The Plague of Fantasies (20)

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

pp. 102-4: The central paradox (and perhaps the most succinct definition) of postmodernity is that the very process of production, the laying-bare of its mechanism, functions as a fetish which conceals the crucial dimension of the form, that is, of the social mode of production. In a step further in this discussion of Marx, one is thus tempted to propose a schema of three successive figures of fetishism, which form a kind of Hegelian 'negation of negation'; first, traditional interpersonal fetishism (Master's charisma); then standard commodity fetishism ('relations between things instead of relations between people', that is, the displacement of the fetish on to an object); finally, in our postmodern age, what we witness as the gradual dissipation of the very materiality of the fetish. With the prospect of electronic money, money loses its material presence and turns into a purely virtual entity (accessible by means of a bank card or even an immaterial computer code); this dematerialization, however, only strengthens its hold; money (the intricate network of financial transactions) thus turns into an invisible, and for that very reason all-powerful, spectral frame which dominates our lives. One can now see in what precise sense production itself can serve as a fetish: the postmodern transparency of the process of production is false in so far as it obfuscates the immaterial virtual order which effectively runs the show....This shift towards electronic money also affects the opposition between capital and money. Capital functions as the sublime irrepresentable Thing, present only in its effects, in contrast to a commodity, a particular material object which miraculously 'comes to life', starts to move as if endowed with an invisible spirit. In one case, we have the excess of materiality (social relations appearing as the property of a pseudo-concrete material object); in the other, the excess of invisible spectrality (social relations dominated by the invisible spectre of Capital). Today, with the advent of electronic money, the two dimensions seem to collapse: money itself increasingly acquires the features of an invisible spectral Thing discernible only through its effects.

Again, the paradox is that with this spectralization of the fetish, with the progressive disintegration of its positive materiality, its presence becomes even more oppressive and all-pervasive, as if there is no way the subject can escape its hold...why? Crucial for the fetish-object is that it emerges at the intersection of the two lacks: the subject's own lack as well as the lack of his big Other. Therein lies Lacan's fundamental paradox: within the symbolic order (the order of differential relations based on a radical lack), the positivity of an object occurs not when the lack is filled but, on the contrary, when two lacks overlap. The fetish functions simultaneously as the representative of the Other's inaccessible depth and as its exact opposite, as the stand-in for that which the Other itself lacks ('mother's phallus'). At its most fundamental, the fetish is a screen concealing the liminal experience of the Other's impotence--the experience best epitomized by the vertiginous awareness that 'the secrets of the Egyptians were also secrets for the Egyptians themselves', or (as in Kafka's novels) that the all-pervasive gaze of the Law is a mere semblance staged in order to fascinate the subject's gaze.

Within the domain of psychoanalytic treatment, this ambiguity of the object which involves the reference to the two lacks becomes visible in the guise of the opposition between the fetish and the phobic object: in both cases we are fascinated, our attention is transfixed, by an object which functions as the stand-in for castration; the difference is that in the case of the fetish, the disavowal of castration succeeds; while in the case of the phobic object, this disavowal fails, and the object directly announces the dimension of castration. Gaze, for example, can function as the fetish-object par excellence (nothing fascinates me more than the Other's gaze, which is fascinated in so far as it perceives that which is 'in me more than myself', the secret treasure at the kernel of my being), but it can also easily shift into the harbinger of the horror of castration (the gaze of the Medusa's head). The phobic object is thus a kind of reflection-into-self of the fetish: in it, the fetish as the substitute for the lacking (maternal) phallus, turns into the harbinger of this very lack....The point not to be missed is that we are dealing with one and the same object: the difference is purely topological. Phobia articulates the fear of castration, while in fetishist perversion (symbolic) castration is that which the subject is after, his object of desire. That is to say: even with the fetishist disavowal of castration, things are more ambiguous than they may seem. Contrary to the doxa, the fetish (or the perverse ritual which stages the fetishist scene) is not primarily an attempt to disavow castration and stick to the (belief in the) maternal phallus; beneath the semblance of this disavowal, it is easy to discern traces of the desperate attempt, on the part of the perverse subject, to stage the symbolic castration--to achieve separation from the mother, and thus obtain some space in which one can breathe freely. For that reason, when the fetishist staging of castration disintegrates, the Other is no longer experienced by the subject as castrated; its domination over the subject is complete....

