The Plague of Fantasies (11)

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

pp. 30-31: Once we move beyond desire, that is to say, beyond the fantasy which sustains desire--we enter the strange domain of drive: the domain of the closed circular palpitation which finds satisfaction in endlessly repeating the same failed gesture.

Drive's 'eternal return of the same'

The Freudian drive is thus another name for the radical ontological closure. Does not Nietzsche's famous 'Drunken Song' from the Fourth Part of Zarathustra ('The world is deep, / And deeper than the day could read. / Deep is its woe-- / Joy--deeper still than grief can be: / Woe says: Hence! Go! / But joys all want eternity-- / Want deep, profound eternity!') express perfectly the excessive pleasure-in-pain at which late Lacan aims in his rehabilitation of drive? This Nietzschean 'eternity' is to be opposed to being-towards-death: it is the eternity of drive against the finitude of desire. The 'Yes!' of the 'eternal return of the same' thus aims at the same thing as Lacan's 'Encore!' ('More!'--Nietzsche himself says in the preceding paragraph that 'the name of / this song / is "Once more"'), which is to be read (also) as an evocation of the proverbial woman's 'More!' during the sexual act--it stands for more of the same, for the full acceptance of the pain itself as inherent to the excess of pleasure which is jouissance. The 'eternal return of the same' thus no longer involves the Will to Power (at least, not in the standard sense of the term): rather, it indexes the attitude of actively endorsing the passive confrontation with objet petit a, bypassing the intermediate role of the screen of fantasy. In this precise sense, the 'eternal return of the same' stands for the moment when the subject 'traverses the fantasy'.

According to the doxa, fantasy stands for the moment of closure: fantasy is the screen by means of which the subject avoids the radical opening of the enigma of the Other's desire--is 'traversing the fantasy' not therefore synonymous with confronting the opening, the abyss of the Other's impenetrable desire? What, however, if things are exactly inverted? What if it is fantasy itself which, in so far as it fills in the void of the Other's desire, sustains the (false) opening--the notion that there is some radical Otherness which makes our universe incomplete? And, consequently, what if 'traversing the fantasy' involves the acceptance of a radical ontological closure? The unbearable aspect of the 'eternal return of the same'--the Nietschean name for the crucial dimension of drive--is the radical closure this notion implies: to endorse and fully assume the 'eternal return of the same' means that we renounce every opening, every belief in the messianic Otherness--here late Lacan parts with the 'deconstructionist' notion of spectrality [....] The point is thus to oppose the radical closure of the 'eternal' drive to the opening involved in the finitude/temporality of the desiring subject.

This closure of drive, of course, is not to be confused with the domain of pre-symbolic animal bodily instincts; crucial here is the basic and constitutive discord between drive and body: drive as eternal-'undead' disrupts the instinctual rhythm of the body. For that reason, drive as such is death drive: it stands for an unconditional impetus which disregards the proper needs of the living body and simply battens on it. It is as if some part of the body, an organ, is sublimated, torn out of its bodily context, elevated to the dignity of the Thing and thus caught in an infinitely repetitive cycle, endlessly circulating around the void of its structuring impossibility. It is thus as if we are not fit to fit our bodies: drive demands another, 'undead' body.

p. 32: The problem with Nietsche, perhaps, is that in his praise of the body, he downplays--disregards, even--this absolute gap between the organic body and the mad eternal rhythm of drive to which its organs, 'partial objects', can be submitted. In this precise sense, drive can be said to be 'meta-physical': not in the sense of being beyond the domain of the physical, but in the sense of involving another materiality beyond (or, rather, beneath) the materiality located in (what we experience as) spatio-temporal reality. In other words, the primordial Other of our spatio-temporal bodily reality is not Spirit, but another 'sublime' materiality. [....] Let us recall the 'massiveness' of the protracted stains which 'are' yellow sky in late Van Gogh, or the water or grass in Munch: this uncanny 'massiveness' pertains neither to the direct materiality of the color stains nor to the materiality of the depicted objects [....] From the Lacanian perspective, it is easy to identify this 'spiritual corporeality' as materialized jouissance, 'jouissance turned into flesh'.

