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Tea with Žižek

Hasmet Uluorta (Trent University, Canada) and Lawrence Quill (San José State University, USA)

DRAFT. Not to be cited.

In April 2009 I was resting in a hotel room in Syracuse, hopping between two channels: a PBS documentary on Pete Seeger, the great American country singer of the left; and a report on the anti-tax Tea Party, with a country singer performing a populist song about how Washington is taxing hard-working ordinary people to finance the Wall Street financiers. There was a weird similarity between the two singers: both were articulating an anti-establishment, populist complaint against the exploitative rich and their state; both were calling for radical measures, including civil disobedience.

Slavoj Žižek (2013)

Introduction

In late 2011, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) quickly came to symbolize dissent across the and beyond. Almost seamlessly the Lacanian intellectual Slavoj Žižek seemed to be at the epicentre of framing the significance of the movement to the occupiers and a global audience. Žižek was able to do so not only due to his personally charged style of presentation but through his use of the Lacanian lens. In short while the OWS made the slogan ‘we are the 99%’ famous Lacanian political analysis, through Žižek and others, became a critical lens by which to understand events as they unfolded. Specifically, the application of the so-called ‘ethical moment’ and ‘the politics of withdrawal’ via the Lacanian analysis of the heroine Antigone gained popular resonance.

Yet this was not the first instance of widespread dissent in the United States to follow from the crisis of 2008-09. The initial movement was that of the Tea Party. Forming in 2009, the Tea Party sought to influence political outcomes in favour of ending illegal immigration, gun control, excessive taxation, overreach of the federal government (e.g., The Affordable Care Act also known as “Obamacare”) and so on. Yet there has been no discussion that we are aware of applying Lacanian analysis to the Tea Party. It is this omission that this paper seeks to redress. In doing so, it posits that while the Lacanian analysis has significant merit it fails to address the political rupture afforded by a movement like the Tea Party.

The first section of the paper discusses the emergence of the Tea Party. In the second and third part of the paper we discuss ethics and withdrawal as forms of dissent within Žižek’s and more broadly Lacanian theorizations along with that of the Tea Party. In the fourth section we critically examine what we refer to as rupture/rapture politics. We end with some commentary on alternatives to the dramatic politics of rapture/rupture by expanding on the working possibilities of the more banal — minor significations.

Tea Party Background

The emerged in 2009 and is associated with the trauma of the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks, the 2008-9 financial collapse, the telepresent world, and more broadly with the shift from American-led 20th century globalization to an emerging multi-centred 21st century globalization. Forming in 2009, the Tea Party consists of libertarians, social conservatives, the religious-right, nationalists, populists, and wealthy financiers such as FreedomWorks. Participants within the Tea Party are quick to note dissent is patriotic and is a necessary part in restoring the nation to its core values of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally , and free markets. The Tea Party movement has constructed a narrative of the replaying of the American revolution and have cast themselves as the chosen people whose truths will restore the United States to its past glory. The Tea Party activists are quick to note that they have withdrawn from the larger American culture. It is now, within this historical moment, as rebellious outsiders from ‘mainstream’ America their explicit purpose is to retake the nation and re-assert domestically and globally.

The Tea Party movement emerged through viral videos and messages in direct response to the financial crisis. The first reference to a Tea Party emerged in January 2009 when Graham Makohoniuk, a part-time stock trader, sent out a message on an stock market Internet forum asking forum readers to ‘mail a tea bag to Congress and to Senate’. Another reader, Stephanie Jasky, then organized a ‘commemorative tea party in Boston MA for 01 February 2009. Finally Karl Denninger, the founder of Market Ticker, called for a protest to take place with the inauguration of . All three of these messages quickly went viral. On 19 February 2009 a video clip of CNBC anchor Rick Santelli accused the Obama administration of promoting ‘bad behaviour’ with the announcement of the expansion of bailouts that his predecessor had initially announced quickly went viral. Santelli said, “This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbour’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand. President Obama, are you listening? We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.”