The theoretical lesson of this is that one should invert the commonplace according to which fetishism involves the fixation on some particular content, so that the dissolution of the fetish enables the subject to accomplish the step towards the domain of symbolic universality, within which he is free to move from one object to another, sustaining towards each of them a mediated dialectical relationship. In contrast to this cliché, one should fully accept the paradoxical fact that the dimension of universality is always sustained by the fixation on some particular point.

The Plague of Fantasies (19)

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

pp. 97-98: In the false alternative between 'naive historicist realism' and 'discursive idealism', both sides accuse each other of 'fetishism': for historicist realists, discursive idealism fetishizes the 'prison-house of language', while for discursivists, every notion of pre-discursive reality is to be denounced as a 'fetish'. What makes this polemic of theoretical interest is the fact that these mutually exclusive uses of the term 'fetishism' point towards a certain split which cuts through the very heart of the notion of fetishism.

Marx opens his discussion of commodity fetishism in Capital with the statement: 'a commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another': this standard notion of fetishism relies on a clear common-sense distinction between what the object is 'in itself', in its external material reality, and the externally imposed fetishist aura, the 'spiritual' dimension, which adheres to it (for example, in 'primitive' fetishist religion, a tree which is 'in itself' merely a tree acquires an additional spectral dimension as the seat of the Spirit of the Forest--or, in commodity fetishism, an object which satisfies some human want also becomes the bearer of Value, the material embodiment of social relations). In German Idealism, however, (and in the radical versions of Hegelian Marxism, like Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness), 'objectivity' as such, as the firm, stable, immediate, determinate Being opposed to the fluidity of subjective mediation, is conceived (and denounced) as a 'fetish', as something 'reified', as the domain whose appearance of stable Being conceals its subjective mediation. From this perspective, the very notion of the object's external material being, directly identical to itself ('the way things really are'), is the ultimate fetish beneath which the critical-transcendental analysis should recognize its subjective mediation/production. The fetish is thus at one and the same time the false appearance of In-itself, and the imposition on this In-itself of some spiritual dimension foreign to it.

It may seem that this split simply indicates the opposition between materialism (which maintains the In-itself of reality, independent of subjective mediation) and idealism (which conceives of every material reality as something posited/mediated by the subject); on closer inspection, however, these two opposed poles reveal a profound hidden solidarity, a shared matrix or framework. For the Marxist historical materialist, the very ideal agency which allegedly 'posits' or mediates every material reality (the 'transcendental subject') is already a fetish of its own, an entity which 'abbreviates' and thus conceals, the complex process of sociohistorical praxis. For a deconstructionist 'semiotic materialist', the notion of 'external reality' is--no less than the notion of the 'transcendental subject'--a 'reified' point of reference which conceals the textual process which generates it. And this game can go on almost indefinitely: in a Marxist response to deconstructionism, the very notion of 'arche-writing' or Text is again dismissed as a fetish which conceals the process of historical material practice....

The theoretical problem behind these impasses is: how are we to conceive of some 'immediacy' which would not act as a 'reified' fetishistic screen, obfuscating the process which generates it? Lacan agrees with the German Idealist argument whereby any reference to 'external reality' falls short: our access to this 'reality' is always-already 'mediated' by the symbolic process. At this point, however, it is crucial to bear in mind the distinction between reality and the Real: the Real as 'impossible' is precisely the excess of 'immediacy' which cannot be 'reified' in a fetish, the unfathomable X which, although nowhere present, curves/distorts any space of symbolic representation and condemns it to ultimate failure. If we are to discern the contours of this Real, we cannot avoid the meanderings of the notion of fetishism.

