But as a theoretical text, it helps to distill the very questions that drive current debates concerning liberalism and its future.Enter Black Panther, a film that illustrates this situation, with some of the effectiveness of Žižek’s work but without the theoretical acumen. The plot of Black Panther concerns something of an ideological struggle. The Black Panther is the defender-king of Wakanda, a realm enriched by alien technology and the magical metal known as Vibranium. Prince T’Challa becomes king; however, there is a contender for the throne, who goes by the name of Killmonger. Having turned out to be of royal blood, he has a right to challenge for the crown and successfully defeats T’Challa in physical combat. We learn that Killmonger’s father was the deceased brother of the king T’Chaka who indoctrinated his son into believing that Wakanda could play a greater role in determining the course of world events.Black Panther appears to be most radical when it poses an alternative history, in its reimagining of Africa without colonization. What if African nations had been able to preserve their resources and minerals from European conquest? Karl Marx himself comes close to praising alternative history by imagining new possible relations to resources. For instance, in one of Marx’s letters to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, he argues that the belief that the United States needed slavery in order to become the most modern and liberal nation on the planet is based merely on an illusory necessity.14 In TheCommunist Manifesto, Marx praises the Utopianism of utopian socialists, arguing that their limitation is not being utopian enough.15 Moreover, in his A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx was not merely condemning religion when he called it the opium of the people.16 He did not merely mean that it stupefied them or relaxed them. Opium was a drug associated with Asia and therefore had oriental, magical connotations. For Marx, religion like opium allowed us to dream, but the dream must not be cut off from real action; an uprooting of the problem. Marx’s understanding of the imagination as limited by social relations is relevant in understanding contemporary Hollywood spectacle and the delirious jubilation that heralded Black Panther.For all the utopian imagination of Wakanda, Black Panther is embedded within the paucity of the liberal capitalist imaginary. Black Panther, in spite of itself, reveals that liberal sympathies have regressed to favoring a hereditary, enlightened monarch, a sympathy found in the writings of some liberal philosophers from the eighteenth century. This belief in the enlightened ruler is reflected in today’s ideology of liberal preferences: Hilary Clinton’s nepotistic induction was expected to triumph over the vulgar populism of Trump. The Democratic Party made clear that Hilary Clinton was entitled to rule based on her being the most experienced candidate, without examining Clinton’s experience of making decisions to support various reactionary policies (such as the intervention in Iraq) or the network that allowed her to come so close to assuming power. Phantoms of the liberal-capitalist imagination haunt the world of Black Panther.The wondrous world of Wakanda depends not on an alternative political model but a fantastical resource. Through the exploitation of the magical Vibranium, Wakanda has developed hidden power, but only under enlightened leadership to share that power in a globalized way, through charity and the geopolitical statist equivalent, liberal interventionism. The legitimacy of Killmonger’s crusades becomes distorted by his desire for revenge; his suffering is one that, as the liberal imaginary insists, is self-destructive. Killmonger scars his own flesh for every kill; by harming others he expresses his own suffering, his own exclusion. His brutal realism is thereby visually traduced to an unhealthy pathology, a scarification divorced from context, induced by a system that rejected him and was not open to him. The underlying logic is that if only he had been looked after through charity and maybe a welfare state, he wouldn’t have become a deranged cold-blooded killer. His perverted pseudojustice can then simply stem from the crime of political omission, of not being inclusive enough. Take Helen Lewis in The New Stateman, who states:One is tempted to answer “not very radical.” As Mark Fisher points out, in Capitalist Realism, capitalism often profits by critiquing itself through the sale of its various cultural products whether these products are Che Guevara T-Shirts, popular music campaigns for peace and the end of poverty, or Hollywood movies with subversive tropes.18The film is also not as open to interpretation as one may at first think. Lewis praises the complexity of issues, but this complexity is a pretense. There is, in the film, a scene of violence between T’Challa and Killmonger when he challenges for power. The sequence serves a couple of ideological functions. First, the witnessing of tribal violence indulges in a liberal pluralism, whereby we may very well disapprove of such practices, and Wakanda isn’t perfect