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.