The Last Philosopher
A Short-Cut to Žižekian Hegelianism through The Last Jedi
[Note: this was originally written as a script for a video I never got around produce it, but I wanted to get the ideas in it to be out there regardless of the format. This was also written before the release of The Rise of Skywalker]
There is no better way to plunge right into the depths of contemporary ideology than jumping right into Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi — a movie known for its divisive tendencies in its audience reception. Now, I am here to talk about The Last Jedi, not quite just as a movie belonging to just the Star Wars franchise or just a movie to be purely enjoyed, but as an explication of its very divisiveness. In order to make this point, however, I am going to be going between the work of Slavoj Žižek and The Last Jedi.
Probably would go as far as to say that, under the lens of a Žižekian approach to ideology, The Last Jedi can be a pretty curious introduction to the intersections of Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Hegelian philosophy. My intention here is to introduce people to a reading I find quite playful and fun about The Last Jedi. My starting point is quite simple: picture Mark Hamill. And now picture philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Exactly. Well, maybe it is not so apparent yet.
Perhaps the biggest problem with The Last Jedi (and this is not to be meant in a derogatory sense) is that it is a challenging film — to Star Wars fans, The Last Jedi confronts them with their expectations and anticipations of what they want to see in it; and to the pleasure-seeking viewer, The Last Jedi’s journey through failed revolutions and lost causes comes across as hardly appealing. Putting the warning out there for spoilers: in The Last Jedi, we see a lot more of the inadequacies and issues with the characters or structural myths that have been associated with the Star Wars franchise than other parts of the franchise. Poe goes on from being a pretty feel-good type character to a quite stubborn pain in the ass. Finn and Rose can never get a plan right, and constantly their precepts of morality keep being challenged. Leia basically gets switched for Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo, with whom the audience has barely any pre-existing attachment to make her a character that people can ease to — in fact, it could be said that Vice Admiral Holdo comes quite suddenly into the picture. And then, Luke Skywalker also feels like quite a mess, he refuses to engage with all the things expected of him — whether these expectations come from Rey, the Star Wars fans, or casual viewers that have idealized Skywalker’s character. And yet, I do not think any of these are bad things; in fact, I think these are the things that make The Last Jedi one of my favorite films, Star Wars or otherwise.
Let me detract quickly to a simple point in Lacanian psychoanalysis which will bring us back to Žižek and then The Last Jedi. To understand psychoanalysis, we cannot just approach it as a pure theory. It will help us if we think of psychoanalysis in the context of the clinic.
In clinical psychoanalysis, the central thing that gets its particular practice going is desire. Not just any desire, but the particular way in which desire is explored in the analytic situation. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan stresses that desire is always the desire of the Other — what this means is that, when we desire, we desire in accordance to the expectations and anticipations that we have of others’ desire (this does not have to be any one person, but even notions like God or the Law that we desire in accordance to — the difference between the other and the Other). For example, developmentally and within the parameters set of familial structures, desire is formed around the desire of figures like a mother and/or a father — we assume this relationship of desiring in accordance to their desire regardless of whether we accept or reject their paths of desire. Similarly, we come to transfer this relation over to analogous figures that act as the space of Other, as our desire becomes entangled with the Other, whether it is parents, teachers, partners, or even a therapist.
And it is this last point that gets stressed in Lacanian psychoanalysis, where the analytic situation looks to set up a transferential relationship between the analyst and the analysand. In the developmental process we just described, we understand that our sense of desire gets entangled and compromised at every step — this is in essence what happens when we realized that the way we want or do something is inherited from one of these entanglements of desire. What the analytic situation seeks to facilitate is an untangling of desire, as well as an encounter with the formations of the unconscious that informs the tendencies of how our desire entangles itself in certain singular ways. Whereas in other relationships, a person’s desire may be actively censored or repressed to not destabilize a certain order of relationships, or perhaps actively destabilize these relationships, or have none established desiring relationship; in the analytic relationship, the analyst offers a space like a blank slate through which the analysand gets to unpack their desire and its knots, were there any. In short, the analytic approach focuses on a rehabilitation of desire and its orientations.
