Slavoj Žižek’s typical concept as mechanism of maintenance of ideology in the play The Exception and the Rule

Abstract

This paper reads Bertolt Brecht’s play The Exception and the Rule using the concept of “typical”, as purported by Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek. It is an interpretative bibliographical study based on lacanianism, a re­cent philosophical current that links Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis to Karl Marx’s historical materialism. The new reading through this perspective allows us to understand the functioning of the typification process, since in a very didactic way, Brecht brings into play the contradictions inherent in the power relations. Although the žižekian concept is after the creation of The exception and the rule it is possible to see the typification process in the play, and this feature works as a constitutive element for the distancing effect, the key concept of bre­chtian dramaturgy. Acerbic critic of the bourgeois drama, Brecht demanded the abandonment of interpersonal relation’s superficial mimesis, which focused exclusively the individual, in order to encompass the collectivity, power’s structures and processes and their almost all-powerful determining role over human behaviors.