The so-called rant is not without controversy. While Tea Party activists consider it to be a spontaneous eruption of a heartfelt impulse about the wrongs America faces others have suggested it was a carefully planned event orchestrated by powerful rightwing groups such as the Koch Brothers. This along with the willingness of news organizations, primarily Fox news, to focus on the Tea Party have led some to describe the Tea Party as an ‘astroturf movement’ rather than a ‘grassroots movement’. As Isaac Martin (2013) documents extensively rich peoples movements masquerading as ‘people’s movements’ has a long history within the United States. The Tea Party is not an exception to this but is a continuation of the tradition. Nevertheless Radio host broadcasted what would be known as Santelli’s rant to more than 10 million national radio listeners adding, “this is the pulse of the revolution, starting today! To when the pulse of the revolution starts, it just takes an action like this to inspire confidence in others who want to show up.” Shortly thereafter, on 27 February 2009 one of the founders of the , Jenny Beth Martin, organized the first Tea Party rally in Atlanta, Georgia. On 04 March 2009 she and fellow activist Mark Meckler formed the Tea Party Patriots and quickly launched a Facebook page, a website, and the Twitter hashtag #TCOT. As Meckler and Martin observe, “the First American Revolution may have begun with a gunshot, but the second American Revolution began with the hashtag.”#TCOT”.

By March national conservative radio and TV hosts were promoting the Tea Party as an oppositional force in American politics. Fox TV and radio talk-show host on 13 March 2009 announced to a national audience an initiative he called the 9/12 Project that sought to galvanize the emergent Tea Party activists with Christian evangelical activists and other right-wing populist groupings around two key principles: ‘America is good’ and ‘I believe in god and he is the centre of my life’. The project would culminate in the ‘Restoring Honor’ freedom rally. The largest rallies and national exposure however would come on 15 April 2009 where Tea Party activists claim more than 1.2 million people attended nearly 850 Tea Party rallies. 2010 may have been the apex of the Tea Party’s electoral success as it saw high profile victories with Maro Rubio and Allan West in Florida, in Kentucky, and Scott Brown in Massachusetts (Note: Christine O’Donnell from Delaware may have provided a glimpse of the Tea Party’s fortunes with her public claims of not being a witch). In July 2010 Michelle Bachmann would form the Tea Party Caucus with 28 members.

The 2012 midterm elections would prove to be less successful with 4 candidates winning and the re-election of President Obama in 2012 and the much spoofed Republican primary process seemed to have reduced the Tea Party’s broad appeal. This would be confirmed with ’s failed attempt to defund the Affordable Care Act in October 2013 along with attempts to block the raising of the US debt ceiling. Both of these Tea Party led initiatives were perceived to be detrimental to the Republican party and have subsequently led to increased tension between the Republican party establishment and the Tea Party Caucus and movement. This tension is unresolvable as the Tea Party movement posits that there can be no compromise. At one level then the Tea Party movement’s positioning cannot be reduced to a single domain such as economics or to a neatly packaged frame of thought such as conservatism.

Žižek’s Dissent: The Politics of Withdrawal and Ethics

Slavoj Žižek argues, paradoxically, that the search for the true revolutionary moment will only be achieved by, first, withdrawing from the political realm. Here, we want to critically examine Žižek’s claims regarding his controversial notion of the act. The act, for Žižek, introduces a radical openness that prepares the ground for the unexpected. Critics have suggested that Žižek’s unwillingness to provide a coherent program or agenda renders such a concept under-theorized or, worse, incoherent. Here, we suggest that such a move is deliberate. The very nature of the act means that to ‘fill in the gaps’ would be to misunderstand the radical contingency of the position of the actor and the unpredictable nature of politics. Indeed, we want to suggest that in his description of the act we find an embryonic theory of political leadership.

For Žižek, politics proper involves a tension between the social order and that which is external to it where appeal to a universal principle, to justice, equality, or liberty for all are made. Politics, then, is precisely this conflict between an appeal to a universal and the particular, contingent circumstances that exist. Politics is never simply about a question of distribution, but recognition: ‘the struggle for one’s voice to be heard and recognized as that of a legitimate partner’ (1998, 989).

