The Plague of Fantasies (1)

From Slavoj Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 1-2:

[....] Among the antagonisms which characterize our epoch (world-market globalization versus the assertion of ethnic particularisms, etc.), perhaps the key place belongs to the antagonism between the abstraction which increasingly determines our lives (in the guise of digitalization, speculative market relations, etc.) and the deluge of pseudo-concrete images. [....]

This book approaches systematically, from a Lacanian viewpoint, the presupposition of this 'plague of fantasies'. The first chapter ('The Seven Veils of Fantasy') elaborates the contours of the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy, with a special consideration of the way ideology has to rely on some phantasmatic background. The second chapter ('Love Thy Neighbor? No, Thanks!') deals with the ambiguous relationship between fantasy and jouissance: the way in which fantasy animates and structures enjoyment, while simultaneously serving as a protective shield against its excess. The third chapter ('Fetishism and Its Vicissitudes') focuses on the impasses of the notion of fetishism as the paradigmatic case of phantasmic seduction, from its religious origins to its postmodern upheavals. The last chapter ('Cyberspace, Or, The Unbearable Closure of Being') directly tackles the topic of cyberspace as the latest version of the 'plague of fantasies', endeavoring to sketch the answer to the question of how ongoing digitalization will affect the status of subjectivity. The three appendixes to these four main chapters analyze three examples of the irrepresentability of the Real as the inherent obverse of the 'plague of fantasies': the failure in representing the sexual act in cinema ('From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: The Sexual Act in Cinema'); the inscription of subjectivity in the breakdown of the melodic line in music ('Robert Schumann: The Romantic Anti-Humanist'); and the foreclosure of the content of the moral Law in modern (Kantian) ethics ('The Unconscious Law: Towards an Ethics Beyond the Good').

The Indivisible Remainder (31)

From Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, by Adrian Johnston (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 2008), pp. 202-204:

p. 202: [....] the later Schelling and the "related matter" of quantum physics converge via the subject-as-$ as the negativity of Real being's inner inconsistency (in metaphorical terms borrowed from quantum physics, $ as the "void" of indeterminate and and not yet actualized virtual possibilities) both preceding the advent of fully constituted actual reality and lingering on after this advent as the ineliminable remaining possibilities for negating the actuality of this reality:

"The emergence of human freedom can be accounted for only by the fact that nature itself is not a homogeneous "hard" reality--that is to say, by the presence beneath "hard" reality, of another dimension of potentialities and their fluctuations: it is as if, with human freedom, this uncanny universe of potentialities re-emerges, comes to light." (Indivisible Remainder, p. 230)

[....] subjectification is the process wherein the indeterminacy of the subject-as-$ [....] is collapsed into a certain determinate configuration, a set of specified identificatory coordinates (i.e., particular key images and words as anchors of an identity mirrored back to the subject by select fragments of its surrounding milieu). This movement of subjectification can be treated here as analogous to the quantum dynamic whereby possible virtuality becomes actual reality.

pp. 202-203: For Žižek, subjective freedom amounts to the return of the repressed Hegelian night of the world, the reappearance within reality of the Real foreclosed by reality and its accompanying labors of subjectification. Žižekian freedom is an anonymous autonomy, a faceless power of negativity ready, willing, and able to cancel any and every congealed given within the state of the status quo.

p. 203: [....] the Ideal emerges from the Real, and thereafter the Ideal begins to reshape this same Real.

p. 204: The living matter of the nervous system is simultaneously constituting (i.e., it generates all the mental states of lived experience) and constituted (i.e., these thus-generated mental states reflexively alter this same generative matter)--and the same holds for mind in relation to brain (i.e., the mental states of lived experience are likewise both constituting and constituted). Clearly, the human brain illustrates that natural matter isn't necessarily an inert, solid density operating in a totally determined mechanistic mode. This is why partisans on both sides of stale, standardized variations on the hackneyed disagreements between idealism and materialism tend to ignore the brain's material malleability.

The Indivisible Remainder (30)

From Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, byAdrian Johnston (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 2008), pp. 201-202:

Briefly examining some remarks contained in The Parallax View (2006) will help make sense of the conclusion Žižek draws in the final paragraphs of The Indivisible Remainder (the 1996 book that ends with the essay "Quantum Physics with Lacan") regarding the philosophical connection between his musings about quantum physics and German idealist conceptions of human freedom. Revisiting his 1996 reflections on this topic almost a decade later, he asks, "Is not the shift from substantial Reality to (different forms of) Event one of the defining features of modern sciences?" and, in response to this question, again emphasizes that "quantum physics posits as the ultimate reality not some primordial elements but, rather, a kind of string of 'vibrations,' entities which can only be described as desubstantialized processes" (Žižek 2006, 165)--or, as he reiterates this later in the same text, "the lesson of quantum physics" is that "solid material reality" isn't the most elementary and fundamental grounding layer of natural substance. Soon after repeating his insistence that quantum physics points to a matter deprived of any philosophically traditional image or notion of materiality, Žižek frames the contemporary difference between idealism and materialism thus:

It is here, in this terrain, that we should locate today's struggle between idealism and materialism: idealism posits an ideal Event which cannot be accounted for in the terms of its material (pre)conditions, while the materialist wager is that we can get "behind" the event and explore how Event explodes out of the gap in/of the order of Being (Žižek 2006, 166)

The Indivisible Remainder (29)

From Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, by Adrian Johnston (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 2008), pp. 200-201:

In Žižek's eyes, there is a Hegelian lesson to Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle. Instead of reading this principle in a Kantian fashion (i.e., the irreducible, unavoidable effect of the observer on the observed establishes a barrier or limit preventing direct observational access to the pure physical Real as it exists unsullied by the interference of observation), Žižek prefers to pull the dialectical trick of transubstantiating an obstacle blocking access to the Thing into the very Thing itself. From this perspective, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle represents (in perhaps a quite loose and metaphorical way) the Hegelian-Žižekian ontological proposition that subject is not separate from substance. Rather, subject is substance staring back at itself; the eye of the observing individual, an eye forming a part of the universe it sees, is, in a certain sense, the universe casting a glance over itself. The subject is that part of substance carrying out the self-objectification of substance, a self-objectification in which substance transforms itself. More specifically, with this example from quantum physics, Žižek contends that subjectivity's effect on the particles it observationally reflects upon isn't a matter of Kantian style external reflection either remaining confined within its own reality apart from material nature of introducing falsifying distortions into the field of Real being. On the contrary, the reflection of subjectivity, rather than being wholly external to what it observes, is inscribed directly into the ontological structure of the Real being of material nature itself. In other words, the refraction of the object by the subject's gaze isn't simply just subjective interference; this refraction is (also) a facet of the object's own essence.

The Indivisible Remainder (28)

From Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, by Adrian Johnston (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 2008), p. 200:

When Žižek speaks of the void, what he sometimes has in mind is an intangible web of virtual possibilities (akin to the fleeting and ethereal domain of microscopic quantum events and processes) that becomes a fully constituted reality (i.e., created material nature as per vulgar philosophical conceptions of macroscopic matter) if and when the symmetrical balance of this web is disturbed through one virtual possibility being endowed with greater weight than the others. The virtuality of possibility thereby "collapses" into the reality of actuality. But what prompts the collapse of this intangible virtual web? What catalyzes the falling out of something (i.e., the reality of actuality as substantial being with material heft) from nothing (i.e., the virtuality of possibility as an insubstantiality within substantial being more than substantial being itself)? Here is where things obviously reconnect with the Hegelian topic of the rapport between substance and subject.

The Indivisible Remainder (27)

From Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, by Adrian Johnston (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 2008), pp. 195-6:

In the spirit of the later Schelling (as per the half-told theosophical tale of the Weltalter drafts), Žižek employs a grand metaphor of cosmic proportions to describe what transpires at the smaller scale of ontogenetic subject formation. Bringing this, so to speak, back down to earth, one can read these remarks as condensing a series of concepts and themes already encountered here. Two of these conceptual-thematic threads are especially important: first, the processes of subjectification are set in motion when loopholes or short circuits generated by conflicts within substance prompt or support contractive investments into operators of subjectification; and second, these operators of subjectification, in their function as concrete universals, introduce an asymmetrical ordering of the field of phenomena, an unbalanced new synthesis of reality. And, as Žižek repeatedly emphasizes, this established "new order" of reality always can be destroyed by the subject which created it, since the negativity of $ isn't ever entirely sublated by the subjectifying orders it establishes. (This negativity, as a set of virtual potentialities perpetually ready to break out of Imaginary-Symbolic systems through the events of acts, haunts the actuality of every Imaginary-Symbolic system.)

On The Indivisible Remainder (26)

The following is excerpted from original article by Tony Myers available at:

http://www.lacan.com/zizekchro1.htm

Reading Schelling via Lacan

Once the Lacanian concepts of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real are grasped, Zizek, in philosophical writings such as his discussion of Schelling, always interprets the work of other philosophers in terms of those concepts. This is so because "the core of my entire work is the endeavour to use Lacan as a privileged intellectual tool to reactualize German idealism". (The Zizek Reader) The reason Zizek thinks German idealism (the work of Hegel, Kant, Fichte and Schelling) needs reactualizing is that we are thought to understand it in one way, whereas the truth of it is something else. The term "reactualizing" refers to the fact that there are different possible ways to interpret German idealism, and Zizek wishes to make "actual" one of those possibilities in distinction to the way it is currently realized.

At its most basic, we are taught that German idealism believes that the truth of something could be found in itself. For Zizek, the fundamental insight of German idealism is that the truth of something is always outside it. So the truth of our experience lies outside ourselves, in the Symbolic and the Real, rather than being buried deep within us. We cannot look into our selves and find out who we truly are, because who we truly are is always elsewhere. Our selves are somewhere else in the Symbolic formations which always precede us and in the Real which we have to disavow if we are to enter the Symbolic order.

The reason that Lacan occupies a privileged position for Zizek's lies in Lacan's proposition that self-identity is impossible. The identity of something, its singularity or "oneness", is always split. There is always too much of something, and indivisible remainder, or a bit left-over which means that it cannot be self-identical. The meaning of a word, i.e., can never be found in the word itself, but rather in other words, its meaning therefore is not self-identical. This principle of the impossibility of self-identity is what informs Zizek's reading of the German idealists. In reading Schelling, i.e., the Beginning is not actually the beginning at all - the truth of the Beginning lies elsewhere, it is split or not identical to itself.

How, precisely, does the Word discharge the tension of the rotary motion, how does it mediate the antagonism between the contractive and the expansive force? The Word is a contraction in the guise of its very opposite - of an expansion - that is, in pronouncing a word, the subject contracts his being outside himself; he "coagulates" the core of his being in an external sign. In the (verbal) sign, I - as it were - find myself outside myself, I posit my unity outside myself, in a signifier which represents me. (The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters)