There is no Truth but this truth

Because of the fundamental negativity (and thus contingency) of the social, the social itself does not prescribe any particular ethical content. However, when one states that the social is necessarily contingent, a circular and paradoxical loop is created. If the contingent is necessary, then the contingent itself must logically be contingent. There has to be some base here and thus the ontological implications of psychoanalysis become normative, despite their very rejection of the normative itself.

This vicious cycle is deemed to be avoided because the ontological, despite prescribing a form which has ethical and normative implications, does not present a particular content. In this way there is not a psychoanalytic ethic as such, rather an orientation towards the ethical. However, this orientation has to have normative repercussions. The ethical (as an empty place) has no content itself, but because it itself is an ontological impossibility, any attempt at signifying it necessarily places it within the discursive, and thus fills it with content. Therefore the ethical is only retrospectively empty and neutral; we always experience it as a particular content.

This brings the problem identified by Zizek in the relationship between the universal, the particular and the singular. Any universality (because of the impossibility of any universal) has to be through a particular content, which takes the place of the impossible universal (e.g. the empty signifier). However, because the universal takes a particular form, it is necessarily exclusive; indeed it is constituted by this exclusion. It is this exclusion that Zizek labels the singular. For Zizek the ethical lies in identification with this singular, as constitutive of the universal.

This undermines the possible of radical democracy. In this perspective, the place of power is to be kept empty because of the undecidability of ethics. However, the institutions required to keep this place of power empty presuppose a Universalist ethical conception. This will be the subject of my next piece, but for here it is enough to say that if we identify with ethics as the identification and institutionalisation of contingency, this enters us into a debate about means and ends, e.g. Ensuring that each has the ability (freedom and equality) to debate the ethical, and as such a universalism of a particular content. However, this will always be based on an exclusion of kinds. For Zizek this exclusion ( from the democratic form) is capitalism, which democracy implicitly supports, despite it undermining the basic principles of the contingent ethic.

Therefore, by identifying with the singular, we acknowledge that any conception of the ethical, even if it is based on an impossible ethic, is up for debate. This leaves us with the contradictory position of trying to defend the normative assumptions of our anti-normative position. For insistence, what are the radical democrats to say if a fundamentalist movement, which rejects the radical ethical position, is to take power ?

It seems that it is necessary for radical democracy/ liberalism as a whole to associate more strongly with a normative ethical position, even if it is an empty one.