The Plague of Fantasies (4)

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

p. 7: The first thing to note is that fantasy does not simply realize a desire in a hallucinatory way: rather, its function is similar to that of Kantian 'transcendental schematism': a fantasy constitutes our desire, provides its co-ordinates; that is, it literally 'teaches us how to desire'. The role of fantasy is thus in a way analogous to that of the ill-fated pineal gland in Descartes's philosophy, this mediator between res cogitans and res extensa: fantasy mediates between the formal symbolic structure and the positivity of the objects we encounter in reality--that is to say, it provides a 'schema' according to which certain positive objects in reality can function as objects of desire, filling in the empty places opened up by formal symbolic structure. To put it in somewhat simplified terms: fantasy does not mean that when I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality, I fantasize about eating it; the problem is, rather, how do I know that I desire a strawberry cake in the first place? This is what fantasy tells me.

p. 8: The second feature concerns the radically intersubjective character of fantasy.

p. 9: This radical intersubjectivity of fantasy is discernible even in the most elementary cases, like that (reported by Freud) of his little daughter fantasizing about eating a strawberry cake--what we have here is by no means a simple case of the direct hallucinatory satisfaction of a desire (she wanted a cake, she didn't get it, so she fantasized about it...). That is to say: what one should introduce here is precisely the dimension of intersubjectivity: the crucial feature is that while she was voraciously eating a strawberry cake, the little girl noticed how her parents were deeply satisfied by this spectacle, by seeing her fully enjoying it--so what the fantasy of eating a strawberry cake is really about is her attempt to form an identity (of the one who fully enjoys eating a cake given by the parents) that would satisfy her parents, would make her the object of their desire....

The Plague of Fantasies (3)

From Slavoj Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 3-4:

The Unconscious is outside, not hidden in any unfathomable depths--or, to quote the X Files motto: 'The truth is out there'.

Such a focusing on material externality proves very fruitful in the analysis of how fantasy relates to the inherent antagonisms of an ideological edifice. Do not the two opposed architectural designs of Casa del Fascio (the local headquarters of the Fascist Party), Adolfo Coppede's neo-Imperial pastiche (1928) and Giuseppe Teragni's highly modernist transparent glasshouse (1934-36) reveal, in their simple juxtaposition, the inherent contradiction of the Fascist ideological project which simultaneously advocates a return to pre-modern organicist corporatism and the unheard-of mobilization of all social forces in the service of rapid modernization? An even better example is provided by the great projects of public buildings in the Soviet Union of the 1930's, which put on top of a flat multistorey office building a gigantic statue of the idealized New Man, or a couple: in the span of a couple of years, the tendency to flatten the office building (the actual workplace for living people) more and more became clearly discernible, so that it changed increasingly into a mere pedestal for the larger-than-life statue--does not this external, material feature of architectural design reveal the 'truth' of the Stalinist ideology in which actual, living people are reduced to instruments, sacrificed as the pedestal for the spectre of the future New Man, an ideological monster which crushes actual living men under his feet? The paradox is that had anyone in the Soviet Union of the 1930's said openly that the vision of the Socialist New Man was an ideological monster squashing actual people, they would have been arrested immediately. It was, however, allowed--encouraged, even--to make this point via architectural design...again, 'the truth is out there'. What we are thus arguing is not simply that ideology also permeates the alleged extra-ideological strata of everyday life, but that this materialization of ideology in external materiality reveals inherent antagonisms which the explicit formulation of ideology cannot afford to acknowledge: it is as if an ideological edifice, if it is to function 'normally', must obey a kind of 'imp of perversity', and articulate its inherent antagonisms in the externality of its material existence.

The Plague of Fantasies (2)

From Slavoj Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997), p. 6:

As Pascal put it, if you do not believe, kneel down, act as if you believe, and belief will come by itself. This is also what Marxian 'commodity fetishism' is about: in his explicit self-awareness, a capitalist is a common-sense nominalist, but the 'purely material sincerity' of his deeds displays the 'theological whimsies' of the commodity universe. This 'purely material sincerity' of the external ideological ritual, not the depth of the subject's inner convictions and desires, is the true locus of the fantasy which sustains an ideological edifice.

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.