That politics is a kind of trauma or rupture explains why, he thinks, ‘the entire history of European thought is ultimately nothing but a series of disavowals of the political moment, of the proper logic of political antagonism’ (Žižek, 1998, p. 991). It explains, too, why we have such a difficult time even imagining a scenario that is different from the ‘objective’ political and economic conditions in which we find ourselves. This is the reason, then, why Žižek considers the movie, The Matrix, the perfect model for our contemporary predicament as it articulates the dilemma of those who desire change but cannot decide whether that requires ‘outright rebellion’ or whether playing ‘the local games of “resistance” while remaining within the Matrix...’ is enough (Žižek, 2003). And yet, Žižek does think that genuine politics is possible. The genuinely revolutionary act, he notes, ‘creates the conditions of its own possibility’ (Žižek, 2008b).

In Violence, Žižek points to the peculiar dilemma of political action.

The threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active’, to ‘participate,’ to mask the nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, ‘do something’; academics participate in meaningless debates, and so on. The truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw. Those in power often prefer even a ‘critical’ participation, a dialogue, to silence – just to engage us in ‘dialogue,’ to make sure our ominous passivity is broken...[abstaining from ‘participation’] confronts us with the vacuity of today’s democracies. (2008, p.183)

In the absence of convincing alternatives, it is best to withdraw from politics altogether. To participate in any way within the system – to employ protest as part of a strategy to further a group’s interests, for example (see Myers, 2008) - is to legitimize it. A refusal to participate, to withdraw completely, is the only possible alternative; yet one with huge costs for the individual. It involves nothing less than the rejection of all symbolic supports hitherto relied upon to construct reality. It is also the necessarily preliminary to effect a ‘miracle’; the unexpected, the unpredictable, and what Žižek terms after Lacan, the act – a precise moment which changes the structure of political possibility within a polity and for which there is no guarantee of success. As Žižek notes, ‘an Act retroactively changes the very co-ordinates into which it intervenes.

Žižek’s discussion of withdrawal in the political realm mirrors the relationship between the psychoanalyst and analysand in the therapeutic encounter. In that encounter when the analysand acknowledges the lack of external guarantees for their own actions, they withdraw from the social-symbolic order in preparation for a radical gesture of freedom (see Homer, 2005). Similarly, a genuine ‘political’ moment arises when we recognize that what we took to be reality, plain and simple, is, rather, a complex fantasy in which we always already find ourselves located. As Homer notes in a discussion of Žižek’s (1998) Sublime Object of Ideology: ‘[w]e like to think of our society as naturally and harmoniously evolving over time and through the democratic consensus of the people. For Žižek, this is not the case: all societies are founded upon a traumatic moment of social conflict and the social ideological fantasy masks this constitutive antagonism.’(113)

By withdrawing from this fantasy – Žižek calls it traversing the fantasy – we confront groundlessness and profound disorientation. The way we had hitherto experienced our fantasy, as a form of enjoyment, prohibits our disrupting the patterns of hierarchical domination that exist. Yet, in so doing, one brings the entire socio-symbolic order into question. Žižek (2010, 401) draws on a number of literary examples in his work to illustrate the significance of this withdrawal. In Herman Melville’s short story Bartleby the Scrivener, for example, he sees Bartelby’s almost conditioned response, ‘I’d rather not,’ as a paradigmatic example of withdrawal; in this case of refusing to participate within the accepted boundaries of ordinary discourse.The very structure that has, up to that point, determined what can be known is thrown into doubt as it is suspended (Pound, 2008, pp.12-13).

This is quite different from the Popperian fantasy of withdrawal, the notion that, if only we try hard enough, we can somehow step outside ourselves at will.

