Sunday, January 24, 2010

The Plague of Fantasies (12)

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

pp. 32-35: Desire emerges when drive gets caught in the cobweb of Law/prohibition, in the vicious cycle in which 'jouissance must be refused, so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder of the Law of desire' (Lacan's definition of castration)--and fantasy is the narrative of this primordial loss, since it stages the process of this renunciation, the emergence of the Law. In this precise sense, fantasy is the very screen that separates desire from drive: it tells the story which allows the subject to (mis)perceive the void around which drive circulates as the primordial loss constitutive of desire. In other words, fantasy provides a rationale for the inherent deadlock of desire: it constructs the scene in which the jouissance we are deprived of is concentrated in the Other who stole it from us. [....] In 'traversing the fantasy', we find jouissance in the vicious cycle of circulating around the void of the (missing) object, renouncing the myth that jouissance has to be amassed somewhere else.

Hysteria provides the exemplary case of desire as a defence against jouissance: in contrast to the pervert who works incessantly to provide enjoyment to the Other, the neurotic-hysteric wants to be the object of the Other's desire, not the object of his enjoyment--she is well aware that the only way to remain desired is to postpone the satisfaction, the gratification of desire which would bring enjoyment. The hysteric's fear is that, in so far as she is the object of the Other's enjoyment, she is reduced to an instrument of the Other, exploited, manipulated by him; on the other hand, there is nothing a true pervert enjoys more than being an instrument of the Other, of his jouissance. [....] What the neurotic cannot stand is the idea that the Other is profiting from his sacrifice; he (typically the obsessional) is prepared to sacrifice everything on condition that the Other does not profit from it, that he does not amass the sacrificed jouissance, does not enjoy in his place. Through psychoanalytic treatment, the neurotic must be helped to stop blaming the Other (society, parents, church, spouse...) for his 'castration', and, consequently, to stop seeking retribution from the Other. (There, in the strategy of culpabilizing the Other, also resides the limitation of 'postmodern' identity politics, in which the deprived minority indulges in ressentiment by blaming, and seeking retribution from, the Other.) In the dialectic of Master and servant, the servant (mis)perceives the Master as amassing jouissance, and gets back (steals from the Master) little crumbs of jouissance; these small pleasures (the awareness that he can also manipullate the Master), silently tolerated by the Master, not only fail to present any threat to the Master but, in fact, constitute the 'libidinal bribery' which maintains the servant's servitude. In short, the satisfaction that he is able to dupe the Master is precisely what guarantees the servant's servitude to him.

Although both the neurotic and the pervert sacrifice enjoyment--although neither of the two is a psychotic directly immersed in jouissance--the economy of sacrifice is fundamentally different: a neurotic is traumatized by the other's jouissance (an obsessional neurotic, for example, works like mad all the time to prevent the Other from enjoying [....]) while a pervert posits himself as the object-instrument of the Other's jouissance; he sacrifices his jouissance to generate jouissance in the Other. [....]

The key point is thus to clearly delineate the specific intermediate status of perversion, between psychosis and neurosis, between the psychotic's foreclosure of the Law and the neurotic's integration into the Law. [....] in contrast to the neurotic, who acknowledges the Law in order occasionally to take enjoyment in its transgressions (masturbation, theft...), and thus obtains satisfaction by snatching back from the Other part of the stolen jouissance, the pervert directly elevates the enjoying big Other into the agency of Law. As we have already seen, the pervert's aim is to establish, not to undermine, the Law: the proverbial male masochist elevates his partner, the Dominatrix, into the Lawgiver whose orders are to be obeyed. A pervert fully acknowledges the obscene-jouissant underside of the Law, since he gains satisfaction from the very obscenity of the gesture of installing the rule of Law--that is, of 'castration'. In the 'normal' state of things, the symbolic Law prevents access to the (incestuous) object, and thus creates the desire for it; in perversion, it is the object itself (say, the Dominatrix in masochism) which makes the law. Here the theoretical concept of masochism as perversion touches the common notion of a masochist who 'enjoys being tortured by the Law': a masochist locates enjoyment in the very agency of Law which prohibits the access to enjoyment.

No comments:

Post a Comment