In Violence (2007) Slavoj Žižek makes a techno-ideological comparison between the US and Europe:

In Europe, the ground floor in a building is counted as 0, so that the floor above it is the first floor, while in the US, the first floor is at street level. In short, Americans start to count with 1, while Europeans know that 1 is already a stand-in for 0. Or to put it in more historical terms, Europeans are aware that prior to beginning a count, there has to be a “ground” of tradition, a ground which is always already given and, as such, cannot be counted, while the US, a land with no premodern historical tradition proper, lacks such a ground. Things begin there directly with the self-legislated freedom. The past is erased or transposed onto Europe.

Let’s translate this comparison into Lacanese: “Americans” start counting their posterity (and accumulating their knowledge S₂) from the Master-Signifier S₁ and thereby repress (or disavow) the ground zero of their symbolic order, whereas Europeans remain faithful in their reference (and reverence) to the virtual symptomatic ground of S(Ⱥ) that “will have taken place” prior (apparently) to the actual counting: This is the lack in the Other that subsequently will have been filled out by the hegemonic Master-Signifier that manages to represent the subject [1].

For the “American” who values technical convenience above everything else, the European gesture of maintaining the reference to one’s symbolic ground is an activity that is economically worthless and therefore morally ridiculous, an unnecessary complication and a redundant nuisance. This American stance of disregard for one’s symbolic ground is already operative in the word “American” which shamelessly conflates the whole continent with just one of its countries.

This difference is historically appropriate since “America” (and the US hegemony) eventually emerged from the European desire to seek a “passage to India” [2]. The so-called “American Dream” is a fantasmatic imposture of wholeness (and allness) that aims to conceal and displace the significance of Europe as the true knot of human desire and lack [3].

This comparison gives us two terms:
0) The old world bears the mark of European desire as S(Ⱥ).
1) The new world bears the mark of the American Dream as S₁.

In brief: Europe is the symptom of America (the latter word referring both to the US hegemony and its problematic conflation with the continent). Moreover: Insofar as the particularity of “America” is the universal model of all ideologies, the singularity of Europe is the world-symptom of humanity. To give it a tinge of neurosis, let’s call it “Neurope”.

The treatment of Europe as a symptom reveals an ambivalence inherent to the accusation of Eurocentrism: Do the accusers call attention to Europe as the world-symptom, or do they call for the repression (or disavowal) of Europe by promoting other national or local Master-Signifiers (all of whose true model is “America” since they all attempt to fantasmatically displace European desire)?

Slavoj Žižek’s European Manifesto picks the first option which is the way of (psycho)analysis, whereas those who accuse him of Eurocentrism pick the second option which is the way of superego moralism as the contemporary form of the “beautiful soul”.

The neologism “Neurope” acknowledges that Europe is the psychic wound that is shared by all humanity. This lets us introduce a non-conventional Neuropean humanism that is based on analyzing human foibles (parapraxes) and turning them into human strengths (which are always relative to the context), instead of investing our faith in ideologies that witlessly idealize supposedly absolute human powers and feed an appetite for fetishistic fictions. As humans we have to acknowledge that we are all impure, and we cannot avoid (or simply “cancel”) our common “European” desire, the baggage of a bloody colonial history that we carry, and the need to repress this burden. We can nonetheless try and prevent the perversion of our Neuropean world-symptom into a fetishistic disavowal that would “know very well” that the appetite for power provokes new bloody wars “yet still” continue to feed that appetite.

All ideologies are modelled on “American” exceptionalism in the sense that each of them portray themselves as “necessary” by claiming a place exempt from castration. This claim to necessity is the “symbolic exception” of S₁ [4]. In Existentialism Is a Humanism (1964) Jean-Paul Sartre had a nice way of putting it:

[Those] who try to prove their existence is necessary, when man’s appearance on earth is merely contingent, I will call bastards.

