Deleuze, Žižek, Spring Breakers and the

Question of Ethics in Late Capitalism

Jenny Gunn, Georgia State University
(jgunn7@gsu.edu)

Abstract:
This article examines Harmony Korine’s 2012 film, Spring Breakers. Arguing that
Korine’s film explores the bankruptcy of ethics in advanced capitalism, the article
considers two predominate and contrasting theories of contemporary subjectivity:
Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytically-inspired conception of the subject as radical
lack and Deleuze’s affirmation of the subject through attention to affect and the
virtual. In reference to Kant’s radical reformulation of the moral law as an empty
and tautological form with the concept of the categorical imperative, this article
shows that Korine’s allegory of the spring break adventure correlates the subject’s
eagerness to surmount any and all obstacles toward enjoyment to late stage
capitalism’s increasing encroachment on the absolute limit of deterritorialization.
In so doing, the film suggests that neither Deleuze nor Žižek, affirmation nor
lack, offer an effective ethical principle for the subject in the face of the real of
global capital.

Keywords: Žižek; Hegel; Lacan; Deleuze; Guattari; Spinoza; Ethics; Capitalism;

Spring Breakers.

This article performs a comparative analysis of Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian and

Lacanian inspired principle of negativity – his conviction, in other words,
that the subject fundamentally lacks – with Gilles Deleuze’s conception
of a radically immanent desiring production. More specifically, it debates

Film-Philosophy 22.1 (2018): 95–113

DOI: 10.3366/film.2018.0064
f Jenny Gunn. This article is published as Open Access under the
terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence
(http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial
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the ethical implications of these two philosophically opposed views

for contemporary subjectivity. The inspiration for this pursuit is Žižek’s
2003 publication, Organs without Bodies, a critical examination of the
philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze. Considering that Žižek and
Deleuze have both had large influences in the field of film philosophy, this
paper will further ground this comparative project in the analysis
of Harmony Korine’s 2012 film Spring Breakers, which so provocatively
challenges the traditional, humanist conception of the rational subject.
As a hyper-real representation of late capitalist neoliberal subjectivity,
Spring Breakers provides an excellent opportunity to test the ethics of
Žižek’s principal of radical negativity against Deleuze’s theory of desiring
production. With only a passing familiarity of Deleuzian affect theory, its
relevance is clear to the style and narrative of Korine’s Spring Breakers.
In other words, like many other recent cultural products, with its
attention to a kaleidoscope of colours, sounds, and textures at the expense
of a more classically motivated storyline, Spring Breakers’ post-cinematic
aesthetics make it clear that Deleuze was not wrong in intuiting the power
of affect or the molecular level of desiring production and its effects on
the molar level of the social. At the same time, seeing as the protagonists
of Spring Breakers also present us with a troubling case of seemingly
moral bankruptcy, the film also provokes one to consider the dangerous
possibilities that an ethics grounded in Deleuzian thought might lead to.
So what place, if any, might there be for Žižek’s radical negativity to
assert itself as a legitimate ethical solution? This article attempts to trace
a preliminary answer to these broad and difficult questions. Before
proceeding to an analysis of Spring Breakers, we should first briefly
establish the opposing philosophical viewpoints that influence Žižek’s
ethical premise of radical negativity (Hegel-Lacan) and Deleuze’s premise
of desiring production (Spinoza).
Given Deleuze’s influence in contemporary critical theory and his
own prolificacy, it seems inevitable that Žižek would come to analyse
the specificities of their philosophical differences, a project he took up
in Organs without Bodies (2003). What becomes clear in the course of
reading Organs without Bodies, and tellingly given Žižek’s commitment to
Lacanian psychoanalysis, is that Žižek prefers Deleuze’s writings without
Guattari.1 More specifically, apart from the Cinema books, Žižek sees

1. “ [O]ne can only regret that the Anglo-Saxon reception of Deleuze (and also the
political impact of Deleuze) is predominantly that of a ‘ guattarized ’ Deleuze […] what
inherent impasse caused Deleuze to turn toward Guattari? Anti-Oedipus [is] arguably
Deleuze’s worst book ” (Žižek, 2003, pp. 20–21).

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Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense as the most redeemable,
particularly The Logic of Sense in which Deleuze sets out to explain the
emergence of sense from being (Deleuze, 1990 and 1995). In Žižek’s
view, the question that Deleuze attempts to answer in The Logic of Sense
in regard to the material genesis of sense can only really be conceived
adequately within the “problematic of dialectic materialism […] only
(dialectical) materialism can effectively think the ‘immaterial ’ void, the
gap of negativity in which mental events emerge. Idealism, by contrast,
substantializes this void” (2003, p. 87). As Žižek well knows, however,
it is precisely this characterization of the gap as negativity that Deleuze
would reject (Smith, 2012a, p. 61). Accordingly, one has to question the
verity of Žižek’s claim that the purpose of Organs without Bodies is merely
a “Hegelian buggery of Deleuze ” when it seems it could more readily be
defined as a passive-aggressive attempt to dismiss the legitimacy of
Deleuze’s philosophical thought tout court (Žižek, 2003, p. 48).2
While both Deleuze and Žižek could be said to agree that the subject is
a reified and misleadingly reductive ontological concept, in his work with
Guattari, Deleuze argues for a productive conception of desiring
production at the molecular level of the subject while Žižek, on the
other hand, argues that the subject is an empty void akin to the Hegelian
“night of the world”:

We must be careful not to miss the way Hegel’s break with the
Enlightenment tradition can be discerned in the reversal of the very
metaphor of the subject: the subject is no longer the light of Reason opposed
to the non-transparent, impenetrable Stuff (of Nature, Tradition …); his
very core, the gesture that opens up the space for the light of Logos, is
absolute negativity, ‘ the night of the world, ’ […]. (Žižek, 2003, pp. 35–37)

As Žižek must realize, however, such a fundamentally negative conception

of the subject cannot be sublated with Deleuze’s own. This is not to say
that Žižek is entirely baseless in his claim that there are connections
between Deleuze’s philosophy and Hegel’s. Indeed, in seeming agreement
with Žižek, Daniel Smith (2012a) argues that to say Deleuze is anti-
Hegelian is not to say that he is anti-dialectical (p. 59). In what is perhaps
a more focused explanation than Žižek’s own as to why Deleuze never
wrote at length on Hegel, Smith argues that he chose instead to grapple
with the thought of the generation of post-Kantian philosophers
immediately prior to Hegel’s – that of Fichte, Shelling and especially

2. Here Žižek makes reference to Deleuze’s own description of engaging with the thought
of great philosophers as an act of “ buggery, ” intended to produce monstrous offspring.

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Salomon Maimon: “Deleuze’s persistent criticism is that Hegel provides

an inadequate solution to Maimon’s primary post-Kantian problematic:
the search for the condition of real experience and not merely possible
experience ” (Smith, 2012a, p. 68). In other words, as opposed to Hegel’s
privileging of the concept, or of the universal over the particular, Maimon
was a philosopher of the immanent, much as Deleuze himself became.
As Smith argues, a more nuanced account of Deleuze’s philosophical
indebtedness to Hegel would “be assessed less in terms of Deleuze’s
explicit comments against Hegel than in terms of the alternate conception
of dialectics he develops in his oeuvre … in which an affirmative
conception of ‘problematic ’ is substituted for the ‘labor of the negative ’”
(Smith, 2012a, p. 71). As a more affirmative philosopher, Deleuze’s
opposition to Žižek is here made crystal clear.
But from where does such an affirmative conception of difference as
Deleuze’s own derive, philosophically speaking? As Žižek is right to point
out, it is Spinoza, and if there was but one philosopher fundamentally
opposed to Hegel and the Hegelian ethics of radical negativity, it would
seem to be Spinoza. Spinoza sought to create a conception of ethics free
of any transcendental dimension, which has since been considered
philosophically problematic (Spinoza and Hampshire, 2005). As Žižek
(2003, p. 39) argues, prior to Spinoza, the deontological dimension
was one and the same with the ethical dimension so creating an immanent
form of ethics could only be viewed as an inherently ironic project.
Following Spinoza, and later Nietzsche, Deleuze rejects the Kantian
premise of the transcendental or deontological law and interprets this very
conception of the transcendental law as fascist and responsible for
rendering in the subject a sense of an infinite debt or guilt in relation to
the law (Smith, 2012b, p. 152). In fact, Deleuze views the concept of
a transcendental law as a form of ideological nonsense that is intimately
related to his conception likewise, and as advanced in Anti-Oedipus, of the
Oedipus complex as a repressing representation:

By failing from the beginning to see what the precise nature of this
desiring-production is, and how, under what conditions, and in response
to what pressures, the Oedipal triangulation plays a role in the recording
of the process, we find ourselves trapped in the net of a diffuse, generalized
oedipalism that radically distorts the life of the child and his later
development, the neurotic and the psychotic problems of the adult, and
sexuality as a whole. (Deleuze et al, 2009, p. 49)

According to Deleuze, the immanent ethical task for the subject in the face
of this “entails ‘an amplification, an intensification, an elevation of power,
an increase in dimension, a gain in distinction” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 172).

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In Daniel Smith’s phrasing, “For Deleuze, it is a question of knowing

whether a mode of existence, however small or great, can deploy its
power, increase its power of acting to the point where it goes to the
limit of what it ‘can do.’ ” (Smith, 2012b, p. 156). This empowering
and perhaps counterintuitive conception of ethics in the classical
philosophical sense is well and good as a means of empowerment for a
subject who indeed believes himself subjugated to a transcendent ethical
law, a subject who does experience the law as an infinite debt. But what,
however, is the efficacy of such a conception of immanent ethics for a
subject who no longer recognizes a transcendent law, for one who no
longer experiences this sense of subjugation and debt?
As Žižek (2003) observes of the current late capitalist subject position,
conceiving of the transcendental law in strictly Lacanian terms as
the Name-of-the-Father is anachronistic: “the Name-of-the-Father is no
longer the symptom/sinthome that holds together the social link [and] the
political consequences of this insight are capital: any possible idea of
revolutionary undermining has to break totally with the problematic
of anti-oedipal revolt ” (p. 101). What Žižek is intimating here, in other
words, is a critical doubt as to the validity of Deleuze and Guattari’s
conviction in regard to the subject’s sense of subjugation to (even an
illegitimate) Oedipal law. Although perhaps such a conviction may have
been more defensible in 1972 when Anti-Oedipus was first published, it
is certainly much less so in its aftermath, which leads Žižek (2003) to
observe damningly of Deleuze that “there are […] features that justify
calling Deleuze the ideologist of late capitalism” (p. 184). That is to say,
then, that the highest ethical principle of Deleuzian thought – the power
to go to the limit of what one can do – can and perhaps should be viewed
precisely in alignment with the logic of late capitalism. The specific
dangers of this ethical morass may be easier explicated, however, if like
Deleuze or Žižek often do, we turn our attention to a specific object of
aesthetic analysis, Harmony Korine’s 2012 film, Spring Breakers.