The Plague of Fantasies (10)

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

[about how the need for the phantasmic support of the public symbolic order is materialized in 'unwritten rules']

p. 27: How do these two levels, the public text and its phantasmic support, interact? Where do they intersect? [....] Every belonging to a society involves a paradoxical point at which the subject is ordered to embrace freely, as the result of his choice, what is anyway imposed on him [....] This paradox of willing (choosing freely) what is in any case necessary, of pretending (maintaining the appearance) that there is a free choice although in fact there isn't, is strictly co-dependent with the notion of an empty symbolic gesture, a gesture--an offer--which is meant to be rejected: what the empty gesture offers is the opportunity to choose the impossible, that which inevitably will not happen [....]

p. 28: What we have here is symbolic exchange at its purest: a gesture made to be rejected; the point, the 'magic' of symbolic exchange, is that although in the end we are back to where we were at the beginning, the overall result of the operation is not zero but a distinct gain for both parties, the pact of solidarity. [....] what if the other to whom the offer to be rejected is made actually accepts it? [....] A situation like this is properly catastrophic: it causes the disintegration of the semblance (of freedom) that pertains to the social order--however, since, at this level, things in a way are what they seem to be, this disintegration of the semblance equals the disintegration of the social substance itself, the dissolution of the social link.

The need for the phantasmic support of the public symbolic order (materialized in the so-called unwritten rules) thus bears witness to the system's vulnerability: the system is compelled to allow for possibilities of choices which must never actually take place, since their occurrence would cause the system to disintegrate, and the function of the unwritten rules is precisely to prevent the actualization of these choices formally allowed by the system. [....]

pp. 28-29: Or--to put it another way--the paradoxical role of unwritten rules is that, with regard to the explicit, public Law, they are simultaneously transgressive (they violate explicit social rules) and more coercive (they are additional rules which restrain the field of choice by prohibiting the possibilities allowed for--guaranteed, even--by the public Law).

p. 29: Fantasy designates precisely this unwritten framework which tells us how we are to understand the letter of the Law. And it is easy to observe how today, in our enlightened era of universal rights, racism and sexism reproduce themselves mainly at the level of the phantasmic unwritten rules which sustain and qualify universal ideological proclamations. The lesson of this is that--sometimes, at least--the truly subversive thing is not to disregard the explicit letter of the Law on behalf of the underlying fantasies, but to stick to this letter against the fantasy which sustains it. In other words, the act of taking the empty gesture (the offer to be rejected) literally--to treat the forced choice as a true choice--is, perhaps, one of the ways to put into practice what Lacan calls 'traversing the fantasy': in accomplishing this act, the subject suspends the phantasmic frame of unwritten rules which tell him how to choose freely--no wonder the consequences of this act are so catastrophic.

[about how contingency as such is necessary]

It is therefore crucial to bear in mind the radical ambiguity of fantasy within an ideological space: fantasy works both ways, it simultaneously closes the actual span of choices (fantasy renders and sustains the structure of the forced choice, it tells us how we are to choose if we are to maintain the freedom of choice--that is, it bridges the gap between the formal symbolic frame of choices and social reality by preventing the choice which, although formally allowed, would, if in fact made, ruin the system) and maintains the false opening, the idea that the excluded choice might have happened, and does not actually take place only on account of contingent circumstances [....]

The Plague of Fantasies (9)

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

pp. 25-27: Conservative populist political discourse is therefore an excellent example of a power discourse whose efficiency depends on the mechanism of self-censorship: it relies on a mechanism which is operative only in so far as it remains censored. Against the image, ever-present in cultural criticism, of a radical subversive discourse or practice 'censored' by Power, one is even tempted to claim that today, more than ever, the mechanism of censorship intervenes predominantly to enhance the efficiency of the power discourse itself.

