How We Are Believers Today

From Žižek 's Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2002), p. 71:

[...] "this is how we are believers today--we make fun of our beliefs, while continuing to practice them, that is, to rely on them as the underlying structure of our daily practices.

In the good old German Democratic Republic, it was impossible for the same person to combine three features: conviction (belief in the official ideology), intelligence, and honesty. If you believed and were intelligent, you were not honest; if you were intelligent and honest, you were not a believer; if you were a believer and honest, you were not intelligent. Does not the same also hold for the ideology of liberal democracy? If you (pretend to) take the hegemonic liberal ideology seriously, you cannot be both intelligent and honest: you are either stupid or a corrupted cynic. So, if I may indulge in a rather tasteless allusion to Agamben's Homo sacer, I can risk the claim that the predominant liberal mode of subjectivity today is Homo sucker: while he tries to exploit and manipulate others, he ends up being the ultimate sucker himself. When we think we are making fun of the ruling ideology, we are merely strengthening its hold over us."

Adrian Johnston on Unfinished Reality

From Žižek 's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 2008), p. 65:

"Hence, what both German idealism and psychoanalysis point to is, as developed by Žižek, a more radical solution to the problems masterfully uncovered (but nonetheless left unresolved) by Kant: the material Real of "nature" (especially human nature) isn't smoothly integrated and free of internal conflicts, but rather is torn apart from within by internal antagonisms.

This absolutely axiomatic Freudian-Lacanian notion of (human) nature as, from the start, a heterogeneous, unintegrated field, instead of as an organically unified set of elements and functions (with this organic unity allegedly being broken up solely by virtue of external intrusions impinging on its inner workings), ought to be recognized as a register complementary to Lacan's "barred" big Other (i.e., the symbolic order as permanently containing, within its own organizational constellations, contradictions, deadlocks, incompleteness, lack, etc.). More specifically, the Lacanian Real, viewed in the context of the preceding analyses, is a barred Real--not only the symbolic order, but the very substance of being is inconsistent and divided against itself."

Bruce Fink on Symbolic Castration

From Bruce Fink's The Lacanian Subject (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1995), p. 99:

"In Seminar XIV, Lacan asks,

'What is castration? It is certainly not like the formulations Little Hans puts forward, that someone unscrews the little faucet, for it nevertheless remains in place. What is at stake is that he cannot take his jouissance inside himself.' (April 12, 1967)

Castration has to do with the fact that, at a certain point, we are required to give up some jouissance. The immediate implication of this is that Lacan's notion of castration focuses essentially on the renunciation of jouissance and not on the penis, and therefore that it applies to both men and women insofar as they 'alienate' (in the Marxist sense of the term) a part of their jouissance."

Object a and the Symbolic Dimension of Subjectivity

From Bruce Fink's The Lacanian Subject (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1995), p. 94:

"We could account for the lost object in yet another way. The breast is not, during the first experience of satisfaction, constituted as an object at all, much less as an object that is not part of the infant's body and that is largely beyond the infant's control. It is only constituted after the fact, after numerous vain attempts by the infant to repeat the first experience of satisfaction when the mother is not present of refuses to nurse the child. It is the absence of the breast, and thus the failure to achieve satisfaction, that leads to its constitution as an object as such, an object separate from and not controlled by the child. Once constituted (i.e., symbolized, though the child may as yet still be unable to speak in any way intelligible to others), the child can never again refind the breast as experienced the first time around: as not separate from his or her lips, tongue and mouth, or from his or her self. Once the object is constituted, the "primal state" wherein there is no distinction between infant and breast, or between subject and object (for the subject only comes into being when the lacking breast is constituted as object, and qua relation to that object), can never be re-experienced, and thus the satisfaction provided the first time can never be repeated. A kind of innocence is lost forever, and the actual breasts found thereafter are never quite it. Object (a) is the leftover of that process of constituting an object, the scrap that evades the grasp of symbolization. It is a reminder that there is something else, something perhaps lost, perhaps yet to be found."

The Fundamental Lesson of Dialectics

From Žižek 's The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski between Theory and Post-Theory (London: British Film Institute, 2001), p. 8:


"[...] the fundamental lesson of dialectics is that universality as such emerges, is articulated 'for itself', only within a set of particular conditions. (All great historical assertions of universal values, from Ancient Roman Stoicism to modern human rights, are firmly embedded in a concrete social constellation.) However, one should avoid here the historicist trap: this unique circumstance does not account for the 'truth' and universal scope of the analysed phenomenon. It is precisely against such hasty historicisers that one should refer to Marx's famous observation apropos of Homer: it is easy to explain how Homer's poetry emerged from early Greek society; what is much more difficult to explain is its universal appeal, i.e., why it continues to exert its charm even today."

Žižek's "The Lamella of David Lynch"

From Reading Seminar XI: Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by R. Feldstein, B. Fink, and M. Jaanus (Albany, SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 214-215:

"Doesn't the elementary structure of subjectivity consist in the fact that not-all of the subject is determined by the causal chain? Isn't the subject the very gap that separates the cause from its effect? Doesn't it emerge precisely insofar as the relationship between cause and effect cannot be accounted for? In other words, what is this feminine depression that suspends the causal link, the causal enchainment of our acts to external stimuli, if not the founding gesture of subjectivity, the primordial act of freedom, of breaking up our insertion into the nexus of causes and effects. The philosophical name for this 'depression' is absolute negativity, i.e., what Hegel called 'the night of the world,' the withdrawal of the subject into itself. In short, woman, not man, is the subject par excellence. And the link between depression and the bursting of the indestructible life-substance is also clear: depression and withdrawal-into-self is the primordial act of retreat, of acquiring a distance from the indestructible life-substance, which makes it appear as a repulsive scintillation."

Žižek on the Process of Symbolic Identification

From Žižek's The Fragile Absolute (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 49-50:

"And it is crucial to note how this passage from symbolic identification to identification with the excremental leftover turns around--accomplishes in the opposite direction--the process of symbolic identification. That is to say, the ultimate paradox of the strict psychoanalytic notion of symbolic identification is that it is by definition a misidentification, the identification with the way the Other(s) misperceive(s) me. Let us take the most elementary example: as a father, I know I am an unprincipled weakling; but, at the same time, I do not want to disappoint my son, who sees in me what I am not: a person of dignity and strong principles, ready to take risks for a just cause--so I identify with this misperception of me, and truly 'become myself' when I, in effect, start to act according to this misperception (ashamed to appear to my son as I really am, I actually accomplish heroic acts). In other words, if we are to account for symbolic identification, it is not enough to refer to the opposition between the way I appear to others and the way I really am: symbolic identification occurs when the way I appear to others becomes more important to me than the psychological reality 'beneath my social mask', forcing me to do things I would never be able to accomplish 'from within myself'."