Of course, this is not as easy as it sounds. Someone going into analysis may come with certain expectations and anticipations about what psychoanalysis is — we may picture Freudian divans, highly speculative and disorienting interpretations of dreams, or five-minute analysis. Surely, an analysand can demand and try to “Have it Your Way” the way Burger King invites us to do; but psychoanalysis teases consumer, fetishistic demand. We sometimes want exactly what the analyst does not have, and we also receive not what we want. This set up allows psychoanalysts to unpack the internal dynamics and economy that shape an analysand’s desire as that desire comes into play in analytic transference and the analytic situation.
So, desire is always desire in accordance to the Other, but also, we do not simply find resoluteness or satisfaction in working ourselves out through analysis. In fact, the progress of analysis is often characterized by frustrations and conflicts at various stages of analysis, insofar as desire contends with different points of compromise.
Now, we can think of Slavoj Žižek as the Big Other we want to desire in accordance to, at least politically, philosophically, or psychoanalytically. Surely, though there are people that might take Žižek at his word, a common trend after his new publications or interviews is disappointment at Žižek’s answers. Much like analysis or other transferential relations, we are trying to figure out what the hell Žižek wants. We want Žižek to answer, but we don’t like the answer or how he answers — for instance, after the Žižek-Peterson debate, various leftists went on to making fan fictions about what they wanted to see in the debate. Žižek articulates the analytic situation in the anticipations and expectations set upon him from people wanting philosophical, analytic, and political answers.
This dynamic very much captivates one of the central themes in The Last Jedi. When I want you to picture Mark Hamill as Slavoj Žižek, this should remind us of Luke’s role in The Last Jedi as he provides a critique of Jedi ideology. The central story follows up from The Force Awakens, where Rey starts making her way to the planet where Luke has set himself up in a self-imposed exile. Rey wants to learn how to be a Jedi, so she goes on to meet Luke with all these expectations and presumptions over being a Jedi and the Force. Immediately, Luke is quick to refuse and resist Rey — after things went wrong with Kylo Ren, Luke has promised to never train another Jedi again.
What is significant here, however, is how this dynamic between the two characters sets up the structure of the Big Other — Luke is the subject-supposed-to-know that Rey is turning towards for an answer. What is Rey wanting Luke to answer to? To the failed revolutions and lost causes of the Jedi and the Rebellion, as well as the elusive question of the Force — these are significant themes throughout the movie, as plans constantly derail for other characters like Poe, Finn, and Rose; and even more so, things keep on going wrong; and how the Force and its different ways of manifesting are problematized.
In The Last Jedi, the role of the Big Other gets displaced from one figure to another. In Rey’s storyline, the Big Other is first latched on to Luke as the subject-supposed-to-know; but then, Luke introduces us to the Book of the Jedi as if they were the foundations that held all the answers to Rey’s questions. But even this gets problematized. At a later point in the movie, after Rey decides to go try to turn Kylo Ren to their side, Luke changes his mind over helping Rey learn the ways of the Jedi. As Luke makes his way over to gather the books to bring them to Rey, Yoda’s spirit manifests and interrupts Luke. Yoda simply roasts Luke about his attitude and how he is going about things; and then, Yoda sets the Books of the Jedi on fire. Yoda intervenes in the most Hegelian manner possible as he notes that: “Wisdom they held, but that library contained nothing that the girl Rey does not already possess”. This is core to the Hegelian notion of Absolute Knowing — in the process of philosophy, we start from what is most immediate and given to us; but the immediate and given only arrive to our understanding under certain determinate mediations and conditions; and as we keep accounting for the manifold of conditions of mediations to arrive to something as it is as such and in itself, we realize that this interplay of appearance is a fracture in the Absolute itself. It is not that an understanding or comprehension of things as they are in themselves comes from detachment from concrete conditions; rather, the thing itself is implicated in the conditions and mediations themselves as well as its capacity to transform them. In short, the minimal wisdom of Absolute Knowledge in both Hegel and Yoda amounts to this movement from the most immediate, to mediations, to the mediation of mediations, and back again. In other words, the “yet” is in the “already”.
This is powerfully exemplified through Rey’s journey in looking for her origin: she turns to Luke for the origin of the Jedi, and then she gets passed along to the Books of Jedi, followed by Kylo Ren’s problematization of Luke as an ideal father figure, and lastly Rey trying to look for her parents to no avail.
Rey only finds what was already there: her. But by the end of her arc with Luke, Yoda highlights that a Hegelian dislocation of foundations has occurred insofar as everything Rey needs is already there. Again, the “yet” is in the “already”.
What does it mean to make a difference then? Finn wants to fight the First Order and Admiral Holdo wants to escape from them and protect the crew. Poe and Rose maintain a strong distinction of good and evil, whereas DJ (and I guess BB-8) are beyond good and evil. Rey and Kylo Ren are always overstepping each other in what they anticipate in each others’ desire. Luke and Supreme Leader Snoke often act as if they have already sorted out Rey’s and Kylo Ren’s own respective desire. Throughout The Last Jedi, we stumble across various instances where characters are at odds with each other— but the common question to all of them is how they can make a difference from the circumstances they are currently in. For example, we see this in Luke’s concern over the infernal repetition of the Same and the return of the repressed — Luke anticipates Rey to be a repetition of the Kylo Ren tragedy, and yet Rey takes a path other than what was expected of her.
The Last Jedi is full of attempts at trying to figure out the desire of the Other: Luke on Kylo Ren’s desire. Luke on Rey’s desire. Rey and Kylo on each other’s desire. And Snoke on Rey and Kylo Ren’s desire. By the end of the film, the lesson is clearly that the Big Other is not — to think one has settled down the desire of the Other only amounts to an attempt to patch over the gap in the Other that allows us to ascribe meaning and intention into it.
Sure, Snoke could sense that Kylo Ren was desiring, as in the broadest space for ascribing meaning and intention — but he was totally wrong about what this desire was the moment that he got shanked the fuck out. And Luke was pretty presumptions about both Kylo Ren and Rey. And well, Rey and Kylo Ren straight up entered a full-on dialectic of desire onto a master-slave dialectic in trying to compromise each other into their own desire.
And well, is what Kylo Ren offering Rey as radically different as it sounds? To Rey, it certainly does not when it means the disavowal of the Rebellion getting destroyed. However, Kylo Ren looks at Rey as counterrevolutionary, unable to let go of the old. But, in just “letting go of the old” as if it were inconsequential, is Kylo Ren not missing the very thing that can save him? The repressed he is trying to fully shut down and what provokes ambivalence and ambiguity in him? In other words, can what is yet-to-come without what is already-there? Or as Žižek elaborates through the image of the spear in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, as he writes in Absolute Recoil: “This brings us back to Wagner’s “Die Wunde schliesst der Speer nur der Sieschlug.” Hegel says the same thing, although with the accent shifted in the opposite direction: the Spirit is itself the wound it tries to heal, that is, the wound is self-inflicted… His point is not that Spirit heals its wounds so perfectly that, in a magical gesture of retroactive sublation, even the scars disappear; the point is rather that, in the course of the dialectical process, a shift of perspective occurs which makes the wound itself appear as its opposite” (Absolute Recoil¸ 127).
Kylo Ren is constantly trying to repress the law of the Mother (Leia) that brings the most infantile and ambivalent tendencies in him, it sharpens the sensation of that wound that founded his rebirth from Ben Solo to Kylo Ren. At the Hegelian gesture towards the coincidence of opposites is that this is also his way out, Kylo Ren could undergo a second symbolic death to save himself. (Finn basically has the inverse storyline with Vice Admiral Holdo, where he tries to refute her as a replacement for the mOther Thing by being an absolute piss baby). But also, this internal struggle with Kylo Ren highlights the curious position that Rey has in her storyline in that she has a blank slate origin — she tries to trace it down without a clear-cut resolution, she has what Kylo Ren does not, namely, no discernible past or lineage of transmissive inheritance. Kylo Ren acknowledges this as he tells Rey that she comes from nothing. Even more crucially, Kylo Ren’s frustration is particularly centered around the fact that Rey is in an optimal position to do what he wants to do himself, and yet she does not want to do that. While Kylo Ren remains stuck in dreaming of some utopian elsewhere in Rey’s capacity to do exactly what he wishes he could do; Rey has a peculiar freedom in assuming a lineage or a place in the story, reclaiming the old to build the new, and yet dislocating the parameters of how this would be a meaningful choice to begin with. And Kylo Ren cannot stand this, in his eternal criticism of the past, he remains in an unhappy consciousness.
What is emancipation? This is a theme common to Hegelian philosophy, Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. This particular interaction between Kylo Ren and Rey can help unpack these senses of emancipation. Hegelian philosophical emancipation derives from its capacity to overcome critical limits while desubstantializing any first foundation or philosophical grounding from any presumption than it is a presupposition of positings and positing of presuppositions (Kant-Hegel-Fichte/Schelling) — Rey is able to reclaim what is already there, in the past and the old, exactly where Kylo Ren sees the precritical and dogmatic. A coincidence of opposites if I’ve ever heard one, not just in the Hegelian sense, but as a demonstration of the deadlocks of Lacanian sexuation as this Parallax View over which Rey and Kylo Ren just look slightly past each other. The point of Žižek’s Parallax View is that the different positions of sexuation are still implicated and registered in each other. And yeah, I guess the Force, the Unconscious, and the Hegelian Spirit could be related, I don’t know.
In Marxism, the exercise of emancipation does not just remain Spiritual or a gymnastics of reason, but actually doing and acknowledging a real antagonism that skews the way in which characters relate to one another — Rose elaborates on the exploitative practices of rich people, DJ pushes further the ambiguity surrounding arms sales for the good guys and the evil guys, and there are slave children. Kylo Ren has some pretty bad praxis, and though he thinks he is clearing the path for the future, he is only repeating his state of unhappy consciousness — the criticism is materialist, his praxis not good.
And in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the height of the transferential relationship between Kylo Ren and Rey comes at the time where Kylo Ren cannot tolerate the fact that Rey is not doing what he wishes he could do — this highlights a high degree of desire entanglement, where Rey shows a peculiar freedom in doing what she did. And though Kylo Ren remains in a state of unhappy consciousness, Luke, on the other hand, is rehabilitated from his Left-wing melancholia in being able to assume the past and the Fall of the Soviet Union…. I mean the Jedi… and fight once more with a resolute Spirit, after he figured his shit out by learning from Rey. I guess the analyst got analysand’d.
All I am trying to say is that The Last Jedi furthers the dialectic a little more. I am sure I won’t care for Episode 9 when it comes out, because I don’t think it will follow up in any of the groundwork laid out by The Last Jedi. Maybe it will try to appeal to fans and casual audiences more and downplay the challenge that we had laid down. The resistances to The Last Jedi may withhold us from tarrying with the negative, as Hegel would say, to work ourselves from the failures and faults of the characters nevertheless helped us arrive to significant truths about the Jedi — in a sense, the resistances to The Last Jedi only corroborate on this account.
We could be free from the Jedi, we just don’t want to — Rian Johnson is not doing Episode 9, and these challenges posed by The Last Jedi are probably not going be met. The Last Jedi itself as a Failed Revolution or Lost Cause — the forced choice of The Last Jedi, this film could only stand alone to be taken seriously; there was no way a film that challenging would make for satisfactory closure. The choice was made before any meaningful choice could be made over the fate of The Last Jedi — and looked at from this slanted angle, we can take note of the forced choice being covered over by little fetishistic choices as if they made any difference — Coke or Pepsi? Jedi or Sith? The impelling force of… well… the Force throws us into this spiralling question.
