Fantasy

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 364:

One of Žižek's decisive innovations is to think the role of fantasy within ideology: it is arguably in this way that he moves beyond someone like Althusser. Fantasy is both that which covers up inconsistencies within the symbolic order and that by which ideological interpellation works today in our seemingly 'post-ideological' times: it is through our apparent distance from ideology (non-ideological enjoyment, fantasy, cynicism) that ideology captures us. 'The message the power discourse bombards us with is by definition inconsistent; there is always a gap between public discourse and its fantasmatic support. Far from being a kind of secondary weakness, a sign of Power's imperfection, this splitting is constitutive for its exercise' (pp. 246 n. 9, 263). Or again: 'And, perhaps, it is here that we should look in the last resort for ideology, for the pre-ideological kernel, the formal matrix, on which are grafted various ideological formations: in the fact that there is no reality without the spectre [we might say fantasy], that the circle of reality can be closed only by means of an uncanny spectral supplement ... This Real (the part of reality that remains non-symbolized) returns in the guise of spectral apparitions ... the notions of spectre and (symbolic) fiction are codependent in their very incompatibility' (p. 241). This is why, for Žižek, the first task of any ideological critique is to attack the fantasy that keeps us bound to ideology: 'if we are to overcome the "effective" social power, we have first to break its fantasmatic hold upon us' (p. 231). And the way to do this is to prove that there is no fantasy or that the Other does not possess what we lack: 'If traversing of the fantasy overlaps with the experience of any lack, it is the lack of the Other and not that of the subject themselves' (p. 47).