We are all familiar with the idea, by now almost a truism, that no one is unbiased. When applied to news sources, this assertion usually leads to the conclusion that we are best served by media that wear their biases on their sleeves, so that hopefully at the end of the day, after hearing the news from Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, the New York Times, NPR, the BBC, The Nation, and Ralph Nader, we will be able to come to our own conclusion, which will hopefully at least turn out to be less overtly biased than those we heard, for example, on the ultra-leftist NPR. Clearly this maintains the underlying conviction that some kind of “unbias” is possible and that a listener who is equally exposed to all the points on the ideological spectrum will be able to come to something like a reasonable, not overtly biased conclusion. There are two ways to respond to this underlying, usually unspoken conviction. The first is to maintain that it is hopelessly naďve and just goes to show how little Foucault we’ve read—-if there’s anything like an unbiased, absolutely true statement, it’s the one that says we’re hopelessly stuck inside our ideologies and that even our presumed resistance against them is determined by the terms of the power structure by which we ourselves are entirely determined. The other way is to say that this conviction is essentially right, even if it is naďve and undeveloped—that is, it is in fact possible to be unbiased or in other words, to be in favor of nothing in particular. I take the second option.

In order to lay out the terms, it is helpful to delve into a little Kantian and Lacanian stuff. In Kantian terms, we could say that biased opinions are based on pathological desires, that is, on particular finite ends such as money or sex. The ultimate question in assessing people’s opinions would be, What’s in it for them to believe this way? Thus, we could say that the Marxist academic is motivated by a desire for tenure and knows that Marxist ideas are in fashion among the faculty at her school, or that the right-wing ideologue is motivated by a desire for money and knows that right-wing ideology is where the money is right now. Kant sets up an alternative to these pathologically motivated acts: acts motivated strictly by the moral law, or in other words, acts that are motivated by a desire for the moral law. And what is the moral law? This is where the theory runs into some difficulty: the Kantian moral law, by its very nature, has no positive content. Thus Hegel criticizes Kant’s theory by claiming that some kind of contingent content will always have to fill in the place of the empty, formal moral law.

Lacan, or at least his modern-day followers, say that Hegel was exactly right, but that Kant still is, too. For Lacan, beneath every contingent desire, there is desire as such, which is simply the desire for something else. This leads him to claim that every time someone makes a concrete demand, she is really saying, “I am asking you to refuse what I demand of you, because that’s not it.” Lacan calls this object of desire as such object a, where a stands for the lack in the Other (which starts with a in French). Object a is a way of referring to the fact that among all the things in the world, nothing ultimately satisfies. Slavoj Žižek, one of the foremost contemporary Lacanians, asserts that object a is the only non-pathological object of desire and proposes as the principle of Lacanian ethics, “Don’t compromise your desire”—-that is, desire object a. This theory, like Kant’s, has its apparent problems, the most pressing of which is that object a is that which cannot be found among all the objects in the world—it is nothingness itself, the remainder once everything in the totality is taken into account. Yet Žižek is perfectly comfortable with this point and indeed insists on it. In order to understand what it means to will nothingness itself, one must move the concept of object a into the higher register of society at large. For Žižek, the problem of object a is perhaps the problem, and it is repeated not only on the “higher” level of the social body, but also on the “lower” level of animal life and even quantum mechanics. Žižek’s term for that which has no place set for it in the social order is the universal. In every society and every group in general, a different set of people fills this role of not having a role, but Žižek offers as his examples the migrant workers, the homeless, those on death row, homosexuals. The case of the migrant worker is especially relevant in the context of Kankakee County, where an entrenched white population finds itself uncomfortably invaded by Mexicans. My coworkers at the chiropractic office are outraged by the fact that the phone menu for calling in credit card transactions now offers as its first option “For instructions in English...”—-not because it slows them down, but because “If they’re going to come to this country, they need to learn the language.” The implicit message behind this, of course, is that they shouldn’t come to this country at all because they don’t belong here. Thus, for the moment at least, the migrant worker represents the “universal” element of our capitalist system, the disavowed but necessary remainder with no official place. It is possible to envision a future in which such workers are integrated into the system and in which the menu options for various languages become comforting signs that everyone has her own place; in fact, that is already the case for the gay and lesbian community in most major urban areas. The only way for a political movement to be universal in scope and thus to be genuinely political is to identify with and to fight relentlessly for this “part of no part.”

Just as object a, which is nowhere to be found among the pathological objects of desire, continually throws the subject off balance and keeps her from ever feeling satisfied and whole, so the universal is the element of society that keeps the social order from becoming permanent and whole. Insofar as desiring object a is the requirement for a non-pathological moral act and fighting for the universal is the requirement for a non-pathological, genuine political movement, I conclude that the nothingness which we are to desire has positive, contingent content. St. Paul could have told us as much: “But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:27-28 NRSV; emphasis added). As Jean-Luc Marion emphasizes in God Without Being, Paul is not simply claiming that God is making non-existent phantoms appear to confuse us, but that God chooses those concrete, existing bodies that have been disqualified as worthless and out of place by the powers of the world. Thus we can say that being unbiased is the same as being in favor of nothing, always keeping in mind that “nothing” has positive, contingent content that must be found anew in every situation.

Thus, to repeat the second option from above, it is possible to be unbiased insofar as one is in favor of nothing, in particular. With this in mind, we can critique the naďve vision of unbias in which rational subject is capable of distinguishing between various options in order to get down to the real truth. The truly unbiasedopinion is not that which disinterestedly observes the state of things, but that which aims at completely changing existing power structures. Thus the properly unbiased subject is passionately involved to the point of identifying with the disavowed remainder of society. In the case of unbias, the answer to the question of, for example, “What’s in it for this person to be in favor of justice for migrant workers and refugees?” is precisely, “Nothing.” The true ethical act, the genuinely political movement, is beyond all considerations of the Good—in fact, Žižek claims that events with a truly universal scope introduce a kind of radical evil into the world, throwing the stable order of the Good and the routine assessment of pragmatic ends completely out of joint. To this extent, the unbiased person is extremely dangerous in that her actions are radically disconnected from her own concerns.

With this in mind, we can see how helpful it is to the current order to claim that the only way to reach unbias is to choose forthrightly from the buffet of the readily available ideological options. Drawing on the political philosophy of Alain Badiou, Žižek claims that the social order is always built upon a primordial crime or universal act that the master(s) of that social order must constantly disavow in order to protect their tenuous structure from collapsing into chaos. The universal exposes that primordial crime—for instance, in a capitalist structure, it may expose the fact that human beings have been essentially reduced to tools in the game of making money. The important point not to be missed, however, is that this universal act simultaneously commits its own crime which must eventually be disavowed in order to reign in the destructive fury of nothingness. Thus Žižek praises Lenin for making concrete the revolutionary program of Marx, but then freely confesses that Lenin eventually had to become a master just like any other or in other words that he eventually had to betray the revolution. The universal event will always necessarily be betrayed, as Žižek states in his major work The Ticklish Subject:

[W]e all know the charm of the [romantic] situation just before the magic silence is broken—the two partners are already assured of their mutual attraction, erotic tension hangs in the air, the situation itself seems to be 'pregnant' with meaning, to precipitate itself towards the Word, to wait for the Word, to be in search of the Word which will name it—yet once the Word is pronounced, it never fully fits, it necessarily brings about the effect of disappointment, the charm is lost, every birth of meaning is an abortion....

What then is the point? Certainly, in the end, the positive order produced by the event is not the thing. It is clear that Žižek has no nostalgia for the socialist order under which he was raised in his native Slovenia, and indeed, he himself played a crucial role in the revolutionary movement that led to the overthrow of the Yugoslav system and ran for president in Slovenia’s first national elections. The tragic heroism implicit in becoming the master is always a consolation prize for the loss of the event, a sad admission that I have lost my nerve. In the universal event itself is alone to be found the glory of being human, which is nothing other than getting outside myself and becoming disconnected from my own concerns by embracing and becoming the concrete negativity, the leftover, the excremental remainder. And for this precise reason, I can only become implicated in the universal event by receiving a call from the outside. So radical is this emptying of myself that I cannot claim as my own even the decision to enter into the event. Upon being implicated, I can say nothing, just as Abraham could say nothing, but if I venture to speak, I can only state plainly that it wasn’t my idea, but that it is all I’ve ever wanted. I can take only responsibility—-but never credit.