Spring Break Forever, or The Absolute Limit of Deterritorialization

Spring Breakers opens with an image of pure, unadulterated spring break
revelry. This opening scene of just over two minutes and filmed at half
speed, features a series of writhing tanned, fit, bikini and surf short clad
bodies, ecstatically cavorting on the beach. This is the essence of the
spring break fantasy, spring break as objet a, the object cause of desire, the
spring break that the male protagonist of the film, Alien (James Franco)
means to suggest in his oft-repeated mantra: “Spring Break – Spring Break
forever ya’ll.” It is a fantasy not because it is wholly unachievable, after
all, and as we are frequently shown in the documentary footage of real

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spring break vacations featured in montage throughout the course of

the film, such ecstatic cavorting does indeed occur regularly for college
students on spring break whether in Panama City, Cancun, Cabo or
St. Pete’s (St. Petersburg, Florida), the actual setting of the diegesis. It
is more that in this opening scene, Korine distils the utopian essence of the
imaginary spring break: a drunken, affective, immersive, pseudo-orgiastic
experience. This fantastical, idealized representation of spring break is
something Korine himself is intimately familiar with, having stated in an
interview that he was never able to attend the Panama City spring break
trips other students from his high school class frequently did. He could
only imagine them (Scott, 2013).
In a way of course, we can view this opening scene cynically or
ironically as a completely ridiculous sublation of something undeniably
tawdry, redneck, even crass. But I would argue instead that we should take
this image at face value and accept it as a legitimate representation
of trans-subjective ecstasy. Although the comparison would surely make
many a film snob cringe, in this way the opening scene of Spring Breakers
is not unlike another well-known fantastical representation of trans-
subjective ecstasy in film history – that of the desert orgy in Michelangelo
Antonioni’s 1970 film, Zabriskie Point, a truly utopian distillation of the
fantasy of the free love hippie movement. Seeing that as Angelo Restivo
(2011) has argued, Zabriskie Point is not without its own immanent
critiques of the very hippie movement it sets out to represent, one could
even argue that Spring Breakers could be read as its neoliberal redux. Like
Spring Breakers’ take on the collegiate spring break, Zabriskie Point
ultimately portrays the hippie movement as an unsustainable fantasy but
one that Antonioni nevertheless asks us to take seriously. Also like
Zabriskie Point, Spring Breakers considers the relationship of its utopian
fantasy to capitalism. The crucial difference however, is that unlike the
hippies of Zabriskie Point, for the neoliberal subjects of Spring Breakers,
the logics of utopia and capitalism are no longer diametrically opposed.
Whereas Zabriskie Point ends with the hippie protagonist, Daria (Daria
Halprin), fantastically exploding the home of capitalist developer, Lee
Allen (Rod Taylor), Spring Breakers ends much more ambivalently. After
all, in the course of their spring break vacation, Candy (Vanessa
Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson) and Cotty (Rachel Korine) have forayed
far beyond the fantasy of the opening image of a trans-subjective ecstasy as
achieved through typical spring break debauchery to a seemingly much
more insidious ecstasy achieved through their association with the drug
dealer, Alien, and a series of armed robberies that they pursue on his
behalf. In other words, Korine’s film suggests that for the neoliberal
subject of late capitalism, the real high, the highest high, is no longer

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found in the fantasy of the collective utopian orgy but rather in the driven
and competitive pursuit of capital gain.
It was not long after Antonioni’s much-maligned debut of Zabriskie
Point in fact, that Deleuze and Guattari published Anti-Oedipus, the first
volume of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. Whereas the 1960s
free-love hippie movement was seen to have died out with the Hells
Angels and the Altamont Free concert in December of 1969 (presumably
part of the reason why Antonioni’s ill-timed release of Zabriskie Point in
1970 was such an abject failure), its utopian dimension continued to live
on, at least theoretically speaking, in the concept of desiring production
advanced by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. In Anti-Oedipus,
Deleuze and Guattari insist, and against the Lacanian theory of subjective
lack, that at bottom, on the molecular level, the subject is made up of a
vast reservoir of desiring production. Furthermore, this molecular level
affects what happens on the molar level of representation, that is, the level
of the subject properly speaking and also the social field.3
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari (2009) argue that whatever
happens on the social field is directly invested with desire, and that
capitalism will conversely deterritorialize and reterritorialize this desiring
production towards its own advancement and at all costs, in order to avoid
reaching the absolute limit beyond capitalism itself, that is, the limit of
absolute deterritorialization:

What we are really trying to say is that capitalism, through its process of
production, produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy or
charge, against which it brings all its vast powers of repression to bear, but
which nonetheless continues to act as capitalism’s limit. For capitalism
constantly counteracts, constantly inhibits this inherent tendency while at
the same time allowing it free reign; it continually seeks to avoid reaching
its limit while simultaneously tending toward that limit. (p. 34)

One of the central projects of Anti-Oedipus was to critique institutions of

“micro-fascism ” such as the church, the university, and psychoanalysis
itself, which were in Deleuze and Guattari’s view knowingly
or unknowingly in cahoots with capitalism, creating ideal workers and
lacking consumers by repressing the subject’s awareness of the molecular
level of its desiring production. Their hope was that by exposing
psychoanalysis in this way, a more “schizophrenic” subjectivity might
emerge, that is, one less repressed and thus more fully in touch with the

3. “ [D]esire produces reality, or stated another way, desiring production is one and the
same thing as social production ” (Deleuze et al, 2009, p. 30).

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affects produced by desiring production – one that might find satisfaction

other than in the logic of the consumer marketplace. As a younger
generation of scholars have noted, however, including Žižek (2003)
and Brian Massumi (2014), what perhaps Deleuze and Guattari failed
to foresee was that capitalism, particularly since the advent of the digital
age, would begin to use affect to target the molecular level of desiring
production directly and in an effort to even further colonize the subject.
Whether this was truly an oversight is debatable, however, since Deleuze
and Guattari often state in Anti-Oedipus that capitalism is always
expanding towards its dreaded limit of absolute deterritorialization in
an effort to reterritorialize anything new and subsume it to a capitalist
exchange value.
Regardless, what makes Spring Breakers such an interesting film in
relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia project
is that it stages a confrontation between the logic of late capitalism and
the notional limit of subjective morality. In other words, the protagonists
of Spring Breakers, repeatedly referred to by Alien as the “these four girls,”
rely on a series of increasingly risky and even criminal experiences to
increase their desiring production (and the exponentially dangerous
quality of their actions is dramatically echoed by Cliff Martinez and
Skrillex’s intensively pulsating score of slightly ominous electronic dance
music [EDM]). In so doing, Korine re-conceptualizes “spring break” as an
allegory akin to the absolute limit of deterritorialization theorized by
Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. Ultimately, Spring Breakers suggests
that as capitalism encroaches further towards its absolute limit, there may
be grave ramifications for the subject and likewise the social. In order to
fully unpack how it is that Spring Breakers does this, however, it will be
useful to consider an earlier and famed philosophical confrontation
around a similar limit, that of Kant’s categorical imperative.

The Absolute Limit as Ethical Impasse or, The Empty Form

of the Kantian Law
Although Lacan (2007) was the first to read Sade’s Philosophy in the
Bedroom in terms of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, Deleuze (1991),
and later Žižek (2009a), also stage the same confrontation. As in the “Kant
avec Sade” dichotomy, in the narrative of Korine’s Spring Breakers the line
between good and evil blurs indistinguishably. What we get instead is
the pure horizon of the absolute or, what Lacan (2007, p. 647) refers to
as the empty form of Kant’s categorical imperative. In other words,
in Kant’s revision of the Platonic principle of the law as “The Good” to the
tautological principle of the law as the law, the law becomes nothing more
than a horizon – only knowable in the form of the punishments made in

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its name. What the confrontation between Kant and Sade reveals is that,
given its empty form, the logic of Kant’s categorical imperative is such that
it is just as likely that evil is its ultimate principle as good. Good and
evil thus become indistinguishable in the empty form of the law itself. In
fact, Žižek (2009a) following Lacan, has argued that Kant’s conception
of diabolical evil – a pure evil defined apart from any pathological
motivation – is the ultimate repressed content of the Kantian law. The
moral law itself thereby merely functions as a Vorstellungsrepräsentanz
(repressive representation) of diabolical evil as its repressed content:

What is so unbearable about the notion of diabolical Evil is that it makes the
ethical Good and Evil indistinguishable, the problem with diabolical Evil is
that it meets all criteria of the transcendental definition of a morally good
act. […] diabolical Evil is the non-phenomenalizable Real. […] the only
true phenomenalization of diabolical Evil is the Good itself, the call of the
moral law. (p. 296)

The ambivalent character of the Kantian conception of the law as Žižek

describes it in the previous quotation is perfectly explicated in the
narrative of Korine’s Spring Breakers. More specifically, like the Kantian
law, Korine’s conception of spring break as a pure, libidinal free-for-all
functions as a similarly empty form or, borrowing a term from Žižek, a
parallax of experience for the four female protagonists of the film: Faith
(Selena Gomez), Candy, Brit and Cotty.
The conflicting emotions that the girls experience over the course of
their spring break vacation are perhaps best elucidated in the phone calls
that Brit and Candy make to their mothers. The audience hears these
phone calls only from the perspective of the girls’ side of the line and so
they function throughout the film as de-sutured and free-floating voice-
over soliloquys of a sort. Although we hear the content of these phone
calls initially fairly early into the spring break week, where they become
perhaps most interesting is at the end of the film when they are repeated:

BRIT: I just wanna do better … better at school … better at life … I just

wanna be a good girl now … be happy, have fun … I feel that’s the secret to
life, being a good person.
CANDY: I’m coming home; back to school and everything … I’m gonna do
better now … be the best I can be. We met people just like us … just the
same as us … we see things differently now … something so amazing
happened, magical, beautiful.

