Some Other Group Threatens Our Enjoyment!

From Sarah Kay’s Žižek: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press), p. 138:

Žižek's theme of the 'theft of enjoyment' reworks Hegel's dialectic of lord and bondsman (Phenomenology, subsections178-196), exploring its implications for the contemporary political scene, especially racism and nationalism. A thoroughgoing instance of such analysis is the final chapter of Tarrying with the Negative.

This examines how political identifications involve 'a shared relationship toward a Thing, toward Enjoyment incarnated' (Tarrying, p. 201). What we call a 'way of life' is the way a 'community' bases itself on the organization of enjoyment. National feeling arises from a common reference to enjoyment (such as festivals), and national tensions from fear that some other group threatens this enjoyment, or has a perverse relationship to it. Animosity towards other racial groups often concentrates on what they eat, or the smell of their food, or the way they themselves smell. The disgust which such things arouse is itself a form of enjoyment, the surplus enjoyment that arises from the conviction that these groups indulge in excessive enjoyments of a kind which we ourselves have renounced (Tarrying, p. 206). Totalitarian regimes make use of racial minorities as a kind of 'shock-absorber': if all the disgust of enjoyment can be projected onto, and borne by, another group, this helps to preserve the balance of the pleasure principle for the rest. Capitalist regimes are likewise eager to off-load their inherent imbalance and excess on to a racial Other, since this enables them to fantasize themselves as 'communities' rather than as impersonal 'societies' (Tarrying, pp. 209-211). White liberal intellectuals are no more comfortable than racists with other people's enjoyment. They may be 'tolerant' of black community politics, but not of white rednecks (Tarrying, pp. 213-214). Thus they merely reshuffle the cards, but keep the same deck. What is needed is not to embrace some alternative fantasy of enjoyment, but to gain a purchase on the structure which gives rise to fantasies of enjoyment in the first place.