Saturday, January 23, 2010

The Plague of Fantasies (11)

From Slavoj Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997)

pp. 30-31: Once we move beyond desire, that is to say, beyond the fantasy which sustains desire--we enter the strange domain of drive: the domain of the closed circular palpitation which finds satisfaction in endlessly repeating the same failed gesture.

Drive's 'eternal return of the same'

The Freudian drive is thus another name for the radical ontological closure. Does not Nietzsche's famous 'Drunken Song' from the Fourth Part of Zarathustra ('The world is deep, / And deeper than the day could read. / Deep is its woe-- / Joy--deeper still than grief can be: / Woe says: Hence! Go! / But joys all want eternity-- / Want deep, profound eternity!') express perfectly the excessive pleasure-in-pain at which late Lacan aims in his rehabilitation of drive? This Nietzschean 'eternity' is to be opposed to being-towards-death: it is the eternity of drive against the finitude of desire. The 'Yes!' of the 'eternal return of the same' thus aims at the same thing as Lacan's 'Encore!' ('More!'--Nietzsche himself says in the preceding paragraph that 'the name of / this song / is "Once more"'), which is to be read (also) as an evocation of the proverbial woman's 'More!' during the sexual act--it stands for more of the same, for the full acceptance of the pain itself as inherent to the excess of pleasure which is jouissance. The 'eternal return of the same' thus no longer involves the Will to Power (at least, not in the standard sense of the term): rather, it indexes the attitude of actively endorsing the passive confrontation with objet petit a, bypassing the intermediate role of the screen of fantasy. In this precise sense, the 'eternal return of the same' stands for the moment when the subject 'traverses the fantasy'.

According to the doxa, fantasy stands for the moment of closure: fantasy is the screen by means of which the subject avoids the radical opening of the enigma of the Other's desire--is 'traversing the fantasy' not therefore synonymous with confronting the opening, the abyss of the Other's impenetrable desire? What, however, if things are exactly inverted? What if it is fantasy itself which, in so far as it fills in the void of the Other's desire, sustains the (false) opening--the notion that there is some radical Otherness which makes our universe incomplete? And, consequently, what if 'traversing the fantasy' involves the acceptance of a radical ontological closure? The unbearable aspect of the 'eternal return of the same'--the Nietschean name for the crucial dimension of drive--is the radical closure this notion implies: to endorse and fully assume the 'eternal return of the same' means that we renounce every opening, every belief in the messianic Otherness--here late Lacan parts with the 'deconstructionist' notion of spectrality [....] The point is thus to oppose the radical closure of the 'eternal' drive to the opening involved in the finitude/temporality of the desiring subject.

This closure of drive, of course, is not to be confused with the domain of pre-symbolic animal bodily instincts; crucial here is the basic and constitutive discord between drive and body: drive as eternal-'undead' disrupts the instinctual rhythm of the body. For that reason, drive as such is death drive: it stands for an unconditional impetus which disregards the proper needs of the living body and simply battens on it. It is as if some part of the body, an organ, is sublimated, torn out of its bodily context, elevated to the dignity of the Thing and thus caught in an infinitely repetitive cycle, endlessly circulating around the void of its structuring impossibility. It is thus as if we are not fit to fit our bodies: drive demands another, 'undead' body.

p. 32: The problem with Nietsche, perhaps, is that in his praise of the body, he downplays--disregards, even--this absolute gap between the organic body and the mad eternal rhythm of drive to which its organs, 'partial objects', can be submitted. In this precise sense, drive can be said to be 'meta-physical': not in the sense of being beyond the domain of the physical, but in the sense of involving another materiality beyond (or, rather, beneath) the materiality located in (what we experience as) spatio-temporal reality. In other words, the primordial Other of our spatio-temporal bodily reality is not Spirit, but another 'sublime' materiality. [....] Let us recall the 'massiveness' of the protracted stains which 'are' yellow sky in late Van Gogh, or the water or grass in Munch: this uncanny 'massiveness' pertains neither to the direct materiality of the color stains nor to the materiality of the depicted objects [....] From the Lacanian perspective, it is easy to identify this 'spiritual corporeality' as materialized jouissance, 'jouissance turned into flesh'.

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