It is at this point that we see when within the film’s narrative chronology
the phone calls are actually made, at the end of the spring break vacation.

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Although the audio from the phone calls had played once earlier as voice-
over tracks, accompanied with imagery of a fairly typical if debauched
Florida spring break vacation, by the end of the film we see that in fact the
girls place these calls only after the events of the spring break vacation
have violently amplified. Brit and Candy call home to their mothers just
on the cusp of murdering Alien’s rival drug dealer, Big Arch (Gucci Mane),
along with other members of his crew in the film’s final shoot out: the
climax of their spring break vacation.
Similarly, earlier in the film, Faith makes a phone call to her
grandmother in which she describes her spring break trip in similarly
effusive terms. Faith is set up early on in the film as a fairly naı̈ve good girl
who attends church youth group but who is also yearning for earthly
fulfilment. She knows something is lacking in her day-to-day life but does
not know exactly where to find the answer. It is some combination then
of her spirituality and her naiveté that makes her description of spring
break in St. Petersburg somewhat uncanny. Accompanying scenes of
binge drinking, hard drug use, and orgiastic grinding cross cut with
scenes of the girls more innocently swimming and scootering, the audio
track features Faith describing the trip to her grandmother as, “the most
spiritual place she’s ever been” as “magical, beautiful, perfect.” And as
she says to her friends in the pool shortly thereafter, “It’s like paradise
here.” Faith wants to “click it, freeze it and say it’ll stay this way forever;
… I’m serious ya’ll, it’s different here. I know we did a really bad thing
but I’m glad we did; … I feel better here.” The “really bad” thing Faith
is referring to here is the armed robbery of the chicken shack that Brit,
Candy and Cotty performed in order to procure the money to be able to
afford their spring break vacation – to make their dream a reality.
All the while hanging heavily over the revelry of the spring break
vacation is the sense that the girls already had a taste of the ultimate high,
higher than that of spring break itself, in holding up the chicken shack.
Later in the film, of course, once the girls hook up with Alien who bails
them out of jail after they were arrested when one of the spring break hotel
parties was broken up, it becomes clear that the high that Brit, Candy and
Cotty crave is in fact a criminal high that will surpass the earlier petty
robbery at the chicken shack that precipitated the spring break vacation.
Interestingly, once the girls hook up with Alien, Faith soon decides
to return home. Although it is she who perhaps most intensely craves a
limit experience (we could call it a religious experience), ultimately she
fears the level of deterritorialization that Alien represents and that his life
of crime would open up for her.
Suffice it to say that as it is defined by Spring Breakers, and not
unlike Žižek’s (2009a) conception of the Kantian law as the

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Vorstellungsrepräsentanz of diabolical evil, the notional behavioural limit

represented by the spring break vacation is ambivalently and conflictingly
both good and evil. This cognitive dissonance, or what Steven Shaviro
(2013) refers to as an “affective dissonance, ” is emphasized multiply in
the film but perhaps most emphatically in the music video-esque montage
of Cotty, Candy and Brit waltzing with machine guns while dressed
in bright pink face masks and colourful swimsuits crosscut with scenes
of them sadistically performing violent armed robberies with Alien, all set
to Britney Spears’ saccharine love song “Everytime.”4
Paralleling the film’s repeated insistence on such moments of affective
dissonance, the cinematography of Spring Breakers envisions the location
of the girls’ spring break at a limit of sorts. In so doing, the diegetic setting
of the film brilliantly echoes the thematic concerns of the film regarding
the question of a moral limit. This can be explicitly seen in the
repeated shots of the horizon that we see throughout the film, as well as
the frequent shots of the bridge that serves as the point of access to the
spring break destination: shots which emphasize the linearity of its
modern, yellow scaffolding. We pass across this bridge multiple times in
the course of the film, emphasizing its function as the boundary line of the
spring break location: first, as the girls arrive together on the Megabus and
then as each respectively leave – Faith in fear of Alien, then Cotty after she
is shot in a drive by, and finally, Candy and Brit after they avenge Alien by
killing his rival, Big Arch.
The bridge and St. Petersburg are both filmed in a largely anonymous
way throughout Spring Breakers as if to suggest that the particular location
is less important than the sense that the destination is beyond the coast, at
a limit point as such. Likewise, the location of the final shoot out at Big
Arch’s property is located at a similar limit point, only accessible from an
oceanfront pier, which the girls and Alien take a speedboat to get to. Once
they arrive on the pier, which is lit abstractly in a bright, florescent pink
neon to further emphasize its linearity, Alien is almost immediately

4. In a lecture given at the Post-Cinematic Perspectives Conference in November 2013 and

later featured as an episode of the Cultural Technologies podcast, Shaviro identifies
Spring Breakers as a recent example of post-continuity cinema, paying particular
attention to the affective dissonances created by the film’s paradoxical imagery as well
as its “ post-ironic ” mode. In an unpublished essay, Steen Christiansen similarly notes
that Spring Breakers is “ primarily made up of contrasts and tensions ” (p. 2). Spring
Breakers’ insistence on the coexistence of paradoxical affective states, as observed by
Shaviro and Christiansen, is I think made more explicable given the film’s engagement
with the schizophrenia of capitalism and in relation to Kant’s radical refashioning of the
law.

