Jew

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 365-6:

The importance of the ideological figure of the 'Jew' in anti-Semitism is that it occupies the positions both of master-signifier and objet a. As Žižek writes, in speaking of the difference between the Jew as master-signifier and the Jew as objet a: 'There is, however, a pivotal difference between this symbolic authority guaranteed by the phallus as the signifier of castration and the spectral presence of the "conceptual Jew" ... The fantasmatic "conceptual Jew" is not a paternal figure of symbolic authority, a "castrated" bearer-medium of public authority ... In short, the difference between the Name-of-the-Father and the "conceptual Jew" is that between symbolic fiction and fantasmatic spectre: in Lacanian algebra, between S1, the Master-Signifier (the empty signifier of symbolic authority) and objet petit a' (p. 239). And this mention of the 'non-castrated' aspect of the Jew as objet a reminds us that the Jew in this logic of racism is a figure of enjoyment: that what we ultimately resent is the way that the Other, the Jew, seems to be able to enjoy in a way we cannot. The Jew in this sense becomes a symptom insofar as they suggest a seemingly external reason for the internal impossibility of jouissance. Speaking of this logic of the Jew as both master-signifier and objet a, Žižek says: 'The notion of fantasy offers an exemplary case of the dialectical coincidentia oppositorum: on the one hand, fantasy in its beautific side ... on the other hand, fantasy in its aspect whose elemental form is envy ... Those who are alleged to realize fully fantasy1 (the symbolic fiction) had to have recourse to fantasy2 (spectral apparitions) in order to explain their failure ... Fantasy1 and fantasy2, symbolic fiction and spectral apparition, are like the front and reverse of the same coin' (p. 244). In fact, Žižek's point is that Jews are not holders of this secret enjoyment, not merely because they do not know their own secret--to paraphrase Hegel, the secret of the Jews is a secret for the Jews themselves--but the Jewish religion is perhaps the first to break with pagan vitalist enjoyment: 'In all previous religions, we always run into a place, a domain of sacred enjoyment ... whereas Judaism evacuates from the sacred domain all traces of vitality and subordinates the living substance to the dead letter of the Father's Law' (p. 258).