The Plague of Fantasies (7)

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

pp. 13-14: This brings us to the next feature, the problematic of the Fall. Contrary to the common-sense notion of fantasizing as an indulgence in the hallucinatory realization of desires prohibited by the Law, the phantasmic narrative does not stage the suspension-transgression of the Law, but the very act of its installation, of the intervention of the cut of symbolic castration--what the fantasy endeavors to stage is ultimately the 'impossible' scene of castration. For this reason, fantasy as such is, in its very notion, close to perversion: the perverse ritual stages the act of castration, of the primordial loss which allows the subject to enter the symbolic order. Or--to put it more precisely--in contrast to the 'normal' subject, for whom the Law functions as the agency of prohibition which regulates (access to the object of) his desire, for the pervert, the object of his desire is the law itself--the Law is the Ideal he is longing for, he wants to be fully acknowledged by the Law, integrated into its functioning....The irony of this should not escape us: the pervert, this 'transgressor' par excellence who purports to violate all the rules of 'normal' and decent behaviour, effectively longs for the very rule of Law.

p. 15: [....] the Fall has never occurred in the present--Adam 'does not, strictly speaking, decide; he finds that he has decided. Adam discovers his choice rather than makes it.' Why is it like this? If the decision (the choice of the Fall) were to happen in the present, it would already presuppose what it gives birth to--the very freedom to choose: the paradox of the Fall is that it is an act which opens up the very space of decision. How is this possible? The second feature of the Fall is that it results from the choice to disobey in order to retain the erotic rapture of Eve, yet the paradox lies in the fact that 'because [Adam] disobeys he loses what he disobeyed in order to keep'. Here we have, once again, the structure of castration: when Adam chooses to fall in order to retain jouissance, what he loses thereby is precisely jouissance--do we not encounter here the reversal of the structure of the 'states which are essentially by-products? Adam loses X by directly choosing it, aiming to retain it....That is to say: what, precisely, is symbolic castration? It is the prohibition of incest in the precise sense of the loss of something which the subject never possessed in the first place. Let us imagine a situation in which the subject aims at X (say, a series of pleasurable experiences); the operation of castration does not consist in depriving him of any of these experiences, but adds to the series a purely potential, nonexistent X, with respect to which the actually accessible experiences appear all of a sudden as lacking, not wholly satisfying. One can see here how the phallus functions as the very signifier of castration: the very signifier of the lack, the signifier which forbids the subject access to X, gives rise to its phantom....