The temptation to be avoided here is the old Leftist notion of 'better for us to deal with the enemy who openly admits his (racist, homophobic...) bias than with the hypocritical attitude of publicly denouncing what one secretly and actually endorses'. This notion fatally underestimates the ideologico-political significance of keeping up appearances: an appearance is never 'merely an appearance', it profoundly affects the actual sociosymbolic position of those concerned. If racist attitudes were to be rendered acceptable for the mainstream ideologico-political discourse, this would radically shift the balance of the entire ideological hegemony. This is probably what Alain Badiou had in mind when he mockingly designated his work a search for the 'good terror'. Today, in the face of the emergence of new racism and sexism, the strategy should be to make such enunciations unutterable, so that anyone relying on them automatically disqualifies himself (like, in our universe, those who refer approvingly to Fascism). One should emphatically not discuss 'how many people really died in Auschwitz', what are 'the good aspects of slavery', 'the necessity of cutting down on workers' collective rights', and so on; the position here should be quite unashamedly 'dogmatic' and 'terrorist': this is not a matter for 'open, rational, democratic discussion'.

We are now in a position to specify the distinction between the Foucauldian interconnection between Power and resistance, and our notion of 'inherent transgression'. Let us begin via the matrix of the possible relations between Law and its transgression. The most elementary is the simple relation of externality, of external opposition, in which transgression is directly opposed to legal Power, and poses a threat to it. The next step is to claim that transgression hinges on the obstacle it violates: without Law there is no transgression; transgression needs an obstacle in order to assert itself. Foucault, of course, in Volume I of The History of Sexuality, rejects both these versions, and asserts the absolute immanence of resistance to Power. However, the point of 'inherent transgression' is not only that resistance is immanent to Power, that power and counter-power generate each other; it is not only that Power itself generates the excess of resistance which it can no longer dominate; it is also not only that--in the case of sexuality--the disciplinary 'repression' of a libidinal investment eroticizes this gesture of repression itself, as in the case of the obsessional neurotic who derives libidinal satisfaction from the very compulsive rituals destined to keep the traumatic jouissance at bay.

This last point must be further radicalized: the power edifice itself is split from within: in order to reproduce itself and contain its Other, it has to rely on an inherent excess which grounds it--to put it in the Hegelian terms of speculative identity, Power is always-already its own transgression, if it is to function, it has to rely on a kind of obscene supplement. It is therefore not enough to assert, in a Foucauldian way, that power is inextricably linked to counter-power, generating it and being itself conditioned by it: in a self-reflective way, the split is always-already mirrored back into the power edifice itself, splitting it from within, so that the gesture of self-censorship is cosubstantiaal with the exercise of power. Furthermore, it is not enough to say that the 'repression' of some libidinal content retroactively eroticizes the very gesture of 'repression'--this 'eroticization' of power is not a secondary effect of its exertion on its object but its very disavowed foundation, its 'constitutive crime', its founding gesture which has to remain invisible if power is to function normally.

The Plague of Fantasies (8)

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

p. 16: The fifth feature: on account of its temporal loop, the phantasmic narrative always involves an impossible gaze, the gaze by means of which the subject is already present at the act of his/her own conception.

[....]

Apropos of a phantasmic scene, the question to be asked is thus always for which gaze is it staged? Which narrative is it destined to support?

[....]

p. 18: The same operation is easily discernible in the abundant media reports on the 'saintly' activities of Mother Theresa in Calcutta, which clearly rely on the phantasmic screen of the Third World. Calcutta is regularly presented as a Hell on Earth, the exemplary case of the decaying Third World megalopolis, full of social decay, poverty, violence and corruption, with its residents caught in terminal apathy (the facts are, of course, rather different: Calcutta is a city bursting with activity, culturally much more thriving than Bombay, with a successful local Communist government maintaining a whole network of social services). Into this picture of utter gloom, Mother Theresa brings a ray of hope to the dejected with the message that poverty is to be accepted as a way to redemption, since the poor, in enduring their sad fate with silent dignity and faith, repeat Christ's Way of the Cross....The ideological benefit of this operation is double: in so far as she suggests to the poor and terminally ill that they should seek salvation in their very suffering, Mother Theresa deters them from probing into the causes of their predicament--from politicizing their situation; at the same time, she offers the rich from the West the chance of a kind of substitute-redemption by making financial contributions to her charitable activity. Again, all this works against the background of the phantasmic image of the Third World as Hell on Earth, as a place so utterly desolate that no political activity, only charity and compassion, can alleviate the suffering.

[....]

In order to be operative, fantasy has to remain 'implicit', it has to maintain a distance towards the explicit symbolic texture sustained by it, and to function as its inherent transgression.

p. 21: The lesson is therefore clear: an ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it: 'not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person' is the very form of ideology, of its 'practical efficiency'. Close analysis of even the most 'totalitarian' ideological edifice inevitably reveals that, not everything in it is 'ideology' (in the popular sense of the 'politically instrumentalized legitimization of power relations'): in every ideological edifice, there is a kind of 'trans-ideological' kernel, since, if an ideology is to become operative and effectively 'seize' individuals, it has to batten on and manipulate some kind of 'trans-ideological' vision which cannot be reduced to a simple instrument of legitimizing pretensions to power (notions and sentiments of solidarity, justice, belonging to a community, etc.). Is not a kind of 'authentic' vision discernible even in Nazism (the notion of the deep solidarity which keeps the 'community of people' together), not to mention Stalinism? The point is thus not that there is no ideology without a trans-ideological 'authentic' kernel but rather, that it is only the reference to such a trans-ideological kernel which makes an ideology 'workable'.

The Plague of Fantasies (7)

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

pp. 13-14: This brings us to the next feature, the problematic of the Fall. Contrary to the common-sense notion of fantasizing as an indulgence in the hallucinatory realization of desires prohibited by the Law, the phantasmic narrative does not stage the suspension-transgression of the Law, but the very act of its installation, of the intervention of the cut of symbolic castration--what the fantasy endeavors to stage is ultimately the 'impossible' scene of castration. For this reason, fantasy as such is, in its very notion, close to perversion: the perverse ritual stages the act of castration, of the primordial loss which allows the subject to enter the symbolic order. Or--to put it more precisely--in contrast to the 'normal' subject, for whom the Law functions as the agency of prohibition which regulates (access to the object of) his desire, for the pervert, the object of his desire is the law itself--the Law is the Ideal he is longing for, he wants to be fully acknowledged by the Law, integrated into its functioning....The irony of this should not escape us: the pervert, this 'transgressor' par excellence who purports to violate all the rules of 'normal' and decent behaviour, effectively longs for the very rule of Law.

p. 15: [....] the Fall has never occurred in the present--Adam 'does not, strictly speaking, decide; he finds that he has decided. Adam discovers his choice rather than makes it.' Why is it like this? If the decision (the choice of the Fall) were to happen in the present, it would already presuppose what it gives birth to--the very freedom to choose: the paradox of the Fall is that it is an act which opens up the very space of decision. How is this possible? The second feature of the Fall is that it results from the choice to disobey in order to retain the erotic rapture of Eve, yet the paradox lies in the fact that 'because [Adam] disobeys he loses what he disobeyed in order to keep'. Here we have, once again, the structure of castration: when Adam chooses to fall in order to retain jouissance, what he loses thereby is precisely jouissance--do we not encounter here the reversal of the structure of the 'states which are essentially by-products? Adam loses X by directly choosing it, aiming to retain it....That is to say: what, precisely, is symbolic castration? It is the prohibition of incest in the precise sense of the loss of something which the subject never possessed in the first place. Let us imagine a situation in which the subject aims at X (say, a series of pleasurable experiences); the operation of castration does not consist in depriving him of any of these experiences, but adds to the series a purely potential, nonexistent X, with respect to which the actually accessible experiences appear all of a sudden as lacking, not wholly satisfying. One can see here how the phallus functions as the very signifier of castration: the very signifier of the lack, the signifier which forbids the subject access to X, gives rise to its phantom....

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.