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.

The Plague of Fantasies (13)

From Slavoj Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 35-6:

The truth of desire, the knowledge of fantasy

The opposition desire/drive coincides with the opposition truth/knowledge. As Jacques-Alain Miller emphasized, the psychoanalytic concept of 'construction' does not involve the (dubious) claim that the analyst is always right (if the patient accepts the analyst's proposed construction, that's OK; if the patient rejects it, this rejection is a sign of resistance which, consequently, again confirms that the construction has touched some traumatic kernel within the patient...). Rather, psychoanalytic treatment relies on the other side of the same coin, which is crucial in psychoanalysis--it is the analysand who is always, by definition, in the wrong (like the priest from Jutland who, at the end of Kierkegaard's Either/Or, repeatedly claims: 'You do not say "God is always in the right"; you say "Against God I am always in the wrong"'). In order to grasp this point, one should focus on the crucial distinction between construction and its counterpart, interpretation--this couple, construction/interpretation, is correlative to the couple knowledge/truth. That is to say: an interpretation is a gesture which is always embedded in the intersubjective dialectic of recognition between the analysand and the interpreter-analyst; it aims to bring about the effect of truth apropos of a particular formation of the unconscious (a dream, a symptom, a slip of the tongue...): the subject is expected to 'recognize' himself in the signification proposed by the interpreter, precisely in order to subjectivize this signification, to assume it as 'his own' ('Yes, my God, that's me, I really wanted this...'). The very success of interpretation is measured by this 'effect of truth', by the extent to which it affects the subjective position of the analysand (stirs up memories of hitherto deeply repressed traumatic encounters, provokes violent resistance...). In clear contrast to interpretation, a construction (typically: that of a fundamental fantasy) has the status of a knowledge which can never be subjectivized--that is, it can never be assumed by the subject as the truth about himself, the truth in which he recognizes the innermost kernel of his being. A construction is a purely explanatory logical presupposition, like the second stage ('I am being beaten by my father') of the child's fantasy 'A child is being beaten' which, as Freud emphasizes, is so radically unconscious that it can never be remembered [....] The fact that this phase 'never had a real existence', of course, indicates its status as the Lacanian real; the knowledge about it, a 'knowledge in the real', is a kind of 'acephalous', non-subjectivized knowledge: although it is a kind of 'Thou art that!' which articulates the very kernel of the subject's being (or, rather, for that very reason), its assumption desubjectivizes me--that is, I can assume my fundamental fantasy only in so far as I undergo what Lacan calls 'subjective destitution'. Or--to put it in yet another way--interpretation and construction stand to each other as do symptom and fantasy: symptoms are to be interpreted, fundamental fantasy is to be (re)constructed....

The Plague of Fantasies (12)

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

pp. 32-35: Desire emerges when drive gets caught in the cobweb of Law/prohibition, in the vicious cycle in which 'jouissance must be refused, so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder of the Law of desire' (Lacan's definition of castration)--and fantasy is the narrative of this primordial loss, since it stages the process of this renunciation, the emergence of the Law. In this precise sense, fantasy is the very screen that separates desire from drive: it tells the story which allows the subject to (mis)perceive the void around which drive circulates as the primordial loss constitutive of desire. In other words, fantasy provides a rationale for the inherent deadlock of desire: it constructs the scene in which the jouissance we are deprived of is concentrated in the Other who stole it from us. [....] In 'traversing the fantasy', we find jouissance in the vicious cycle of circulating around the void of the (missing) object, renouncing the myth that jouissance has to be amassed somewhere else.

Hysteria provides the exemplary case of desire as a defence against jouissance: in contrast to the pervert who works incessantly to provide enjoyment to the Other, the neurotic-hysteric wants to be the object of the Other's desire, not the object of his enjoyment--she is well aware that the only way to remain desired is to postpone the satisfaction, the gratification of desire which would bring enjoyment. The hysteric's fear is that, in so far as she is the object of the Other's enjoyment, she is reduced to an instrument of the Other, exploited, manipulated by him; on the other hand, there is nothing a true pervert enjoys more than being an instrument of the Other, of his jouissance. [....] What the neurotic cannot stand is the idea that the Other is profiting from his sacrifice; he (typically the obsessional) is prepared to sacrifice everything on condition that the Other does not profit from it, that he does not amass the sacrificed jouissance, does not enjoy in his place. Through psychoanalytic treatment, the neurotic must be helped to stop blaming the Other (society, parents, church, spouse...) for his 'castration', and, consequently, to stop seeking retribution from the Other. (There, in the strategy of culpabilizing the Other, also resides the limitation of 'postmodern' identity politics, in which the deprived minority indulges in ressentiment by blaming, and seeking retribution from, the Other.) In the dialectic of Master and servant, the servant (mis)perceives the Master as amassing jouissance, and gets back (steals from the Master) little crumbs of jouissance; these small pleasures (the awareness that he can also manipullate the Master), silently tolerated by the Master, not only fail to present any threat to the Master but, in fact, constitute the 'libidinal bribery' which maintains the servant's servitude. In short, the satisfaction that he is able to dupe the Master is precisely what guarantees the servant's servitude to him.

Although both the neurotic and the pervert sacrifice enjoyment--although neither of the two is a psychotic directly immersed in jouissance--the economy of sacrifice is fundamentally different: a neurotic is traumatized by the other's jouissance (an obsessional neurotic, for example, works like mad all the time to prevent the Other from enjoying [....]) while a pervert posits himself as the object-instrument of the Other's jouissance; he sacrifices his jouissance to generate jouissance in the Other. [....]

The key point is thus to clearly delineate the specific intermediate status of perversion, between psychosis and neurosis, between the psychotic's foreclosure of the Law and the neurotic's integration into the Law. [....] in contrast to the neurotic, who acknowledges the Law in order occasionally to take enjoyment in its transgressions (masturbation, theft...), and thus obtains satisfaction by snatching back from the Other part of the stolen jouissance, the pervert directly elevates the enjoying big Other into the agency of Law. As we have already seen, the pervert's aim is to establish, not to undermine, the Law: the proverbial male masochist elevates his partner, the Dominatrix, into the Lawgiver whose orders are to be obeyed. A pervert fully acknowledges the obscene-jouissant underside of the Law, since he gains satisfaction from the very obscenity of the gesture of installing the rule of Law--that is, of 'castration'. In the 'normal' state of things, the symbolic Law prevents access to the (incestuous) object, and thus creates the desire for it; in perversion, it is the object itself (say, the Dominatrix in masochism) which makes the law. Here the theoretical concept of masochism as perversion touches the common notion of a masochist who 'enjoys being tortured by the Law': a masochist locates enjoyment in the very agency of Law which prohibits the access to enjoyment.

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.