I do admit that at any moment we are prisoners caught in the framework of our theories, our expectations, our past experiences, our language. But we are prisoners in a Pickwickian sense: if we try, we can break out of our framework at any time. Admittedly, we shall find ourselves again in a framework but it will be a better and roomier one, and we can at any moment break out of it again. The central point is that a critical discussion and a comparison of the various networks is always possible. (cited in Wood, 18)

Precisely because of this difficulty we find ourselves unable (or unwilling) to imagine an alternative to the current state of affairs. Žižek is not alone in thinking that this is a symptom of our present. It, does, however reveal much about the current state of the possibility of theorizing about politics. This lack of guarantee is what the critics cannot tolerate: they want an Act without risk...’(2002, 152-3).

This is a promising approach for a number of reasons not least because advocating alternative responses to state oppression has been a mainstay of theorists of disobedience for the last five hundred years at least. Speaking in a language, or adopting a stance that states can understand is precisely not the way to achieve reform. Only by removing oneself from the dominant narratives of our time, from the Symbolic realm that necessarily qualifies and reduces human freedom, can one hope to challenge the prevailing order of things. Yet, how does such a heroic act fit within the context of late or liquid Modernity? And how might such acts be repeated in the future? What Žižek attempts in his rendering of the miracle of politics, of the ‘act’, is nothing less than a re-description of the possibilities for political life.

It is the figure of Antigone that provides Žižek with the archetypal model of resistance, one that renders her effectively ‘undead’ in the symbolic order. Antigone is caught in a dilemma because her brother, Polynices, who died in a battle against the state of Thebes, has been denied an honorable burial. His brother, Eteocles, who died fighting against him and defending the city, has been so honored. Creon, the undisputed ruler of the city, and Antigone’s uncle, orders that Polynices’s body should be left unburied – ‘his corpse carrion for the birds and dogs to tear, an obscenity for the citizens to behold!’ Anyone who attempts to disobey the order will be put to death. Creon insists that this must be obeyed if Thebes is to recover from civil strife.

The defiled body of the traitor Polynices serves as a symbolic reminder of what happens to those who betray the city and what, indeed, can happen to cities that are divided. When Creon discovers that Polynices’ body has been covered with soil, he explodes into rage. His first thought is that someone must have been paid to bury the body. When he eventually discovers that Antigone deliberately disobeyed his edict, she tells him that his orders could be overridden, as they were man’s laws, not the gods’. Antigone insists that no shame can come from honoring her brother.

For Žižek, the example of Antigone, her rejection of the symbolic order provided by Creon constitutes a Lacanian act. Instead of a ‘false transgression,’ Antigone’s decision to ignore the laws of the city; Žižek might say her reaction to the ideological impasse in which she finds herself; effectively excludes her from the socio-symbolic space temporarily suspending what Lacan called the big Other - the language we are born into and in which we articulate our own desires and come to understand our ‘selves.’ This withdrawal places Antigone in the ‘domain of the undead...in which the causality of the symbolic fate is suspended’ (1998: 4). The result of such a genuinely political action, claims Žižek, is no mere rearticulation within the symbolic field but a ‘thorough reconfiguration of the entire field’ thereby redefining what is possible politically.

Lacan’s wager is that even and also in politics, it is possible to accomplish a more radical gesture of “traversing” the very fundamental fantasy. Only such gestures which disturb the fantasmatic kernel are authentic acts. (Žižek, 1998, 6)

The peculiarity of such action, however, should not go unrecognized both for the effect upon the self and the society in which such an act occurs. In addition to no longer being able to ‘enjoy our symptoms,’ the act necessarily erases the self that existed prior to it, situated as it was within the big Other of the symbolic universe. As Lacan noted in Seminar 14, the subject is entirely transformed by the act. ‘If there is a subject to the act, it is not the subject of subjectivization, of integrating the act into the universe of symbolic integration and recognition, of assuming the act as “my own,” but rather it is an uncanny “acephalous” subject through which the act takes place as that which is “in him more than himself...”’(Žižek, 2008, p. 11).

