Sunday, February 7, 2010

The Plague of Fantasies (23)

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

The object which gives body to this surplus-enjoyment fascinates the subject, it reduces him to a passive gaze impotently gaping at the object; this relationship, of course, is experienced by the subject as something shameful, unworthy. Being directly transfixed by the object, passively submitting to its power of fascination, is ultimately unbearable: the open display of the passive attitude of 'enjoying it' somehow deprives the subject of his dignity. Interpassivity is therefore to be conceived as the primordial form of the subject's defence against jouissance: I defer jouissance to the Other who passively endures it (laughs, suffers, enjoys...) on my behalf. In this precise sense, the effect of the subject supposed to enjoy--the gesture of transposing one's jouissance to the Other--is perhaps even more primordial than that of the 'subject supposed to know', or the 'subject supposed to believe'. Therein lies the libidinal strategy of a pervert who assumes the position of the pure instrument of the Other's jouissance: for the (male) pervert, the sexual act (coitus) involves a clear division of labour in which he reduces himself to a pure tool of woman's enjoyment; he is doing the hard work, accomplishing the active gestures, while she, in transports of ecstasy, endures it passively and stares into space....In the course of the psychoanalytic treatment, the subject has to learn to accept directly his relationship to the object which gives body to his jouissance, bypassing the proxy who enjoys in his place, instead of him. The disavowed fundamental passivity of my being is structured in the fundamental fantasy which, although it is a priori inaccessible to me, regulates the way I relate to jouissance. For that precise reason, it is impossible for the subject to assume his fundamental fantasy without undergoing the radical experience of 'subjective destitution': in assuming my fundamental fantasy, I take upon myself the passive kernel of my being--the kernel the distance towards which sustains my subjective activity.

The substitution of the object for the subject is thus in a way even more primordial than the substitution of the signifier for the subject: if the signifier is the form of 'being active through another', the object is the form of 'being passive through another'--that is to say, the object is primordially that which suffers, endures it, for me, in my place: in short, that which enjoys for me. So what is unbearable in my encounter with the object is that in it, I see myself in the guise of a suffering object: what reduces me to a fascinated passive observer is the scene of myself passively enduring it. Far from being an excessive phenomenon which occurs only in extreme 'pathological' situations, interpassivity, in its opposition to interactivity (not in the standard sense of interacting with the medium, but in the sense of another doing it for me, in my place), is thus the feature which defines the most elementary level, the necessary minimum, of subjectivity: in order to be an active subject, I have to get rid of--and transpose on to the other--the inert passivity which contains the density of my substantial being. In this precise sense, the opposition signifier/object overlaps with the opposition interactivity/interpassivity: the signifier is interactive, it is active on my behalf, in my place, while the object is interpassive, it suffers for me. Transposing my very passive experience on to another is a much more uncanny phenomenon than that of being active through another: in interpassivity I am decentred in a much more radical way than I am in interactivity, since interpassivity deprives me of the very kernel of my substantial identity.

Consequently, the basic matrix of interpassivity follows from the very notion of subject as the pure activity of (self)positing, as the fluidity of pure Becoming, devoid of any positive, firm Being: if I am to function as pure activity, I have to externalize my (passive) Being--in short: I have to be passive through another. This inert object which 'is' my Being, in which my inert Being is externalized, is the Lacanian objet petit a. In so far as the elementary, constitutive structure of subjectivity is hysterical--in so far, that is, as hysteria is defined by the question 'What for an object am I (in the eyes of the Other, for the Other's desire)?', it confronts us with interpassivity at its purest: what the hysterical subject is unable to accept, what gives rise to an unbearable anxiety in him, is the presentiment that the Other(s) perceive him in the passivity of his Being, as an object to be exchanged, enjoyed or otherwise 'manipulated'. Therein lies the 'ontological axiom' of Lacanian subjectivity: the more I am active, the more I must be passive in another's place--that is to say, the more there must be another object which is passive in my place, on my behalf. (This axiom is realized in its utmost simplicity in the proverbial senior manager who, from time to time, feels compelled to visit prostitutes to be exposed to masochistic rituals and 'treated as a mere object'.) What psychoanalysis is looking for in an active subject is precisely the fundamental fantasy which sustains his disavowed passivity.

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