The Plague of Fantasies (6)

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

p. 10: The third point: fantasy is the primordial form of narrative, which serves to occult some original deadlock.

pp. 10-11: Lacan is thus radically anti-narrativist: the ultimate aim of psychoanalytic treatment is not for the analysand to organize his confused life-experience into (another) coherent narrative, with all the traumas properly integrated, and so on. It is not only that some narratives are 'false', based upon the exclusion of traumatic events and patching up the gaps left by these exclusions--Lacan's thesis is much stronger: the answer to the question 'Why do we tell stories?' is that narrative as such emerges in order to resolve some fundamental antagonism by rearranging its terms into a temporal succession. It is thus the very form of narrative which bears witness to some repressed antagonism. The price one pays for the narrative resolution is the petitio principii of the temporal loop--the narrative silently presupposes as already given what it purports to reproduce [....]

pp. 12-13: Consequently, the paradox to be fully accepted is that when a certain historical moment is (mis)perceived as the moment of loss of some quality, upon closer inspection it becomes clear that the lost quality emerged only at this very moment of its alleged loss....This coincidence of emergence and loss, of course, designates the fundamental paradox of the Lacanian objet petit a which emerges as being-lost--narrativization occludes this paradox by describing the process in which the object is first given and then gets lost. (Although it may appear that the Hegelian dialectic, with its matrix of the mediatization of immediacy, is the most elaborate philosophical version of such a narrativization, Hegel was, rather, the first to provide the explicit formulation of this absolute synchronicity--as he put it, the immediate object lost in reflection 'only comes to be through being left behind. The conclusion to be drawn from this absolute synchronicity, of course, is not that 'there is no history, since everything was already here from the very outset', but that the historical process does not follow the logic of narration: actual historical breaks are, if anything, more radical than mere narrative deployments, since what changes in them is the entire constellation of emergence and loss. In other words, a true historical break does not simply designate the 'regressive' loss (or 'progressive' gain) of something, but the shift in the very grid which enables us to measure losses and gains.

p. 13: The solution, again, is that emergence and loss coincide.

The Plague of Fantasies (5)

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

pp. 9-10: One can clearly perceive the difference here from early Lacan, for whom the object is reduced to a token which is totally insignificant in itself, since it matters only as the point in which my own and the Other's desires intersect: for late Lacan, the object is precisely that which is 'in the subject more than the subject itself', that which I fantasize that the Other (fascinated by me) sees in me. So it is no longer the object which serves as the mediator between my desire and the Other's desire; rather, it is the Other's desire itself which serves as the mediator between the 'barred' subject ($) and the lost object that the subject 'is',--that provides the minimum of phantasmic identity to the subject. And one can also see in what la traversee du fantasme consists: in an acceptance of the fact that there is no secret treasure in me, that the support of me (the subject) is purely phantasmic.

[....] Lacan's point is thus that symbolic intersubjectivity is not the ultimate horizon behind which one cannot reach: what precedes it is not a 'monadic' subjectivity, but a pre-symbolic 'impossible' relation to an Other which is the real Other, the Other as Thing, and not yet the Other located within the field of intersubjectivity.

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.