The Plague of Fantasies (18)

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

pp. 90-91: Is not Lacan's futur anterieur his version of Marx's Thesis 11? The repressed past is never known 'as such', it can become known only in the very process of its transformation, since the interpretation itself intervenes in its object and changes it: for Marx, the truth about the past (class struggle, the antagonism which permeates the entire past history) can become visible only to a subject caught up in the process of its revolutionary transformation. What is at play here is the distinction between the subject of the enunciated and the subject of the enunciation: when, during psychoanalytic treatment, the analysand subjectively fully accepts the fact that his identification is that of a worthless scum or excrement,this very recognition is the unmistakable sign that he has effectively already overcome this identification. (Schelling made the same point apropos of the fundamental existential decision which concerns what I am in the kernel of my being: the moment this decision is explicitly taken, brought to consciousness, it is in reality already undone.)

pp. 91-92: Adorno's famous thesis that nothing is more true in Freud's theory than its exaggerations is to be taken literally, not reduced to the common-sense 'wisdom' according to which exaggeration in one direction corrects the existing opposite exaggeration, and thus re-establishes the proper balance. One has to abandon the textbook notion of the Hegelian dialectical process in which the first exaggeration is supplanted by the opposite one until, finally, the proper balance between the two is established, and each is reduced to its proper limited place, as in politics: one needs neither organic links that are too strong (which give us an inflexible corporate state unable to accommodate individual freedom, that is, the infinite right of subjectivity) nor a too-strong unilateral emphasis on abstract individual freedom (which leads to liberal anarchy and the disintegration of concrete social links, and as such gives rise to a mechanical state which is again experienced as an external power limiting the subjects' freedom), but the proper 'synthesis' of the two....

Hegel's point is not a new version of the yin/yang balance, but its exact opposite: 'truth' resides in the excess of exaggeration as such. That is to say: here one has to apply the fundamental Hegelian logical principle according to which the two species of the genus are the genus itself and its one species, so that we do not have the two exaggerations (finally reunited in a synthesis), but the balance as such and the disruptive 'exaggeration' which disturbs its poise. And of course, Hegel's point is the exact opposite of the standard wisdom: the harmonious balanced totality is not the 'truth' within which particular exaggerations, deprived of their excess, must find their proper place; on the contrary, the excess of 'exaggeration' is the truth which undermines the falsity of the balanced totality. In other words, in the choice between the Whole and its Part, one has to choose the Part and elevate it to the Principle of the Whole--this 'crazy' reversal introduces the dynamics of the process. One can also put it in terms of the opposition between 'being' and 'event', of the subject qua event, articulated by Alain Badiou: the subject emerges in the event of 'exaggeration', when a part exceeds its limited place and explodes the constraints of balanced totality.

pp. 93-95: [....] what is of interest in pragmatism is not a rather common-sense notion that the meaning of a term is always embedded in the use of this term within a concrete life-world context, but the much more radical thesis that the meaning of a term 'as such' is nothing but the multitude of its uses; what makes Oswald Ducrot's notion of argumentative topoi so interesting is not merely the premiss that each statement or predicate also has an argumentative dimension, that we use it in order to argue for some attitude towards the designated content--Ducrot claims that not only is the descriptive content of a predicate always accompanied by some argumentative attitude, but that this very 'descriptive content' is in itself nothing but a reified bundle of argumentative topoi; and so forth. Again, the key Hegelian point not to be missed here is that the enlightening 'truth-effect' of each of these theories resides not in the reduced kernel of truth beneath the false exaggeration ('not all meaning can be reduced to argumentative attitude, but a limited argumentative stance supplements its referential content in every statement we make...') but in the very 'unilateral' reductionist exaggeration.

