On The Metastases of Enjoyment

In his book The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994, 2005), Žižek argues that nationalistic mobilizations involve an illusion produced by the element of fantasy at work in ideology. Žižek claims that the cause of the West’s failure to end the suffering in Sarajevo during the Bosnian conflict was the enjoyment provided by the fantasy image of ‘the Balkan victim’. The Metastases of Enjoyment (abbreviated Metastases below), builds on Žižek’s previous works by tracing the workings of enjoyment as a political factor.

“Enjoyment” is Žižek’s translation of the Lacanian term jouissance. In order to understand Žižek, it is crucial to keep in mind that enjoyment is not pleasure: enjoyment is the aim of the drives and as such, it is something of which the subject is unaware. As the obscene underside of symbolic institutions, enjoyment manifests as an odd fascination accompanied by pain, disgust, or even horror.

In Metastases, Žižek argues that Western intervention was inadequate because of our unconscious desire to maintain the ideologically-charged image of the helpless victim, reduced to the level of animal suffering:

[...] “the West provided just enough humanitarian aid for the city to survive, exerted just enough pressure on the Serbs to prevent them from occupying the city; yet this pressure was not strong enough to break the siege and allow the city to breathe freely—as if the unavowed desire was to preserve Sarajevo in a kind of atemporal freeze, between the two deaths, in the guise of a living dead, a victim eternalized in its suffering.” (Metastases, p. 213)

In sum, Right-wing power (and the masculine logic that underlies it) is held in place by an obscene, fantasmatic underside. Beneath the public law, the superego functions as the injunction to enjoy, to adopt the mantle of the mythical, primordial father of unbridled jouissance. It is this obscene “nightly law”—as the injunction to transgress—that sustains the triumph of liberal, global capitalism. Nationalistic mobilizations, and all political identifications, involve a relationship toward a fantasmatic Thing, which represents the incarnation of enjoyment. Racial tensions result from imagining that some other group threatens our enjoyment, or has a privileged relationship to enjoyment.

In Metastases, Žižek shows that the illusion of community in global, multicultural capitalism is sustained by racist fantasy. In spite of our alleged “freedom”, we cynical, postmodern subjects—finding ourselves overwhelmed by the injunction to transgress and the burden of choosing every aspect of our very existence—compensate for the decline in symbolic efficacy by voluntarily subjecting ourselves to ever new forms of constraint: in short, we demand that the other act on our behalf. Instead of recognizing that Capital itself is the ultimate power of deterritorialization, we blame the loss of symbolic efficacy on some ethnic other.

This is why the resigned and cynical, “depoliticized” subject of late capitalism views anyone with political principles as a dangerous fanatic. Moreover, the worldwide triumph of liberal democracy has led to the development of a new ideological formation, namely, the universalization of the fantasy image of the helpless victim. Žižek writes:

“So the much-advertised liberal-democratic ‘right to difference’ and anti-Eurocentrism appear in their true light: the Third World other is recognized as a victim—that is to say, in so far as he is a victim. The true object of anxiety is the other no longer prepared to play the role of victim—such an other is promptly denounced as a ‘terrorist’, a ‘fundamentalist’, and so on. The Somalis, for example, undergo a true Kleinian splitting into a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ object—on the one hand the good object: passive victims, suffering starving children and women; on the other the bad object: fanatical warlords who care more for their power or their ideological goals than for the welfare of their own people. The good other dwells in the anonymous passive universality of a victim—the moment we encounter an actual/active other, there is always something with which to reproach him: being patriarchal, fanatical, intolerant....” (Metastases, p. 215)

In such ways, Žižek’s supports his provocative claim from the Introduction to Metastases—the claim that unconscious enjoyment was the cause of the West’s quavering indecision during the Bosnian war. It is the enjoyment provided by ideological formations—such as the fantasy image of the victim—that explains the failure of Western intervention in the Bosnian conflict.

Free Will or Determinism? (4)

From Žižek's The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), p. 20:

The emergence of Freedom means that Spirit has posited itself as such in opposition to its impenetrable-inert Ground, that it has acquired a distance towards its Ground and can now 'make free with it', and that the 'chain of being' is broken--that is to say, Spirit is no longer determined by the network of causality. Freedom is thus stricto sensu the moment of eternity--it stands for the suspension of the temporal chain of (sufficient) reasons-causes, for the leap from the enchainment [Verkettung] of finite, determinate entities into the abyss of their primordial origin, of the 'source of things'.

