Where the Mortal God Meets the Real: The Theory of the State in the Context of the Philosophy of Zizek and Reisner

Abstract

The article is devoted to a rethinking of the state as a political form from the perspective of Slavoj Zizek's psychoanalytical understanding of ideology and Mikhail Reisner's theory of the state. The paper systematically outlines Zizek's ideas from the early period of his work and Reisner's theory of the state. Zizek, rejecting the traditional understanding of ideology as false consciousness, presents it as a necessity that structures reality. In turn, Reisner views the state not only as an instrument of oppression but also as a psychological phantasm based on the ideas and unconscious attitudes of the masses. Synthesising Zizek's ideas with Reisner's legacy forms the main aim of this article. In combining the two perspectives, the state turns out to be the ideology that organises contemporary political experience and conceals a certain traumatic impossibility of symbolising the Real. The attempt to look at the state-as-ideology through the prism of psychoanalysis reveals the mechanisms of its functioning as the main signifier around which political-legal discourse and political practice are centered. It turns out that the state-as-ideology replaces other forms of political communities both temporally and spatially. Overcoming this situation is possible through bringing the phantasm of the state back to the human psyche. This, in turn, requires a recognition of the presence of an unsymbolised lack at the very heart of the symbolic order, undermining the absolute power of the state-as-ideology to determine the structure of political reality. The non-obvious intellectual connection between Zizek and Reisner and their original views on the nature of ideology and the state provide an opportunity to take a fresh look at the principles of the structure of the contemporary political form and to contribute to the ongoing debate on the state.