Is not the whole point of Hegel, however, that one should pass from one position to the next through the self-resolution of its constrained character? Yes, but Hegel's point is that this passage occurs only and precisely when we fully assume the 'unilateral' reductionist gesture: Hegelian totality is not an organic Whole within which each element sticks to its limited place, but a 'crazy' totality in which a position reverts to its Other in the very movement of its excessive exaggeration--the dialectical 'link' of partial elements emerges only through their 'exaggeration'. Back to Ducrot: the Hegelian point to be made is not that each predicate has a descriptive aspect as well as an argumentative aspect, but that the descriptive aspect itself emerges when an argumentative attitude is brought to its extreme, 'reified', and thus self-negates.

In the standard notion of the opposition between subject and object, the subject is conceived as the dynamic pole, as the active agent able to transcend every fixed situation, to 'create' its universe, to adapt itself to every new condition, and so on, in contrast to the fixed, inert domain of objects. Lacan supplements this standard notion with its obverse: the very dimension which defines subjectivity is a certain 'exaggerated', excessive, unbalanced fixation or 'freeze' which disturbs the ever-changing balanced flow of life, and can assume three forms, in accordance with the triad of Imaginary, Symbolic and Real:

*At the level of the Imaginary, Lacan--as is well-known--locates the emergence of the ego in the gesture of the precipitous identification with the external, alienated mirror-image which provides the idealized unity of the Self as opposed to the child's actual helplessness and lack of coordination. The feature to be emphasized here is that we are dealing with a kind of 'freeze of time': the flow of life is suspended, the Real of the dynamic living process is replaced by a 'dead', immobilized image--Lacan himself uses the metaphor of cinema projection, and compares the ego to the fixed image which the spectator perceives when the reel gets jammed. So, already at this most elementary level, one has to invert the commonplace according to which an animal is caught in its environs, in the self-enclosed organic whole of Innenwelt and Aussenwelt, while man can transcend this closure, dialectically subvert the confines of his environs, build new, artificial environs, and so on--yes, but what makes this transcendence possible is precisely an excessive fixation on the mirror image.

*The answer to this deadlock may seem to reside in the opposition between imaginary fixity and the dialectic fluidity and mediating power of the symbolic process: an animal remains stuck at the imaginary level, it is caught in the mirror-relationship to its environs, while man is able to transcend this closure by being engaged in the process of symbolization. It is the realm of 'symbolic fictions' which enables us to adapt ourselves to ever new situations, radically to change our self-perception, and so on. Is not the ultimate feature of the symbolic order found in its utter contingency? We can never derive the 'story we tell about ourselves' from our 'real situation', there is always a minimal gap between the real and the mode(s) of its symbolization....Here however, again, the very plasticity of the process of symbolization is strictly correlative to--even grounded in--the excessive fixation on an empty signifier: to put it in a somewhat simplified way, I can change my symbolic identity precisely and only in so far as my symbolic universe includes 'empty signifiers' which can be filled in by a new particular content. For example, the democratic process consists of the elaboration of ever new freedoms and equalities (of women, of workers, of minorities...); but throughout this process, the reference to the signifier 'democracy' is a constant, and the ideological struggle is precisely the struggle to impose an ever new meaning on this term (say, to claim that democracy which is not inclusive of democracy for women, which does not also preclude workers' enslavement, which does not also include respect for religious, ethnic, sexual, etc., minorities, is not true democracy...). The very plasticity of the signified content (the struggle for what democracy 'really means') relies on the fixity of the empty signifier 'democracy'. What characterizes human existence is thus the 'irrational' fixation on some symbolic Cause, materialized in a Master-Signifier to whom we stick regardless of the consequences, disregarding our most elementary interest, survival itself: it is the very 'stubborn attachment' to some Master-Signifier (ultimately a 'signifier without signified') which enables man to maintain free flexibility towards every signified content (the fact that I fear God absolutely enables me to overcome my fear of any worldly threat, etc.).