but we must nevertheless accept its cultural rites and indulge the “other” in its uncomfortable authenticity. Such a gesture signals a pretend openness but it is one that is prescribed. Second, it serves the function of limited openness because the brutal challenge itself is a dead letter of the law—only invoked in drastic, improbable circumstances, by a revolutionary summoning of atavistic brutality.The film does consider, or at least presents, three geopolitical positions: (1) isolationism (Wakanda’s resource is initially hidden from the rest of the world), (2) permanent revolution (Killmonger supporting a global revolution), and (3) liberal interventionism coupled with charity. Number 3 sits easily within the mainstream ideology of the U.S. Democrats. Brutal political realism is also gestured to through the criminal organization, Klaw. It is revealed that Killmonger was made and not born a monster.19 After his father’s disappearance Killmonger grew up on U.S. streets and ended up fighting in brutal wars. Liberal interventionism could have prevented his trauma: if only he wasn’t abused by racists, sent to fight in cynical wars, and then abandoned by his isolationist nation for being too contaminated by the outside world! As Eliran Bar-El perceptively notes:Bar-El’s critique is perceptive, as he notes the fetishistic move where Vibranium and technology are the answer to saving the planet rather than offering an alternative economic model. (Eliran Bar-El has, in fact, translated Žižek’s Antigone for Resling Publishing.)But in the spirit of fairness, the supposed vacuous progressivism inscribed within Black Panther can further be discerned in most of Marvel’s other films. Time and time again galactic problems face the planet and the solution is that the Avengers assemble. Another offering from Marvel, The Avengers: Infinity War (2018), ends with the Avengers defeated. The heroes no longer have the answers and they overtly attempt to protect the status quo against a radical inhumane solution.Perhaps, Thanos’s own position itself is in fact deeply conservative and entwined within the liberal political order. His supposed radical act of culling half of all life in the universe in a single instant amounts to no actual transformation of the basis of political community, no underlying change to economic structures or even the consumption of resources. Isn’t he then nothing more than a purple David Cameron or Theresa May, championing austerity through a benevolent conservatism that is nevertheless brutal. Such brutality amounts to nothing more than a Band-aid covering over the real structural problem of capitalism. His position naturalizes the economic order; apparently, all intelligent alien species go through cycles of boom and bust with resources until they all disappear. Even Thanos’s flirtation with deep ecology falls short; it isn’t that intelligent life is evil; there should just be less of it. As with recent capitalism the ethical demand is placed on us: we need to learn to live within our means.Žižek himself has observed the ideological limits of the Marvel universe in his review of Black Panther, whereby he asserts:Yet Žižek also points out that this aspect of ideology whereby the film elicits sympathy has a radical possibility. Such a possibility is both concealed and revealed by its triadic form: isolationist (T’Chaka), radical (Killmonger), moderate (T’Challa). He notes that on final analysis, we realize the truth of the villain, Killmonger, and see that in his opposition to T’Challa there is no personal grievance.Despite the austerity politics of Thanos and the personalized vengeance of Killmonger, their collective claims refer back to resources. Although these films present liberalism as the de facto approach—one that must be defended—for all their super powers, the heroes are always on the defensive, resisting change, while winning battles in a losing war. Their constant managing seems incredible. Politicians, even Shield, have vanished beyond being a supportive mechanism. Only superpowered heroes can make this system work and keep the status quo barely going.From this vantage the Marvel films dialectically reveal not only that it is easier to imagine the end of the world—or the universe—than the end of capitalism (as Žižek and Fisher have argued) but also that although solutions are often all too marred by capitalism, new potentials are presented. These potentials have been monstrously denigrated by the Marvel terminology but they nevertheless problematize themselves. Capitalist realism as Mark Fisher framed it has descended into capitalist despair, where capitalism increasingly doesn’t believe in itself. In this way, perhaps Black Panther has some qualities in common with Antigone. As with Žižek’s rendition of Sophocles’s play, Black Panther brings to the surface the problems with and the limitations of the logic of representation.Aleksandr Andreas Wansbrough lectures at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. He is also an adjunct lecturer at Auro University, and managing editor of the JAPPC. He has written extensively on post–Kantian German Idealism in relation to cinema.