p. 138: This is one way to read Lacan's dictum 'Truth has the structure of a fiction': I can articulate the hidden truth about my drives precisely in so far as I am aware that I am simply playing a game on the screen. In cyberspace sex, there is no 'face-to-face', just the external impersonal space in which everything, including my most intimate internal fantasies, can be articulated with no inhibitions....What one encounters here, in this pure 'flux of desire', is, of course, the unpleasant surprise of what the Frankfurt School called 'repressive desublimation': the universe, freed of everyday inhibitions, turns out to be a universe of unbridled sadomasochistic violence and will to domination....The usual complaint against cybersex is that instead of the truly arousing and intensive encounter with another body, we get a distanced, technologically mediated procedure. However, is not precisely this gap, this distance towards immediate Erlebnis, which can also add sexual arousal to a sexual encounter? People use pornography (or other technical sex devices) not only when they lack 'flesh-and-blood' partners but also in order to 'spice up' their 'real' sex life. The status of sexual supplement is thus again radically ambiguous and 'undecidable': it can spoil the game, yet it can also intensify enjoyment.
p. 139: However, this ambiguity, although irreducible, is not symmetrical. What one should introduce here is the elementary Lacanian distinction between imaginary projection-identification and symbolic identification. The most concise definition of symbolic identification is that it consists in assuming a mask which is more real and binding than the true face beneath it [....]
p. 140: [....] what is this middle-mediating level, this third domain interposing itself between 'real life' and 'mere imagination', this domain in which we are not directly dealing with reality, but not with 'mere words' either (since our words do have real effects), if not the symbolic order itself?
p. 141: The subject who suffers from [multiple personality disorder] is rather too firmly anchored in 'true reality': what he lacks is, in a sense, lack itself: the void which accounts for the constitutive dimension of subjectivity. That is to say: the 'multiple Selves' [....] are 'what I want to be', the way I would like to see myself, the representations of my ideal ego; as such, they are like the layers of an onion: there is nothing in the middle, and the subject is this 'nothing' itself. It is therefore crucial to introduce here the distinction between 'Self' ('person') and subject: the Lacanian 'decentred subject' is not simply a multiplicity of good old 'Selves', partial centres; the 'divided' subject does not mean there are simply more Egos/Selves in the same individual [....]. The 'decentrment' is the decentrement of the $ (the void of the subject) with regard to its content ('Self', the bundle of imaginary and/or symbolic identifications); the 'splitting' is the splitting between $ and the phantasmic 'persona' as the 'stuff of the I'. The subject is split even if it possesses only one 'unified' Self, since this split is the very split between $ and Self....In more topological terms: the subject's division is not the division between one Self and another, between two contents, but the division between something and nothing, between the feature of identification and the void.
'Decentrement' thus first designates the ambiguity, the oscillation between symbolic and imaginary identification--the undecidability as to where my true point is, in my 'real' self or in my external mask, with the possible implication that my symbolic mask can be 'more true' than what it conceals, the 'true face' behind it. At a more radical level, it points towards the fact that the very sliding from one identification to another, or among 'multiple selves', presupposes the gap between identification as such and the void of $ (the 'barred subject') which identifies itself--serves as the empty medium of identification. In other words, the very process of shifting among multiple identifications presupposes a kind of empty band which makes the leap from one identity to another possible, and this empty band is the subject itself.
p. 142: [....] Lacan's point is that ego itself is always-already 'alter' with regard to the subject whose ego it is. For that reason, the subject entertains towards it the relationship of acceptance-through-disavowal [....]
p. 143: One can thus say that the phallus is the [....] point at which the very gap that separates the series of mental causes from the series of bodily causes is inscribed into our body....
p. 144: [....] there is no reality without its phantasmic support: social reality [....] can occur only if it is supported by (at least) two fantasies, two phantasmic scenarios.
p. 148: [....] you can have it all only if you pass through the 'zero point,' and agree to lose it all [....] a suicidal moment has to occur in which the hero casts off the fake position and assumes an authentic position. [....] the subject occupies, fills in, the empty place in some pre-existing symbolic network [....] gradually identifies with this symbolic place and fully assumes it, up to the point where he is prepared to stake his life on it.
This line of development is properly materialist: it accounts for the process in the course of which what was at the outset a manipulated movement with a faked Leader can outgrow its initial conditions and turn into an authentic movement. That is to say: much more interesting than the idealist narrative of gradually corrupted innocence is the opposite story: since we all live within ideology, the true enigma is how we can outgrow our 'corrupted' initial condition--how something which was planned as ideological manipulation can all of a sudden miraculously start to lead an authentic life of its own.
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