*According to this second commonplace, the self-transcending plasticity and freedom of man is grounded in the distance between 'things' and 'words', in the fact that the way we relate to reality is always mediated by a contingent symbolic process. Here again, however, a certain excessive fixity intervenes: according to psychoanalytic theory, a human subject can acquire and maintain a distance towards (symbolically mediated) reality only through the process of 'primordial repression': what we experience as 'reality' constitutes itself through the foreclosure of some traumatic X which remains the impossible-real kernel around which symbolization turns. What distinguishes man from animals is thus again the excessive fixation on the trauma (of the lost object, of the scene of some shattering jouissance, etc.); what sets the dynamism that pertains to the human condition in motion is the very fact that some traumatic X eludes every symbolization. 'Trauma' is that kernel of the Same which returns again and again, disrupting any symbolic identity.

So, at each of the three levels, the very dynamic, adaptive, self-transcending capacity which defines subjectivity is grounded in an excessive fixation.

The Plague of Fantasies (17)

From Slavoj Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 75-77:

Ideological Anamorphosis

The procedure which enables us to discern the structural inconsistency of an ideological edifice is that of the anamorphic reading. For example, is not the relationship between le Nom-du-Pere and le Non-du-Pere in Lacan a kind of theoretical anamorphosis? The shift from Nom to Non--that is, the insight which makes us discern, in the positive figure of Father as bearer of symbolic authority, merely the materialized/embodied negation--effectively involves a change in the subject's perspective: viewed from the right perspective, the Father's majestic presence becomes visible as a mere positivization of a negative gesture. One can also put it in Kantian terms: the anamorphic shift enables us to discern an apparently positive object as a 'negative magnitude', as a mere 'positivization of a void'. That is the elementary procedure of the critique of ideology; the 'sublime object of ideology' is the spectral object which has no positive ontological consistency, but merely fills in the gap of a certain constitutive impossibility.

The anti-Semitic figure of the Jew (to take the example of this sublime object) bears witness to the fact that the ideological desire which sustains ant-Semitism is inconsistent, 'self-contradictory' (capitalist competition and pre-modern organic solidarity, etc.). In order to maintain this desire, a specific object must be invented which gives body to, externalizes, the cause of the non-satisfaction of this desire (the Jew who is responsible for social disintegration). The lack of positive ontological consistency in this figure of the Jew is proved by the fact that the true relationship of causality is inverted with regard to the way things appear within the anti-Semitic ideological space: it is not the Jew who prevents Society from existing (from realizing itself as a full organic solidarity, etc.); rather, it is social antagonism which is primordial, and the figure of the Jew comes second as a fetish which materializes this hindrance. In this sense, one can also say that the Jew (not actual Jews, but the 'conceptual Jew' in anti-Semitism) is a Kantian 'negative magnitude': the positivization of the opposing force of 'evil' whose activity explains why the order of Good can never fully win. One of the most elementary definitions of ideology, therefore, is: a symbolic field which contains such a filler holding the place of some structural impossibility. In natural sciences, an example of such 'negative magnitude' is the infamous phlogiston (the ethereal stuff which allegedly serves as the medium for the transmission of light): this object merely positivizes the lack and inconsistency of our scientific explanation of the true nature of light. In all these cases, the basic operation is that of giving negativity precedence over positivity: prohibition is not a secondary obstacle which hinders my desire; desire itself is an attempt to fill the gap sustained by the prohibition. The (anti-Semitic figure of the) 'Jew' is not the positive cause of social imbalance and antagonisms: social antagonism comes first, and the 'Jew' merely gives body to this obstacle.

Kant is usually criticized for his formalism: for maintaining the rigid distinction between the network of formal conditions and the contingent positive content which provides the content for this formal network. There is, however, a critico-ideological use of this distinction: in the case of anti-Semitism, the main point is that the historical reality of Jews is exploited to fill in a pre-constructed ideological space which is in no way inherently connected with the historical reality of Jews. One falls into the ideological trap precisely by succumbing to the illusion that anti-Semitism really is about Jews.