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gunned down by one of Big Arch’s crew, yet Candy and Brit continue
unconcerned onto the property intent on killing Big Arch as planned.
After they successfully do, and in the film’s final shot, we see Candy
and Brit again crossing the St. Petersburg bridge under its signature
yellow scaffolding, each in a kind of affectless state seemingly typical
of exhausted girls leaving a debauched spring break vacation but which
is nonetheless jarring given that they are leaving a murder scene. Here, in
the film’s final scene, Candy and Brit leave St. Pete’s to presumably return
to their college town to be the good girls they had earlier told their
mothers on the phone they would be. The only souvenir they have with
them to suggest that this spring break was not wholly ordinary is Big
Arch’s Lamborghini sports car that they drive off in.
Considering the plot of Spring Breakers and in light of Deleuze’s
Spinozan-informed principles of an immanent ethics – amplification,
intensification, elevation of power, increase in dimension, gain in
distinction – it should be clear that in spite of the evil nature of many of
the acts we see performed by the four girls in Spring Breakers, they fulfil
the conditions of Deleuze’s immanent ethics. In other words, in disregard
for any other conception of the moral law, they increase their desiring
production and their power, going to the limit of what they can do.
Deleuze’s ethics thus seem to lack a degree of reciprocity between subjects
such as that supposedly guaranteed by Kant’s categorical imperative.
Indeed, as Daniel Smith (2012b) argues, Deleuze even allowed that the
means of evaluating an immanent form of ethics is problematic. Deleuze’s
solution to this seeming impasse was to be found in the faculty of
judgment:
A mode of existence can be evaluated apart from transcendental or universal
values by the purely immanent criteria of its power or capacity (puissance):
that is, by the manner in which it actively deploys its power by going to the
limit of what it can do (or, on the contrary, by the manner in which it is
reduced to powerlessness. (Smith, 2012b, pp. 147–148)

Here Smith seems to imply that the actions of our spring breakers could be
deemed unethical, given the fact that in order to go to their limit, they
commit horrific crimes. Elsewhere, however, Deleuzian ethics seem to
lack any dimension of evaluation such as when he states, for example,
that: “there are never any criteria other than the tenor of existence, the
intensification of life” (Deleuze et al, 1996, p.74). The moral ambivalence
of Deleuze’s immanent ethics is arguably the direct result of the
tautological conception of the Kantian law. In other words, in the
wake of Kant’s formulation of the law, morality and ethics become
irreversibly severed.

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As both Deleuze and Lacan suggest in their analyses of Kant with Sade,
however, Kant’s conception of the law may be arguably less ambivalent than
it is inherently unbalanced: granting the sadistic law an unlimited “right to
jouissance, ” in Lacan’s words, in exchange for the infinite guilt of its
subjects (2007, p. 649). It is in their interpretation of Sade’s response
to Kant, however, that Lacan and Deleuze differ. Whereas Lacan sees
Sade’s conception of sadism as ultimately reproducing the unbalanced
logic of the Kantian categorical imperative only in terms of evil rather than
good, Deleuze argues instead that Sade privileges amorality as a form of
protest against the law. As Deleuze (1991) argues, “true sovereignty” can
only be “found in anarchic institutions of perpetual motion and permanent
revolution […]. The law can only be transcended by virtue of a principle
that subverts it and denies its power” (p. 75). It is interesting to consider
then how Žižek’s own investment in revolution or anarchy as the only form
of legitimate political protest aligns with Deleuze’s thought here. The
protagonists of Spring Breakers could be interpreted to fulfil the conditions
of anarchy exactly as Deleuze describes them but yet the question remains:
what is the content of the law against which they protest?
If Kant and Sade have both shown that the law is ultimately only an empty
form, if as Lacan would later argue there is no other of the other, then what
exactly do our spring breakers rail against? In light of the empty form of
the Kantian law, Žižek argues that Lacan saw an opportunity to advance
a theory of the law as pure desire defined outside of pathological
considerations (1998). In response to this, we might argue that while
in the Kantian formation the moral law represses diabolical evil, for
contemporary neoliberal subjects, and as Deleuze and Guattari would seem
to agree, capitalism itself now functions as the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz of
pure desire. As Žižek (2003) states, “capital is the ‘concrete universal’ of
our historical epoch. What this means is that, while it remains a particular
formation, it overdetermines all alternative formations, as well as all
noneconomic strata of social life” (p. 185). Indeed, given that Žižek’s
description of capital eerily echoes Kant’s description of the law, should
the anarchic crime sprees depicted in Spring Breakers (and from an
Anti-Oedipal perspective) then be considered legitimate, even ethical
attempts to free the real of desire from its repression under capitalism? It is
here that we perhaps should put Žižek’s own Lacanian-Hegelian ethics of
radical negativity equally to the test. Does the Hegelian-inspired principle
of radical negativity bring us to any alternative place from which to act
other than the anarchic one depicted in Spring Breakers?
As a good Lacanian, Žižek reminds his readers often that both
the subject and the Big Other – that is the law – are at bottom lacking.
What type of ethics then is available to this destituted subject? Ultimately,

