You might think your Catholic
mother has nothing in common with the Marxist intellectual and legendary
interpreter of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis — Slavoj Žižek. But give the
latter a microphone and the former a third glass of wine and the two start to sound
fantastically similar on issues of human sexuality. So without further
ado, and in the spirit of celebrating the
developing illicit love-relation between postmodern philosophy and the Church,
I give you the quiz: Who said it, Žižek or your Catholic mom?
1. This book [50 Shades of
Grey], it starts on the Internet, no? People are reading more than ever before
with this technology, it is disgusting, wholly degenerate.
2. What if, in our postmodern
world of ordained transgression, in which the marital commitment is perceived
as ridiculously out of time, those who cling to it are the true subversives?
What if, today, straight marriage is the most dark and daring of all
transgressions?
3. What if sexual difference
is not simply a biological fact, but the Real of an antagonism that defines
humanity, so that once sexual difference is abolished, a human being
effectively becomes indistinguishable from a machine?
4. I despise Leftists who
think, you know, violence is just an effect of social alienation, blah, blah,
blah; once we will get communism, people will live in harmony. No, human nature
is absolutely evil and maybe with a better organization of society we could
control it a little bit.
5. But this book, the Fifty
Shades of Grey book, it is embraced openly, the women read it on public
transport…It is the Other without Otherness, utterly obscene. In the liberal
society, everything is permitted, every kind of sexuality; not only permitted,
it is mandatory. The command everywhere is this: you must Enjoy! The truly
radical act, this I claim, is to not enjoy.
6. With this [virtual
reality] you will be able to have almost any kind of experience with just
about anyone, real or imagined, at any time.” The question to be asked
here is: will this still be experienced as “reality”? Is not, for a human
being, “reality” ONTOLOGICALLY defined through the minimum of RESISTANCE – real
is that which resists, that which is not totally malleable to the caprices of
our imagination?
7. I like to live in a society
where you do whatever you want. Just please — don’t express yourself too much,
you know.
8. I like people who know how
to control themselves. I believe in proper manners.
9. The specific human vocation
does not rely on the development of man’s inherent potentials (on the awakening
of the dormant spiritual forces OR of some genetic program); it is triggered by
an external traumatic encounter, by the encounter of the Other’s desire in its
impenetrability.
10. In our postmodern
“disenchanted” permissive world sexuality is reduced to an apathetic
participation in collective orgies.
11. How are we to get out of
it? The standard way would be to somehow try to resurrect the transgressive
erotic passion following the well-known principle, first fully asserted in the
tradition of the courtly love, that the only true love is the transgressive
prohibited one – we need new Prohibitions, so that a new Tristan and Isolde or
Romeo and Juliet will appear…The problem is that, in today’s permissive
society, transgression itself is the norm.
12. The “sublime” moment of
the love life occurs when the magic dimension transpires even in the common
everyday acts like washing the dishes or cleaning the apartment.
13. The way –
the only way – to have an intense and fulfilling personal (sexual)
relationship is not for the couple to look into each other’s eyes, forgetting
about the world around them, but, while holding hands, to look together
outside, at a third point (the Cause for which both are fighting, in which both
are engaged).
14. The use of the
expression usually reserved for homosexuals (masturbation “brings self love out
of the closet”) hints at a kind of implicit teleology of the gradual exclusion
of all otherness: first, in homosexuality, the other sex is excluded (one does
it with another person of the same sex) then…the very dimension of
otherness is cancelled, one does it with oneself.
15. The basic injunction is
‘have a good time’ or to put it in more spiritualist terms ‘realize yourself.
This is why I think Dalai Lama is such a big hit. He preaches enlightened
egoism; be happy, realize your potentials and so on.
16. When you date online,
you have to present yourself there in a certain way putting forward certain
qualities. You present an image of yourself. You focus on your idea of how
other people should perceive you. But I think that’s not how love functions,
even at the very simple level. You cannot ever fall in love with the perfect
person. There must be some tiny small disturbing element and it is only through
noticing this element that you say, but in spite of that imperfection I love
him or her.
17. In December 2006, the New
York City authorities declared that the right to chose one’s gender (and so, if
necessary, to have the sex-change operation performed) is one of the
inalienable human rights – the ultimate Difference, the “transcendental”
difference that grounds the very human identity, thus turns into something open
to manipulation – the ultimate plasticity of being-human is thoroughly
asserted. “Masturbathon” is the ideal form of the sex activity of this
trans-gendered subject.
18. There are two topics which
determine today’s liberal tolerant attitude towards Others: the respect of
Otherness, openness towards it, and the obsessive fear of harassment – in
short, the Other is OK insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as the
Other is not really Other… In the strict homology with the paradoxical
structure of chocolate laxative, tolerance this coincides with its opposite: my
duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get
too close to him, not to intrude into his/her space – in short, that I should
respect his/her intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is what is more and
more emerging as the central “human right” in late-capitalist society: the
right not to be “harassed,” i.e., to be kept at a safe distance from the
others.
ANSWERS
Okay, that was cheap: It’s all
Žižek. Žižek on Fifty
Shades of Grey, Masturbation
or Sexuality in an Atonal World (I cannot recommend this essay highly
enough), No Sex Please, We’re
Post-Human, Online Dating
and Synthetic Sex, The
Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, and The
Puppet and the Dwarf.
One of the tricks to
understanding Žižek’s paradoxical and challenging critique of the apathy and
banality of postmodern sexuality is to understand him in reference, not just to
Lacan and Hegel, but to G.K. Chesterton. Žižek waxes Chestertonian all the
time — many thanks to Cosmos
in the Lost for first cluing me in on the fact — and this is especially
true when it comes to sex and love. As a side note, there’s a lot of ways that Žižek
ain’t even a smidgen like your Catholic mom, so if you plan on following some
of these quotes down the Žižekian rabbit-hole, you, fair warning: Your
sensibilities and ethical principles will probably be offended.
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