Does not Lacan perform the same anamorphic shift of perspective in his famous reversal of Dostoevsky ('If there is no God, nothing at all is permitted')--that is to say, in his reversal of (the common perception of) Law as the agency which represses desire into (the concept of) Law as that which effectively sustains desire? In this precise sense, the Hegelian dialectical reversal also always involves a kind of anamorphic shift of perspective: what we (mis)perceived as the obstacle (the Prohibition), the condition of impossibility, is actually a positive condition of possibility (of our desiring)--the wicked world about which the Beautiful Soul complains is the inherent condition of its own subjective position. (The same also goes for the relationship between Law and its transgression: far from undermining the rule of the Law, its 'transgression' in fact serves as its ultimate support. So it is not only that transgression relies on, presupposes, the Law it transgresses; rather, the reverse case is much more pertinent. Law itself relies on its inherent transgression, so that when we suspend this transgression, the Law itself disintegrates.)

The Plague of Fantasies (16)

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

pp. 49-50: Jouissance is thus the 'place' of the subject--one is tempted to say: his 'impossible' Being-there, Da-Sein, and. for that very reason, the subject is always-already displaced, out-of-joint, with regard to it. Therein lies the primordial 'decentrement' of the Lacanian subject: much more radical and elementary than the decentrement of the subject with regard to the 'big Other', the symbolic order which is the external place of the subject's truth, is the decentrement with regard to the traumatic Thing-jouissance which the subject can never 'subjectivize', assume, integrate. Jouissance is that notorious heimliche which is simultaneously the most unheimliche, always-already here and, precisely as such, always-already lost. What characterizes the fundamental subjective position of a hysteric (and one should bear in mind that for Lacan, the status of the subject as such is hysterical) is precisely the ceaseless questioning of his or her existence qua enjoyment--that is, the refusal fully to identify with the object that he or she 'is', the eternal wondering at this object: 'Am I really that?'

Another way to express the point is to say that jouissance designates the non-historical kernel of the process of historicization. As Jacques-Alain Miller defines the analyst as the subject who, in contrast to us, 'common' individuals caught in the everyday symbolic circuit, no longer confounds what he hears [j'ouis] with what he enjoys [jouir]; Miller, of course, is alluding here to Lacan's famous wordplay from 'The Subversion of the Subject...' regarding the superego injunction Jouis! ('Enjoy!'), 'to which the subject can only reply J'ouis ('I hear'), the jouissance being no more than a half-heard innuendo'. The subject can avoid this confusion only by 'traversing the fantasy', since it is precisely his fundamental fantasy which provides the frame anchoring his jouissance in that which he is able to hear/understand: when I achieve a distance towards the phantasmic frame, I no longer reduce jouissance to what I hear/understand, to the frame of meaning.

The most difficult and painful aspect of what Lacan calls 'separation' is thus to maintain the distance between the hard kernel of jouissance and the ways in which this kernel is caught in different ideological fields--jouissance is 'undecidable', 'free-floating'. The enthusiasm of fans for their favourite rock star and the religious trance of a devout Catholic in the presence of the Pope are libidinally the same phenomenon; they differ only in the different symbolic network which supports them. [....] So, when someone, while describing his profound religious experience, emphatically answers his critics: 'You don't really understand it at all! There's more to it, something words cannot express!', he is the victim of a kind of perspective illusion: the precious agalma perceived by him as the unique ineffable kernel which cannot be shared by others (non-believers) is precisely jouissance as that which always remains the same. Every ideology attaches itself to some kernel of jouissance which, however, retains the status of an ambiguous excess.

The Plague of Fantasies (15)

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

pp. 48-49: What psychoanalysis can do to help the critique of ideology is precisely to clarify the status of this paradoxical jouissance as the payment that the exploited, the servant, receives for serving the Master. This jouissance, of course, always emerges within a certain phantasmic field; the crucial precondition for breaking the chains of servitude is thus to 'traverse the fantasy' which structures our jouissance in a way which keeps us attached to the Master--makes us accept the framework of the social relationship of domination. [....]

