The Plague of Fantasies (6)

From Slavoj Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997)

p. 10: The third point: fantasy is the primordial form of narrative, which serves to occult some original deadlock.

pp. 10-11: Lacan is thus radically anti-narrativist: the ultimate aim of psychoanalytic treatment is not for the analysand to organize his confused life-experience into (another) coherent narrative, with all the traumas properly integrated, and so on. It is not only that some narratives are 'false', based upon the exclusion of traumatic events and patching up the gaps left by these exclusions--Lacan's thesis is much stronger: the answer to the question 'Why do we tell stories?' is that narrative as such emerges in order to resolve some fundamental antagonism by rearranging its terms into a temporal succession. It is thus the very form of narrative which bears witness to some repressed antagonism. The price one pays for the narrative resolution is the petitio principii of the temporal loop--the narrative silently presupposes as already given what it purports to reproduce [....]

pp. 12-13: Consequently, the paradox to be fully accepted is that when a certain historical moment is (mis)perceived as the moment of loss of some quality, upon closer inspection it becomes clear that the lost quality emerged only at this very moment of its alleged loss....This coincidence of emergence and loss, of course, designates the fundamental paradox of the Lacanian objet petit a which emerges as being-lost--narrativization occludes this paradox by describing the process in which the object is first given and then gets lost. (Although it may appear that the Hegelian dialectic, with its matrix of the mediatization of immediacy, is the most elaborate philosophical version of such a narrativization, Hegel was, rather, the first to provide the explicit formulation of this absolute synchronicity--as he put it, the immediate object lost in reflection 'only comes to be through being left behind. The conclusion to be drawn from this absolute synchronicity, of course, is not that 'there is no history, since everything was already here from the very outset', but that the historical process does not follow the logic of narration: actual historical breaks are, if anything, more radical than mere narrative deployments, since what changes in them is the entire constellation of emergence and loss. In other words, a true historical break does not simply designate the 'regressive' loss (or 'progressive' gain) of something, but the shift in the very grid which enables us to measure losses and gains.

p. 13: The solution, again, is that emergence and loss coincide.