A querela do declínio do simbólico: perspextivas e impasses do pensamento de Slavoj i ek

Abstract

The main aim of this study is to analyze the reflections of the Slovenian philosopher and theoretical psychoanalyst Slavoj i ek regarding the subjective impacts of the normative transformations that have taken place in the West over the last 50 years. The problem of the so-called decline of the Symbolic began to be widely discussed by the Lacanian psychoanalytic community in which the philosopher is involved as of the end of the 1990s, which constituted an innovation in a field strongly influenced by the structuralist conception of subjectivity. Situating the author as a pioneer in the use of Lacanian conceptual tools for analysis of the social domain, the study is divided into two parts. The first presents the theoretical basis of i ek s thinking, contextualizing his intellectual and political itinerary, and approaching his three fundamental lines of investigation: political philosophy, discussion about the ethical act and the ontology of the subject. Thus, the first chapter retraces the path that leads from his first studies about ideological functioning in totalitarian regimes to his pop philosophical approach to the ideology nowadays. Next, it presents his re-description of the notion of communism in the light of the thesis of the new antagonisms of late capitalism. Finally, it covers the philosopher s universalist perspective based on his materialist reading of Christianity, resorting, above all, to the studies by Alain Badiou about Saint Paul. The second chapter delineates the central co-ordinates of i ek s conception of subject, whose originality lies in articulation of the Lacan and Hegel formulations. The notions of great Other, small object a, death drive and negativity are taken as the pillars on which rests the description of the i ekian subject. In the second part of the study, the i ek theses are examined with regard to the relations between subjectivity and culture, with emphasis on the new impasses that arise from them. The inhibitions that succeed the injunction of enjoyment without restraint, the melancholization of the social tie, the metamorphoses of guilt, victimology and culpabilization of the Other are central topics that are emphasized in this context. In this part of the work, i ek s reflections are collated with the analyses by authors of Lacanian orientation, considered representative of this type of discussion, such as Jean-Pierre Lebrun, Charles Melman, Dany-Robert Dufour and Roland Chemama. With this it is intended to enrich the discussion, pointing out the approximations and distances that i ek thinking entertains with the referred authors. The final chapter is dedicated to the critical examination of the i ekian démarche about the decline of the Symbolic. Two topics of his discourse are analyzed, namely: a) his ambivalent position concerning the criticism of catastrophism; b) his effort to expunge from the notion of ethical act in which he wants to find ways out for the problems engendered by the aforementioned decline of the Symbolic any trace of belonging to the Jewish-Christian moral tradition, keeping only the example of the formal aspect of the act. In order to undertake such an examination, on the one hand, reference is made to the critical study by the French sociologist, Alain Ehrenberg, about declinology a notion coined by him to refer to the set of studies that emphasizes current risk of dissolution of social ties and, on the other, support is sought from the conception of ethics of the neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty.