If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao...

What Ben decries below is at least a half-truth: rebellion is necessarily defined by its opposition to the thing being rebelled against, that opposition determines the terms of the rebellion. It's related to the old Thomist (?) idea that evil is merely the absence of good, with no positive presence of its own (not that rebellion is evil, but it's a helpful metaphor). Thus, rebellion contains an implicit acknowledgment of the reality/success of the opposite—to rebel against an authority, we must admit that it is an authority, or is at least perceived as one. And Zizek is right, cynicism is indeed a commodity these days—look at any 'hip' tv show, for instance. Or take a trip to Hot Topic, for that matter. Once again, Cat and Girl comes through for me here.

That said, that doesn't totally invalidate it—the king's head is in the basket, no matter how you look at it. And it is true that if we give too much credence to the idea of rebellion as conservative, we can incapacitate ourselves into an existential mess (which is a good part of the story of 19th and 20th century philosophy). I don't think that's the point of recognizing that, though—rather, it is a warning about how we wield power: in violently declaiming our enslavement to one idea, we may retreat into the clutches of another master whose chains have an ugly familiarity. As Dylan says, "You gotta serve somebody." A real life example might be seen the actions of our own government—in an ostensible attempt to protect our precious freedoms (whatever that means) from the actions of terrorists, we ended up with the Patriot Act and the concomitant culture of censorship, surveillance, and, well, terror (see also: every political revolution ever). It's also a call to vigilance. Rebellion thrives off of generalizations, and inevitably reacts to a caricature, not the thing itself, which can keep us from seeing it when it crops up again:

"You must see to it that you pull up regularly all the baobabs, at the very first moment when they can be distinguished from the rosebushes which they resemble so closely in their earliest youth. It is tedious work," the little prince added, "but very easy."

There is a real danger in saying "Well, I'm glad we're through with that" and forgetting about the supposedly vanquished idea, only to have it creep in through the back door. This is perhaps why there are so few old radicals—people's ideals temper with age, and they often come to embrace even the shortcomings of what they once derided (e.g. the later Wordsworth).

Moreover, there is a kind of authority-endorsed fake rebellion that ultimately affirms the status quo. We can watch The Office and chuckle with smug superiority at the absurdity and drudgery of office life, but we still end up in our cubicle the next morning, having successfully blown off the steam that might eventually drive us to quit. It's Carnival: a safe, bounded reversal of the social hierarchy that reinforces it in the long run. I think this is what Zizek is really getting at in that quote, and he is right to decry it.

As a side note, I take issue with Ben's comment that "no one has ended up lusting after a nun." Really? What about your own obsession with "the veil"? (Which is admittedly not lust, but still.) Consider the now-cliche movie plot about the hunky guy accepting a dare to turn the frumpy, bookish girl into the prom queen—she turns out to be gorgeous, and he falls in love. Is this not a variation on the seduce-a-nun fantasy? Also, on a purely logical note, be careful about making a claim and then dismissing everything outside its bounds as "deviance," Freud. :)

I suspect that this whole topic is connected at some deep level to Bloom's "anxiety of influence" which I wrote about at length for my senior seminar paper (B+, by the way). Perhaps I'll try to ferret that connection out in a later post. Also, who's proud of me for not relating the issue to hipster-ism? Me, that's who.