Enjoyment and the Effect of Linguistic Sense

From “De Maistre Avec de Sade: Zizek Contra

De Maistre”

IJŽS Vol 1.4 - Matthew Sharpe: Deakin University, Australia.

see original article at http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/viewFile/74/135

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The pivot of Žižek’s theory of political ideology is a series of claims Žižek makes on the basis of Lacan’s development of the category of the Real in and after Seminar VII (1959-1960). If we are to understand the logics of political ideologies, and the source of their power to ‘interpellate’ or name individuals, we need to understand the role of the Real of Jouissance. This underlies the symbolic register of power which we have been focusing on here up to now: which is the basis of Žižek’s criticisms of Derrida, Laclau and Mouffe. Žižek’s central, related concepts of ideological fantasy, the disidentification of subjects with ideologies, and the ‘inherent transgressions’ which allow subjects the (false) semblance of political independence all turn on his Lacanian account of the relations between the symbolic and the Real. They also underlie Žižek’s most incisive cultural analyses, including his justly celebrated critique of the faux political cynicism of late capitalist subjects about public authority. [see endnote 2]

Based in Žižek’s confessedly ‘dogmatic’ reliance on Lacan, one great boon of his political interpretations is the depth at which they are grounded, in terms of a fundamental ontology of subjectivity and its relations to language. As The Sublime Object of Ideology lays out in its central chapter, the basic logics at work in ideological interpellation, for Žižek, are grounded in the ‘quilting’ operation at play in the production of sense in language. For Lacanian theory, a signifier’s sense or ‘signified’ only becomes clear, retrospectively, at the end of an utterance. At this point, the entire sentence(s) is ‘quilted’ or ‘tied’ to the big Other of accepted linguistic meanings. Before such time, the signifiers are ‘floating’, indeterminate, and open—as we must add—to the telltale interruptions of the unconscious in ‘slips.’ [see endnote 3] What Žižek stresses, pointing to the top half of Lacan’s famous ‘bottle opener’ diagram developed in Seminar V, is the undergirding role of Jouissance in the quilting of linguistic sense. (Žižek, 1989: ch. 3) For ‘quilting’ to be successful, and the effect of sense to be generated, Žižek argues that subjects must suppose that language has touched a ‘little piece of the Real.’

endnote 2:

As Žižek contends in ‘I Hear You With My Eyes’: “A cynic mocks public law from the position of an obscene underside which, consequently, he leaves intact … Cynical distance and full reliance on [ideological fantasy about the Jouissance of the Other] are thus strictly correlative: the typical subject today is the one who, while displacing cynical distrust of any public ideology, indulges without restraint in paranoiac fantasies about conspiracies, threats and excessive forms of enjoyment of the other …” (Žižek, 1999: 101)

endnote 3:

Of course, this exigency is what makes reading convoluted sentences in student essays such a chore—one never knows where the student is heading to, and sometimes your expectations that they will arrive at sense are disappointed.

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