Thursday, February 11, 2010

The Plague of Fantasies (29)

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

pp. 150-151: The supreme example of symbolic virtuality, of course, is that of (the psychoanalytic notion of) castration: the feature which distinguishes symbolic castration from the 'real' kind is precisely its virtual character. That is to say: Freud's notion of castration anxiety has any meaning at all only if we suppose that the threat of castration (the prospect of castration, the 'virtual' castration) already produces real 'castrating' effects. This actuality of the virtual, which defines symbolic castration as opposed to the 'real' kind, has to be connected to the basic paradox of power, which is that symbolic power is by definition virtual, power-in-reserve, the threat of its full use which never actually occurs (when a father loses his temper and explodes, this is by definition a sign of his impotence, painful as it may be). The consequence of this conflation of actual with virtual is a kind of transubstantiation: every actual activity appears as a 'form of appearance' of another 'invisible' power whose status is purely virtual--the 'real' penis turns into the form of appearance of (the virtual) phallus, and so on. That is the paradox of castration: whatever I do in reality, with my 'real' penis, is just redoubling, following as a shadow, another virtual penis whose existence is purely symbolic--that is, phallus as a signifier. Let us recall the example of a judge who, in 'real life', is a weak and corrupt person, but the moment he puts on the insignia of his symbolic mandate, it is the big Other of the symbolic institution which is speaking through him: without the prosthesis of his symbolic title, his 'real power' would instantly disintegrate. And Lacan's point apropos of the phallus as signifier is that the same 'institutional' logic is at work already in the more intimate domain of male sexuality: just as a judge needs his symbolic crutches, his insignia, in order to exert his authority, a man needs a reference to the absent-virtual Phallus if his penis is to exert its potency.

p. 153: The decline of this function of the Master in contemporary Western societies exposes the subject to radical ambiguity in the face of his desire. The media constantly bombard him with requests to choose, addressing him as the subject supposed to know what he really wants (which book, clothes, TV programme, holiday destination...) [....] At a more fundamental level, however, the new media deprive the subject radically of the knowledge of what he wants: they address a thoroughly malleable subject who has constantly to be told what he wants--that is, the very evocation of a choice to be made performatively creates the need for the object of choice. One should bear in mind here that the main function of the Master is to tell the subject what he wants--the need for the Master arises in answer to the subject's confusion, in so far as he does not know what he wants. What happens, then, in the situation of the decline of the Master, when the subject himself is constantly bombarded with the request to give a sign of what he wants? The exact opposite of what one would expect: it is when there is no one to tell you what you really want, when all the burden of the choice is on you, that the big Other dominates you completely, and the choice effectively disappears--is replaced by its mere semblance. One is again tempted to paraphrase here Lacan's well-known reversal of Dostoevsky ('If there is no God, nothing at all is Permitted'): if no forced choice confines the field of free choice, the very freedom of choice disappears.

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