In the experience of freedom, in the vortex we perceive for a brief moment when we confront a groundless act of freedom, we 'rejoin the Absolute'--that is, we re-establish contact--our identity even--with the primordial origin outside temporal reality, with the abyss of eternity prior to the fall into the world of creatures. Man is directly linked to the Absolute in so far as he occupies a unique place among created things: what re-emerges in him (and in him only) is a 'possibility-potentiality of being [Seinskonnen]' which does not immediately collapse into actuality. Other actually existing entities do not relate to possibility as such; in them, a possibility is simply realized; man only relates to possibility as such--for him, a possibility is in a sense 'more' than actuality, as if the actualization-realization of a possibility somehow already 'betrays' or 'devalues' it. This opposition, of course, coincides with the opposition between necessity and freedom: an unfree entity simply is, it coincides with its positive actuality, whereas (as Schelling asserts, announcing thereby the existentialist problematic) a free being can never be reduced to what it is, to its actual, positive presence--its 'project', the undecidable opening of what it might do or become, its 'want-to-be', is the kernel of its very existence.

Free Will or Determinism? (3)

On p. 14 of The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), Žižek discusses "the fact of freedom." Here is a quotation from p. 16:

"The whole world is thoroughly caught in reason, but the question is : how did it get caught in the network of reason in the first place? Here Schelling inverts the standard perspective : the problem is not how, in an universe regulated by inexorable natural laws, freedom is possible--that is, where, in the determinist universe, there is a place for freedom which would not be a mere illusion based on our ignorance of the true causes--but, rather, how the world as a rational totality of causal interconnections made its appearance in the first place." [....] "For Schelling, then, the primordial, radically contingent fact, a fact which can in no way be accounted for, is freedom itself, a freedom bound by nothing, a freedom which, in a sense, is Nothing; and the problem is, rather, how this Nothing of the abyss of primordial freedom becomes entangled in the causal chains of reason."

The Real is a kind of "parallax gap", which shows itself in fundamental oppositions or antagonisms. For example: (1) Kant's phenomena (appearances, things for us) versus noumena (things in themselves, e.g. the freedom of the will); (2) the philosophical question about determinism versus freedom; (3) linear time (a causal sequence) versus the hermeneutic circle, i.e., interpretation based on memory and tradition; (4) a situation in which the cause determines the effect versus a situation in which the effect retroactively determines its own cause.

The "short circuit", or twist in the Moebius strip (i.e., the qualitative change that finally emerges out of quantitative developments in complexity) is when linear time "folds back on itself". A physically determined organism develops memory to the point of forming abstract concepts, or ideas (no longer just reflexes, instincts, etc). Après-coup is the way Lacan described this "psychoanalytic time" (i.e., interpretation of memories, past trauma).

It is only in these terms that we can understand Lacan's enigmatic remark that "a madman is the only free man". A psychotic is the subject that refuses the whole world that is thoroughly caught in reason. A psychotic refuses the forced choice of the Name of the Father. This means that the psychotic continues to dwell in the impossible opposite of symbolic identification; instead of accepting a place in the intersubjective space of the symbolic "big Other", the psychotic chooses instead to remain in what Schelling describes as the original abyss of Nothing, that is, the abyss of primordial freedom.

Free Will or Determinism? (2)

On p. 14 of The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), Žižek discusses "the fact of freedom." Here is a quotation from p. 16:

"The whole world is thoroughly caught in reason, but the question is : how did it get caught in the network of reason in the first place? Here Schelling inverts the standard perspective : the problem is not how, in an universe regulated by inexorable natural laws, freedom is possible--that is, where, in the determinist universe, there is a place for freedom which would not be a mere illusion based on our ignorance of the true causes--but, rather, how the world as a rational totality of causal interconnections made its appearance in the first place." [....] "For Schelling, then, the primordial, radically contingent fact, a fact which can in no way be accounted for, is freedom itself, a freedom bound by nothing, a freedom which, in a sense, is Nothing; and the problem is, rather, how this Nothing of the abyss of primordial freedom becomes entangled in the causal chains of reason."

The Real is a kind of "parallax gap", which shows itself in fundamental oppositions or antagonisms. For example: (1) Kant's phenomena (appearances, things for us) versus noumena (things in themselves, e.g. the freedom of the will); (2) the philosophical question about determinism versus freedom; (3) linear time (a causal sequence) versus the hermeneutic circle, i.e., interpretation based on memory and tradition; (4) a situation in which the cause determines the effect versus a situation in which the effect retroactively determines its own cause

The "short circuit", or twist in the Moebius strip (i.e., the qualitative change that finally emerges out of quantitative developments in complexity) is when linear time "folds back on itself". A physically determined organism develops memory to the point of forming abstract concepts, or ideas (no longer just reflexes, instincts, etc). Après-coup is the way Lacan described this "psychoanalytic time" (i.e., interpretation of memories, past trauma).