The act cannot be said to be intentional, one cannot will it, because there is no strong sense of agency in either Lacan or Žižek. Indeed, once the individual has withdrawn from the symbolic order what gets worked out authentically is as much a surprise to the subject who is compelled to act, as it is to those about her. In a footnote, Žižek describes the act thus: ‘After an authentic act, my reaction is always, “I myself do not know how I was able to do that – it just happened!”’

This means that the act is destructive of the self that was. As the subject can only understand itself and its desires through the symbols it has been trained to use, withdrawing from the confines of social reality, refusing to participate in the symbolic world of self and other, results in a necessarily violent and destructive state of affairs. Withdrawal, it appears, is not mere passivity nor acquiescence, but a violation of the symbolic order. As Žižek puts it, ‘Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do’ (2000 p. 183).

Tea Party Dissent: Withdrawal and Ethics

Dissent for the Tea Party forms its own politics premised on a complex notion of withdrawal and ethics. From one standpoint the Tea Party seems to be entirely engaged in the political process as they actively challenge the Obama administration on issues ranging from raising the debt ceiling, challenging the legality of the Affordable Care Act, to fighting American intervention in Syria. Yet their uncompromising stance is also indicative of a politics of withdrawal. Indeed for the Tea Party, un-American groups such as liberals, democrats, socialists, the LGBT community, the UN and so on, bring the United States to the precipice of ultimate destruction. This introduces a contradiction as there is engagement and disengagement.

Indeed for the Tea Party the notion is not of a politics of engagement but of a higher calling to the founding documents of the Republic along with largely Evangelical Right- Christian understandings of biblical truths (footnote that other conservative religious groups are implicated such as with the Vice-Presidential Nominee Paul Ryan and Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum, both conservative Catholics). The overriding issue that frames these is a strong belief that we are living in the end times. As Tea Party favourite Ted Cruz (2013) recently said at the , ‘You know we can’t keep going down this road much longer. We’re nearing the edge of the cliff . . . We have only a couple of years to turn this country around or we go off the cliff to oblivion!’ In order to better understand this we delineate the Tea Party between two constitutive forces: American libertarianism and the Evangelical Christian-Right.

75% of Tea Party activists describe themselves as Christian conservatives. Nearly half (47%) are actively involved in a religious right or Christian conservative movement. The connection between the Tea Party and Christian conservatives in particular Evangelical christians has not gone unnoticed. This was expressed in the last Presidential election when Republican Presidential hopeful selected a Tea Party and religious- right candidate as his running mate - Paul Ryan. Religious-Right strategist , formed the Faith and Freedom Coalition in 2009 with the aim of bringing the two groups together. David Brody (2012), author of the book Teavangelicals, provides a succinct explanation as to why the two social groupings have considerable overlap. As he indicates the fiscally conservative message of the Tea Party resonates with Evangelical christians and other christian denominations.

The significance of this linkage is that Tea Party activists assume an immutable connection between religiosity and morality. What binds religion and morality together is the common sense understanding of objective truths. The one key truth is the belief in the Second Coming of Christ. A Time/CNN poll conducted in 2002 indicated that 36% of Americans believe that is the word of God and is to be taken literally. 59% believe the prophecies in the Book of Revelation will come true. While the preachings of people such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rick Warren, , Richard Land and so on have contributed to the pervasiveness of this belief, the success of the Left Behind book series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins cannot be discounted. Selling more than 50 million copies to date and now a film series animates the end of times by narrating how millions of born-again Christians around the world are lifted suddenly to heaven during the Rapture. Those left behind face the tribulation with the Antichrist taking over the UN and establishing a one-world government. This inevitably pits believers in Christ against the nonbelievers in the final struggle.

This leads to the apparent paradox withdrawal or engagement. A closer look reveals that the outcome is not one of the politics of engagement but one of withdrawal as the Tea Party not only forms a synthesis between Evangelicals and Libertarians but also between two broad theological streams: premillennialists and postmillennialists. The majority of the Evangelical Christian-Right within the United States are dispensational premillennialists believing as described above that born-again Christians will be “raptured” before the “tribulation” well before the triumphal return of Jesus Christ. This suggests withdrawal from politics as the inevitability of this narrative leads to a positive outcome, namely a 1000 year rule by Christ. Postmillennials posit that it is only when Christians take the lead in eliminating evil and living through the tribulation that Christ’s rule will come into place. In this vision then political engagement is required as Christians must provide the environment necessary for Christ’s return. The difference may seem minimal but it is productive of confusion as to how political engagement is to be understood. Indeed the issue is not of engagement at all. Instead it is about preparing for the end times.

This translates into a central role to be played by the United States as God’s ‘city on a hill’. More specifically, Tea Party activists point to the origins of the Constitution in Papers and the Declaration of Independence. This is both a Libertarian and Christian Evangelical-Right discourse. Though this demand for a return to a constitutionally limited government is more readily translated into an Evangelical discourse as a return to Judaeo-Christian principles. While there is overlap regarding the centrality of the US constitution, Evangelical elements within the Tea Party focus on what they believe is the basis for the documents — a belief in God and God’s hand in the drafting of the documents. Pointing to the Declaration of Independence, Evangelicals and Tea Party activists argue that the rights provided to Americans in that document do not come from the but from God. As former Arkansas Governor (2014) proclaimed in his recent Conservative Political Action Conference speech,

These are the things that I know. I know there is a God, and I know this nation would not exist had he not been the midwife of its birth. And I know that this nation exists by the providence of his hand, and if this nation forgets our God, then God will have every right to forget us. I hope that we repent before we ever have to receive his fiery judgment.

Taken together both groupings posit that there are rules pertaining to right and wrong that human beings do not create but only need to discover. Within this paradigm there exists one correct answer for every ethical question and hence the fitting notion of absolutist ethics. And for a Judaeo-Christian civilization, as the two groupings consider the United States to be, these ethical absolutes ought to regulate both private and public conduct by forming the laws that govern society preparing the way for the Second Coming.

To do otherwise is to invite tragedy. The tragedy is evidenced with the passage of the 16th amendment which introduces US income tax in 1913. The second mistake is the 17th amendment also of 1913 this amendment allowed for the direct election of US senators by the people of each state. Prior to that state legislatures were responsible for selecting your Senators the third mistake is that concentration of power in Washington which they highlight through the apportionment act of 1913 (81-95). These objections point to a critical understanding of the United States not as a democracy but a republic. Pointing to the Founding Fathers, Tea Party activists argue that the Founding Fathers understood human nature and designed a form of governance that would protect citizens not only from unchecked power exercised by a sovereign but also from the tyranny of majority rule.

As self identified outsiders to mainstream American culture the defence of the minority is a defence not of groups such as women of colour but of religious peoples and so forth. What the Tea Party activists seek to delimit is mainstream American culture which they consider to be unethical. This is the essence of the politics of withdrawal and helps explain why they engage in the political process to bring about a constitutionally limited government. In the broadest sense it is seen as necessary preparation for the coming end times. In a more practical sense drawing from the Federalist Papers, Tea Party activists posit that government spending encourages more government involvement and not less. Pointing to the bible Tea Party activists maintain that one cannot have two masters. A direct correlation is drawn between increasing government intervention and a decline in faith. In a zero sum calculus the more government intervention the less God and consequently morality.

This is expressed in a letter, called Letter from 2012, that was widely circulated on the web by James Dobson. During the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign, James Dobson (2008, 1), founding member of the Evangelical organization Focus on the Family, warned of what would happen if then Senator Obama was elected President. He asked,

[h]as America completely lost God’s favor and protection as a nation? If it has, is this surprising? How can God continue to bless a nation whose official policies promote blatant violation of God’s commands regarding the protection of human life, and sexual morality? Why should God bless any nation that elects officials who remove people’s freedom of religion and freedom of speech and freedom even to raise their own children?