Against such claims of exemption, we should assert the “real exception” of S(Ⱥ) which is able to authoritatively declare in certain contexts that no place is exempt from castration. This declared fact is equivalent to the famous impossibility of the sexual relationship. This is a paradoxical way to authorize oneself, since all symbolic authorities ultimately rely on fetishizing the exempted position of S₁ [5].

Given that (1) all ideologies are modelled on “American” exceptionalism, and that (2) Europe is the symptom of America, one must conclude that any ideology critique is inherently European even if it’s not European per se. This is universally true at the present historical context.

The predominant ideology in the recent era was neoliberalism. The neoliberal erosion of public rights castrated and corroded the primarily masculine proletariat and reproduced the primarily feminine precariat [6]. This historical process was fundamentally superegoic, even in its “revolutionary” versions of “refusing bourgeois rights”, because in most cases the erosion was inflicted from a particular position that claimed exemption from castration. This superegoic claim was most emphatically made by the sexual revolutionaries who showed the greatest enthusiasm to assert the absolute possibility of the sexual relationship in the fantasy space exempted from castration. In the present era of “authoritarian populism” this place of exemption took the form of the obscene master [7] which is a special kind of hysterical master that conforms to Lacan’s capitalist discourse.

The symptom designates a parapraxis that warrants analysis and interpretation. A Lacanianist pitfall is to reify this parapraxis as an entity that allows no further interpretation, and to baptize the symptom as a “sinthome” to signify this change of stance. Insofar as a “sinthome” claims exemption from being castrated by further analytical explanations and interventions, even if those analyses never end, it turns into an imposture of wholeness just like the Master-Signifier S₁. By wishing to “keep the critics busy for three hundred years” didn’t Joyce aim to become a Master-Signifier? The notion of “home” nicely captures this sense of supposedly uncastratable place (sint-home) where sexual relationship is possible and indeed takes place (like the home founded by marriage). The fact that Neurope is a symptom means that it is not a “home” in this sense.

So what is Neurope? Perhaps it’s the letter that always arrives at its destination (according to Lacan). In Enjoy Your Symptom! (1992) Slavoj Žižek provides multiple interpretations for the letter’s arrival. In the imaginary sense, a letter always arrives at its destination because it interpellates its addressee into an ideology. In the symbolic sense, a letter always arrives at its destination because it evokes an unpaid symbolic debt. Finally he says the following about the real sense of the letter’s arrival:

The ultimate variation on the theme of a letter that always arrives at its destination reads therefore: “you can never get rid of the stain of enjoyment” – the very gesture of renouncing enjoyment produces inevitably a surplus enjoyment that Lacan writes down as the “object small a.”

To express this opaque stain of enjoyment in the real sense of the letter, I coin the neologism “latcher” that distorts the word “letter” in order to imply both captivation and barring of meaning [8]. In contrast to the imaginary letter and the symbolic letter both of which can be said to originate from a “home” or a “homeland” (e.g. being interpellated by European ideology and being called to sacrifice due to your moral debt to Europe) the real letter of Slavoj Žižek’s European Manifesto is a latcher that originates from the world-symptom Neurope. The perspective of not-all is that of a knot-owl.

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] On a related interesting note, BASIC programming language whose indices start from 1 was developed in the US, whereas BCPL (forerunner of C) programming language whose indices start from 0 was developed in Britain, also ABC (forerunner of Python) programming language whose indices started from 0 was developed in the Netherlands.

[2] See “The European lack lies under the American Dream”

[3] See “Imaginary Alienation (Posturing Wholeness) and Symbolic Alienation (Posturing Allness)”

[4] See “Symbolic Exception and Real Exception”

[5] See “Symbolic Authorization of Fetishes and Real Authorization of Symptoms”

[6] See “Exigency and Enjoyment”

[7] See “Power, Appearance and Obscenity: Five Reflections” (Žižek)

[8] See “Letter and Latcher”

Earth image source.