The Plague of Fantasies (21)

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

p. 105: Beneath the apparently humanist-ideological opposition between 'human beings' and 'things' lurks another, much more productive notion, that of the mystery of substitution and/or displacement: how is it ontologically possible that the innermost 'relations between people' can be displaced on to (or substituted by) 'relations between things'? That is to say: is it not a basic feature of the Marxian notion of commodity fetishism that 'things believe instead of us, in place of us'? The point worth repeating again and again is that in Marx's notion of fetishism the place of the fetishist inversion is not in what people think that they are doing, but in their actual social activity itself: a typical bourgeois subject is, in terms of his conscious attitude, a utilitarian nominalist--it is in his social activity, in exchange on the market, that he acts as if commodities were not simple objects but objects endowed with special powers, full of 'theological whimsies'. In other words, people are well aware of how things really stand; they know very well that the commodity-money is nothing but a reified form of the appearance of social relations, that beneath the 'relations between things' there are 'relations between people'--the paradox is that in their social activity they act as if they do not know this, and follow the fetishist illusion. The fetishist belief, the fetishist inversion, is displaced on to things; it is embodied in what Marx calls 'social relations between things'. And the crucial mistake to be avoided here is the properly 'humanist' notion that this belief, embodied in things, displaced on to things, is nothing but a reified form of direct human belief: the task of the phenomenological reconstitution of the genesis of 'reification' is then to demonstrate how original human belief was transposed on to things....

p. 106: The paradox to be maintained is that displacement is original and constitutive: there is no immediate, self-present living subjectivity to whom the belief embodied in 'social things' can be attributed, and who is then dispossessed of it. There are some beliefs, the most fundamental ones, which are from the very outset 'decentred' beliefs of the Other; the phenomenon of the 'subject supposed to believe' is thus universal and structurally necessary.

p. 107: [....] belief is symbolic and knowledge is real (the big Other involves, and relies on, a fundamental 'trust'). Belief is always minimally 'reflective', a 'belief in the belief of the other' [....], while knowledge is precisely not knowledge about the fact that there is another who knows. For this reason, I can believe through the other, but I cannot know through the other.

p. 108: The crucial mistake to be avoided here is, again, the properly 'humanist' notion that this belief embodied in things, displaced on to things, is nothing but a reified form of direct human belief, in which case the task of the phenomenological reconstitution of the genesis of 'reification' would be to demonstrate how the original human belief was transposed on to things....The paradox to be maintained, in contrast to such attempts at phenomenological genesis, is that displacement is original and constitutive: there is no immediate, self-present living subjectivity to whom the belief embodied in 'social things' can be attributed, and who is then dispossessed of it.