In the letter, Dobson outlines the disaster that befalls the United States when it moves away from America’s Christian values. Not only have individuals lost their freedoms, but America has lost its place as God’s chosen nation. Speaking to Evangelicals, Dobson makes use of their shared language and bases his plea on common sense. Part of his common sense is based on the synthesis of predispensational and postdispensational views.

You Say Rupture, We Say Rapture

Writing in the Guardian newspaper Žižek sought to explain the cause of the October 2013 US federal government shutdown. The article parallels the Tea Party’s populism with that of the radical-populist left of the 1960s. He (2013) asks, “are today's Christian survivalist-fundamentalist groups with their half-illegal status not organised like Black Panthers back in the 1960s?” He explicitly addresses the Tea Party arguing that they have succumbed to masterful ideological manipulation as their actions to protect the average person are effectively working against this interest and instead serving the interests of the financial elites who are responsible for the financial crisis and subsequent government shutdown. While this is significant Žižek makes a much more profound assertion when he asks whether President Obama’s strategy to provide space for the crisis is not productive. This everyday piece by a public intellectual then provides us with two clear and profound points. First it provides insight into Žižek’s understanding of the Tea Party. It also conforms to his politics of withdrawal we discussed above.

In terms of Žižek’s understanding of the Tea Party what becomes clear is not a dismissal of the movement. Rather he assumes that they are not the ‘enemy’ per se but instead share much in common with left-populist dissent. This is not a new message as Žižek delivered it when he addressed the Occupy Wall Street activists in Zuccotti Park in 2011. He (quoted in Gell 2011) said, “[t]he tragedy is that many of the Tea Party people should be on our side…That’s where we should work. They may be stupid, but don’t look at them as the enemy.” What Žižek misses with his interpretations of the Tea Party however is the linkages to the Evangelical Religious-right and the rhetoric of the end times. In other words, while Žižek viewed the Occupy as the so-called ‘red ink’ of truth; that is of radical opening and re-imagining alternatives the Tea Party is ultimately about closure as the grand narrative of end times supersedes any possibility of a progressive politics. That is not to say that progressive politics is doomed. Hardly. What it does suggest is that Žižek and other commentators focus on ‘policy’ and ‘politics’ is not what the Tea Party proclaims to be about. Instead, it fits into the much grander narrative of America as the chosen nation and the epic struggle between good and evil.

In terms of the politics of withdrawal, Žižek maintains that within a deep crisis stark choices are necessary. While the article does not go into depth about this insight his 2010 book, Living in the End Times provides what Žižek believes is the way forward for progressive dissent to effect radical social transformation. Contrary to what the dominant discourses seek as a means to go beyond the impasse — namely some sort of bipartisan compromise Žižek argues the opposite as he calls for withdrawal as President Obama has done. Žižek’s notion of withdrawal is different because it is radically political. Yet, to understand what is meant here one must first distinguish between political activity – of which he thinks there is too much - and what he calls, following Lacan, the political act, a human action that is genuinely or authentically free. Žižek (2010, 392) suggests that in a democracy antagonisms often agonism. Žižek suggests the only way forward is to reintroduce the radical antagonisms through the dictatorship of the proletariat by which he means the pressure brought to bear onto governments through mobilization and self-organization (393).

In this light it becomes clear that for Žižek the Tea Party cannot be considered the enemy. More fundamentally, the Tea Party could better be understood through the lens of an emergent risk society or Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity. Individuals are compelled to make choices in situations where they do not have sufficient information to make those choices. When things go wrong, as they inevitably do, it is easy to find blame in the other. As Žižek, and Lacanians, point out an external enemy is imagined to have been responsible. Missing from this analysis though is not just the external projection but the search for a coherent discourse from which to view the other. This discourse, for the Tea Party, is overlooked by Žižek as he assumes that the purpose of the policies is to eradicate some sort of immediate deficiency (e.g., the Healthcare debate). Yet, this is an assumption rather than a certainty. As the Tea Party leadership has indicated at issue was not to ‘win’ the debate nor to defund the Affordable Care Act but instead to draw a line in the sand. It is this synthesis of predispensational and postdispensational views that requires theorization and understanding.