Jouissance concerns the very fundamentals of what one is tempted to call psychoanalytic ontology. Psychoanalysis chances upon the fundamental ontological question: 'Why is there something instead of nothing?' apropos of the experience of the 'loss of reality [Realitatsverlust]', when some traumatic, excessively intense encounter affects the subject's ability to assume the full ontological weight of his world-experience. From the very outset of his teaching, Lacan emphasized the inherent and irreducible traumatic status of existence: 'By definition, there is something so improbable about all existence that one is in effect perpetually questioning oneself about its reality.' Later, after the crucial turning point of his teaching, he links existence ('as such', one is tempted to add) to jouissance as that which is properly traumatic--that is, whose existence can never be fully assumed, and which is thus forever perceived as spectral, pre-ontological. In a key passage from 'Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire', for example, he answers the question 'What am I?':

[quotation from Lacan] 'I' am in the place from which a voice is heard clamouring 'the universe is a defect in the purity of Non-Being'. And not without reason, for by protecting itself this place makes Being itself languish. This place is called Jouissance, and it is the absence of this that makes the universe vain.

Jouissance is thus the ontological aberration, the disturbed balance (clinamen, to use the old philosophical term) which accounts for the passage from Nothing to Something; it designates the minimal contraction (in Schelling's sense of the term) which provides the density of the subject's reality. Someone can be happily married, with a good job and many friends, fully satisfied with his life, and yet absolutely hooked on some specific formation ('sinthom') of jouissance, ready to put everything at risk rather than renounce that (drugs, tobacco, drink, a particular sexual perversion...). Although his symbolic universe may be nicely set up, this absolutely meaningless intrusion, this clinamen, upsets everything, and there is nothing to be done, since it is only in this 'sinthom' that the subject encounters the density of being--when he is deprived of it, his universe is empty. At a less extreme level, the same holds for every authentic intersubjective encounter: when do I actually encounter the Other 'beyond the wall of language', in the real of his or her being? Not when I am able to describe her, not even when I learn her values, dreams, and so on, but only when I encounter the Other in her moment of jouissance: when I discern in her a tiny detail (a compulsive gesture, an excessive facial expression, a tic) which signals the intensity of the real of jouissance. This encounter with the real is always traumatic; there is something at least minimally obscene about it; I cannot simply integrate it into my universe, there is always a gulf separating me from it.

The Plague of Fantasies (14)

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

p. 37: [....] Lacan increasingly focuses his theoretical attention on drive as a kind of 'acephalous' knowledge which brings about satisfaction. This knowledge involves neither an inherent relation to truth nor a subjective position of enunciation--not because it dissimulates the subjective position of enunciation, but because it is in itself non-subjectivized, ontologically prior to the very dimension of truth (although, of course, the very predicate 'ontological' thereby becomes problematic, since ontology is by definition a discourse on truth...). Truth and knowledge are thus related as desire and drive: interpretation aims at the truth of the subject's desire (the truth of desire is the desire for truth, as one is tempted to put it in a pseudo-Heideggerian way), while construction expresses the knowledge about drive. [....]

pp. 38-9: Within psychoanalysis, this knowledge of drive, which can never be subjectivized, assumes the form of knowledge about the subject's 'fundamental fantasy', the specific formula which regulates his or her access to jouissance. That is to say: desire and jouissance are inherently antagonistic, even exclusive: desire's raison d'etre (or 'utility function', to use Richard Dawkins's term) is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire. So how is it possible to couple desire and jouissance, to guarantee a minimum of jouissance within the space of desire? It is the famous Lacanian objet petit a that mediates between the incompatible domains of desire and jouissance. In what precise sense is objet petit a the object-cause of desire? The objet petit a is not what we desire, what we are after, but, rather, that which sets our desire in motion, in the sense of the formal frame which confers consistency on our desire: desire is, of course, metonymical; it shifts from one object to another; through all these displacements, however, desire none the less retains a minimum of formal consistency, a set of phantasmic features which, when they are encountered in a positive object, make us desire this object--objet petit a as the cause of desire is nothing other than this formal frame of consistency. In a slightly different way, the same mechanism regulates the subject's falling in love: the automatism of love is set in motion when some contingent, ultimately indifferent (libidinal) object finds itself occupying a pre-given fantasy-place.