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the Žižekian ethical principle of radical negativity seems just as much

implicated in Spring Breakers as the Deleuzian ethics of desiring
production. This is evident, for example, in the frequent images of the
girls pretending to shoot themselves in the head, either by making
the gesture of a gun shooting off with their hands, or with water guns,
and perhaps most especially in the scene of Candy and Brit forcing Alien
to suck on the barrels of two loaded guns as a form of sexual foreplay.
These girls do not fear death in the least, and in that way they are in fact
reminiscent of Antigone, Lacan’s model for the analysand.
Deleuze’s own indebtedness to Lacan may in fact become clearer in
light of viewing Spring Breakers. In other words, Deleuze’s imperative to
pursue your desiring production, to go to the limit of your power relative
to others, seems almost to follow as a logical consequence of Lacan’s
concepts of subjective destitution and the law of pure desire. That is, if the
subject does not stand to gain anything in the face of the Big Other, what
likewise does she have to lose? She may as well like Korine’s Candy, Brit
and Cotty, enjoy the surplus value of a thoroughly solipsistic desiring
production while she can. Admittedly, neither Lacan nor Deleuze
intended such a nihilistic interpretation of their theories. Rather, Lacan
often emphasized the value of the super-egoic jouissance produced in
following the law, while Deleuze intended his theory of desiring
production as a critical revelation as to the logic of capitalism that
could thereby perhaps undermine it. At the same time, however, Spring
Breakers could be said to represent the most radical consequences of
adherence to either a Žižekian or Deleuzian ethics. In both cases, the
fantasy of a transcendent conception of the law has been traversed and the
consequences are equally dire.
Or are they? Might we instead consider Spring Breakers a heroic, or
even a utopian tale? Frederic Jameson (2007) has argued that dystopian
narratives such as those preferred in post-apocalyptic science fiction can
in fact be viewed as representations of utopia in that they allow us to
imagine an alternative to late capitalism. After all, as Jameson and Žižek
have both famously stated, for the neoliberal subject, it is easier to think
the end of the world than it is to think the end of capitalism, which is
another way of saying that it would take nothing short of an apocalypse to
disrupt the smooth operations of global capitalism. While on one level
then, we might view Spring Breakers as a representation of a nightmarish
subjective embodiment of the ruthless logic of late global capitalism,
perhaps on another level we should view it as a utopian narrative of
vengeance against capitalism.
In order to see the film in this more principled light, we have to
consider the male protagonist of the film, the drug dealer Alien, who

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arguably functions most clearly as a personification of the logic of late

capitalism, and specifically his death in the final shoot out of the film.
Alien’s function as a personification of the logic of capital is literally
suggested in his appearance: more specifically, by the $ tattoo he has on
his neck and the grill of gold covering his front teeth. But also and perhaps
more importantly, his sympathy with capitalism’s surplus logic is baldly
revealed in the longest speech in the film in which Alien rejoices in
the sheer proliferation of his possessions: “Money… That’s the American
dream. This was my dream, and I made it all come true! This is my dream
ya’ll… Look at all this shit! …All this shit! … I got rooms of this shit!” What
Alien emphasizes and what excited him is the proliferation, the pure
surplus of the commodity items in his possession, which he enumerates
in the plural: shorts, bullets, Scarface on repeat, colognes, Franklins,
nunchucks, blades, machine guns, et cetera. At the same time, and recalling
the alienation inherent to capitalism, Alien also personifies the Lacanian
conception of the barred subject – in fact, the $ tattoo branded on his
neck eerily resembles Lacan’s symbol for the lacking subject, S-barred.
The anonymous, lacking subject advanced by Lacanian psychoanalysis
seems in fact the ideal consumer of the capitalist logic of the surplus. This,
of course, is one of the primary aspects of psychoanalysis – its seeming
synchronicity with capitalist logic – that leads Deleuze and Guattari (2009)
to critique it as an institution of micro-fascism.
Although Candy and Brit, the last of the four girls remaining by Spring
Breakers’ end, are indeed excited and attracted to Alien and his wealth, they
break free from him once he is killed in the film’s final shoot out in which
the girls also kill his nemesis and paternalistic-capitalist doppelganger, the
gangster, Big Arch. With the deaths of both of these hetero-patriarchal
personifications of capital at the end of Spring Breakers, a fragment of hope
may be born. As a feminine alternative to the masculine logic of global
capitalism, Candy and Brit ride off into the sunset together no longer under
Alien’s yoke. But is this truly an alternative? The fact that Candy and Brit
keep Big Arch’s Lamborghini as a souvenir of their spring break
debauchery – and the sports car being perhaps the status symbol of the
capitalist – makes the ending of the film somewhat ambivalent.
As Deleuze and Guattari argue in Anti-Oedipus (2009), the question of
the absolute limit of deterritorialization is also always already being
reterritorialized as the relative limit of global capitalism. Along these lines
one can wryly imagine, after their ruthless training under drug dealer
Alien, Candy and Brit returning to college and declaring their majors in
finance capital, a narrative projection that might return us to Žižek’s
critique of Deleuze. While we can all agree that Deleuze was right to draw
our attention to the real existence of affect and the real effects that it has

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on the social, rather than functioning as a legitimate avenue of resistance,

is our newly won awareness of affect and molecular desiring production
nothing more than a symptom of late global capitalism itself? As Žižek
(2003) argues:

As Lacan pointed out apropos of his deployment of the structural homology

between surplus value and surplus-enjoyment, what if the surplus value
does not simply ‘ hijack ’ a preexisting relational field of affects – what
if what appears as an obstacle is effectively a positive condition of
possibility, the element that triggers and propels the explosion of affective
productivity? (p. 185)

Žižek’s observation begs the question if, whether as a means of overcoming

the horizon of late global capitalism, we might need be willing to sacrifice
the molecular level of desiring production and the free circulation and
surplus enjoyment of affect? Theoretically, Žižek would argue that we
should and must be willing to sacrifice our desiring production, which
in Lacanian terms would mean to traverse our fantasy. Although, whether
or not Lacan himself would have endorsed the revocation of desire may
be up for debate given his advancement in the seventh seminar of a theory
of the law of pure desire. Žižek’s own endorsement of fascism as an
alternative to capitalist democracy, though problematic, is nonetheless
suggestive of such a sacrifice. Perhaps such a sacrifice of our desiring
production is what we should interpret the girls of Spring Breakers to have
performed by the film’s end when, in a gesture of what Deleuze might
have called micro-fascism, all four of them sacrifice the deterritorialization,
the free circulation of affect that the spring break vacation had made
available for them, and willingly return to the pursuit of their moral
education at the university. In this case, however, Big Arch’s Lamborghini
functions as their sinthome, the remainder of capitalism that they are not
willing to depart with – what is in them more than them as Lacan might
have said. According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, the sinthome is the
symptom that the analysand clings to even after traversing the fantasy. Like
a final glimpse of the killer after the seemingly happy ending of a horror
film, it is the lingering presence of Big Arch’s Lamborghini, as the ultimate
sinthome of Spring Breakers, which suggests that the real of capitalism will
continue to haunt us.5

5. Lacan developed the concept of the sinthome most fully in seminar XXIII. Žižek
provides a wonderful elucidation of the concept of the sinthome in the second chapter
of The Sublime Object of Ideology (2009b, pp. 57–92).

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Radical Moderation or, The Ethics of Theory as Practice

I have considered the relative (de)merits of a Žižekian ethics of radical
negativity and a Deleuzian ethics of desiring production in terms of an
analysis of Harmony Korine’s recent ethically ambiguous film Spring
Breakers. The inspiration for this project is Žižek’s 2003 book Organs
without Bodies, which advances a consideration, and ultimately more of a
condemnation, of Deleuze’s more affirmative conception of the subject in
comparison to Žižek’s own Lacanian-Hegelian notion of the subject as a
radical negativity or lack. In considering Deleuze and Žižek’s ethical and
theoretical principle side-by-side and in terms of the analysis of a specific
and neutral aesthetic object, this article has shown that neither can be said
to offer an ethical solution for the subject in the face of the real of global
capital. In the wake of Kant’s reconfiguration of the law away from the
transcendent principle of “The Good,” in his exposure of the law as an
empty form, it seems no absolute limit remains to counteract the relative
limit of capitalism, and thus in the context of late global neoliberalism, the
opportunities for the emancipation of the subject are questionable at best.
The ending of Spring Breakers, which implies Candy and Brit will return
to campus, leaving the absolute lawless affectivity of their vacation
behind them, seemingly suggests moderation as a possible solution. This is
perhaps similar to Steven Shaviro’s observation that one form of protest
against capitalism is the pursuit of an ethics of “self-cultivation ”:

Self-cultivation […] contradicts our modern (and post-modern)

assumptions about the infinitude of desire. For the last century or more
we have tended to prefer an aesthetic of the sublime to one of the beautiful;
or in Roland Barthes terms, we have tended to prefer the radical convulsions
of orgasmic bliss (jouissance) to the easier satisfactions of mere pleasure
(plaisir). The latter terms in both of these binaries seem complacent and
quaint; they are too conservative, and too limited, to match our voracious
consumerism, our aggressive boosterism, and our impulses toward rebellion
and absolute negation […]. But these are precisely the assumptions that
condemn us to suffer from imposed scarcity even in the midst of plenty.
[…] In contrast to this vision of infinite desire, aesthetic self-cultivation
always has limited aims. It makes do with the finite and the transitory
(Shaviro, 2015, pp. 51–52).

As opposed to either the Deleuzian pole (rebellion) or the Žižekian pole

(negation), Shaviro proposes a moderate middle ground in the life of
self-cultivation. And perhaps it is here where Žižek might find himself
surprisingly on common ground with Deleuze. Although they may both
endorse anarchy and revolution in theory, as academic theorists, Deleuze
and Žižek have led the aesthetic life of self-cultivation par excellence.

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Channelling Foucault, Calvin Thomas (2013) has argued, that as a

“practice of creativity, ” theoretical writing should itself be viewed as
perhaps the most sublime of revolutionary acts (pp. xii and 274). On this
moderate note, I will close this article: hopeful that within the vanishing
mediator of writing as revolution, a sublation of Deleuze and Žižek – and
the thinking of an outside to capitalism – are yet possible.

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