Afterword: The Work of Minor Signifiers

Lacanians, and by extension Žižek, welcome the supposed rupture politics that Antigone signifies. Never giving up on one’s desire and the tragic choice that Antigone makes forms the epitome of an ethical act. It is an act that transcends law. Lacanians are not alone in their elevation of ethics. The Tea Party subscribes to ‘Cowboy ethics’ (Meckler and Martin: 5), which harken back to a mythologized ordered life based on good versus evil with its culmination in the rapture. It comes as no surprise that this outsider and individual who himself steps outside the law in order to enforce the law helps formulate the Tea Party’s ethical positioning. In both instances the ethical turn is also an evacuation from the political whether it with the ushering in of an the era of the post-political or a return to God and America’s path in ushering in the end times. Rapture and rupture politics transcends politics as it replaces divisions with the end of life.

The dilemma faced by Lacanians is scalability. Are ethical acts necessarily individual? Clearly not. If all actors were to be Antigone who then to carry on the struggle? The point is one of performance and inspiration. Žižek (2000: 672) notes in reference to the ethical act it, “is not simply beyond the good, it redefines what counts as good.” Nor does it necessarily need to lead to Antigone’s fate. Nevertheless this leaves us with questions. How is an ethical act to be completed? What counts as an ethical act? By example take the recent 21 hour filibuster of the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the shutdown of the federal government spearheaded by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. These acts not only angered the Democrats but also divided the Republican Party. Cruz’s actions could not stop the passage of the act and were referred to as politically damaging, policy nihilism, to . His stance was widely seen by the established parties as harmful to the economy and to the electability of the Republican party. It comes as no surprise that the Republican party has responded by seeking to isolate Cruz and others who have affinity with the Tea Party movement. Does Cruz’s actions redefine the good?

To better answer this a return to Antigone may prove fruitful. Honig’s re-reading of Antigone reveals that her actions are not simply ethical but deeply political. In her reading Antigone uses language and often discounted ways––whispers, notches, puns echo over Creon’s head and speak directly to the audience. Her aim is to act publicly so that the people of Thebes are confronted with their own choice. Her action then, after some time and reflection, would result in the delegitimating of Creon’s authority. Honig also suggests that Lacanians have been wrong to focus exclusively on Antigone while ignoring the more subtle yet effective actions of her sister, Ismene. Both she and Antigone plot together. Honig’s displacement of Antigone as the sole focus of the play reveals a present-day fascination with rupture and by extension rupture in the place of the everyday workings, and often mundane workings, of politics. For Honig, and it is a conception we agree with, the significance of Antigone is to bring politics from the singular to the multiple.

Accepting Žižek’s claim that the Occupied movement should not alienate the Tea Party we can take this step further––and suggest why not conversations between Tea Party activists and the Occupy? Social change whether it was the Civil Rights movement in the United States or the end of Communism in Eastern Europe was not the work of a single act nor a single group. In many ways the isolation of the Occupy from the Tea Party has in many ways functioned to delimit the possibilities of a new politics.

Indeed this answers the question as to whether Cruz’s actions may be considered ethical. They are not. As Lacanians and Honig herself point out the ethical choice that Antigone displays to us is to make a third choice. Within the present context of social transformation within the United States that the first choice is to disregard the other opposition movement and to classify it as irrational. To dismiss it as a political entity and to elevate oneself and one’s group as the bearer of truth. These movements have much in common. Yet the focus on rapture and rupture curtails what the Lacanian perspective has to offer as a way forward namely a focus on minor signifiers rather than fixating on major signifiers that are more readily attached to rapture and rupture.

We might conclude with Žižek’s worry — he tells the Occupy to not fall in love with itself. Might this be a larger problem? Might we be in love with our own positions rendering us incapable of viewing the other as having legitimate claims? Claims necessitate a coming together and the opening of dialogue. Undoubtedly this is not the answer. It is however a democratic process that invites participation and an outcome that is unknown. Is this not the very basis of politics?