The Plague of Fantasies (24)

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

p. 117: [....] the attitude which constitutes subjectivity is not 'I am the active autonomous agent who is doing it', but 'when another is doing it for me, I myself am doing it through him' [....]

p. 118: How then, does 'desire is the desire of the Other' differ in the case of men and women? The masculine version is, to put it simply, that of competition/envy: 'I want it because you want it, in so far as you want it'--that is to say, what confers the value of desirability on an object is that it is already desired by another. The aim here is the ultimate destruction of the Other, which of course, then renders the object worthless--therein lies the paradox of the male dialectic of desire. The feminine version, on the contrary, is that of 'I desire through the Other', in both senses of 'let the Other do it (possess and enjoy the object, etc.) for me' (let my husband, my son...succeed for me), as well as 'I desire only what he desires, I want only to fulfil his desire' (Antigone, who wants only to fulfil the desire of the Other in accomplishing the proper burial of her brother).

p. 119: The ontological paradox--scandal, even--of these phenomena (whose psychoanalytic name, of course, is fantasy) lies in the fact that they subvert the standard opposition of 'subjective' and 'objective': of course, fantasy is by definition not 'objective' (in the naive sense of 'existing independently of the subject's perceptions'); however, it is not 'subjective' either (in the sense of being reducible to the subject's consciously experienced intuitions). Fantasy, rather, belongs to the 'bizarre category of the objectively subjective--the way things actually, objectively seem to you even if they don't seem that way to you'. When, for example, the subject actually experiences a series of phantasmic formations which interrelate as so many permutations of each other, this series is never complete: it is always as if the actually experienced series presents so many variations on some underlying 'fundamental' fantasy which is never actually experienced by the subject.

p. 120: This brings us back to the mystery of 'fetishism': when, by means of a fetish, the subject 'believes through the other' (i.e. when the fetish-thing believes for him, in the place of him), we also encounter this 'bizarre category of the objectively subjective': what the fetish objectivizes is 'my true belief', the way things 'truly seem to me', although I never actually experience them in this way; apropos of commodity fetishism, Marx himself uses the term 'objectively-necessary appearance'. So when a critical Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, the Marxist's comment to him is not "Commodity may seem to you a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified expression of relations between people'; the actual Marxist's comment is, rather, 'You may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple embodiment of social relations (that, for example, money is just a kind of voucher entitling you to a part of the social product), but this is not how things really seem to you--in your social reality, by means of your participation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that a commodity really appears to you as a magical object endowed with special powers'.

At a more general level, is this not a characteristic of the symbolic order as such? When I encounter a bearer of symbolic authority (a father, a judge...), my subjective experience of him can be that he is a corrupted weakling, yet I none the less treat him with due respect because this is how he 'objectively appears to me'. [....] Or, to put it in Hegelian terms: the notion of the 'objectively subjective', of the semblance conceived in the 'objective' sense, designates the moment when the difference between objective reality and subjective semblance is reflected within the domain of the subjective semblance itself. What we obtain in this reflection-into-semblance of the opposition between reality and semblance is precisely the paradoxical notion of objective semblance, of 'how things really seem to me'. Therein lies the dialectical synthesis between the realm of the Objective and the realm of the Subjective: not simply in the notion of subjective appearance as the mediated expression of objective reality, but in the notion of a semblance which objectivizes itself and starts to function as a 'real semblance' (the semblance sustained by the big Other, the symbolic institution) against the mere subjective semblance of actual individuals.

The Plague of Fantasies (23)

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

The object which gives body to this surplus-enjoyment fascinates the subject, it reduces him to a passive gaze impotently gaping at the object; this relationship, of course, is experienced by the subject as something shameful, unworthy. Being directly transfixed by the object, passively submitting to its power of fascination, is ultimately unbearable: the open display of the passive attitude of 'enjoying it' somehow deprives the subject of his dignity. Interpassivity is therefore to be conceived as the primordial form of the subject's defence against jouissance: I defer jouissance to the Other who passively endures it (laughs, suffers, enjoys...) on my behalf. In this precise sense, the effect of the subject supposed to enjoy--the gesture of transposing one's jouissance to the Other--is perhaps even more primordial than that of the 'subject supposed to know', or the 'subject supposed to believe'. Therein lies the libidinal strategy of a pervert who assumes the position of the pure instrument of the Other's jouissance: for the (male) pervert, the sexual act (coitus) involves a clear division of labour in which he reduces himself to a pure tool of woman's enjoyment; he is doing the hard work, accomplishing the active gestures, while she, in transports of ecstasy, endures it passively and stares into space....In the course of the psychoanalytic treatment, the subject has to learn to accept directly his relationship to the object which gives body to his jouissance, bypassing the proxy who enjoys in his place, instead of him. The disavowed fundamental passivity of my being is structured in the fundamental fantasy which, although it is a priori inaccessible to me, regulates the way I relate to jouissance. For that precise reason, it is impossible for the subject to assume his fundamental fantasy without undergoing the radical experience of 'subjective destitution': in assuming my fundamental fantasy, I take upon myself the passive kernel of my being--the kernel the distance towards which sustains my subjective activity.

The substitution of the object for the subject is thus in a way even more primordial than the substitution of the signifier for the subject: if the signifier is the form of 'being active through another', the object is the form of 'being passive through another'--that is to say, the object is primordially that which suffers, endures it, for me, in my place: in short, that which enjoys for me. So what is unbearable in my encounter with the object is that in it, I see myself in the guise of a suffering object: what reduces me to a fascinated passive observer is the scene of myself passively enduring it. Far from being an excessive phenomenon which occurs only in extreme 'pathological' situations, interpassivity, in its opposition to interactivity (not in the standard sense of interacting with the medium, but in the sense of another doing it for me, in my place), is thus the feature which defines the most elementary level, the necessary minimum, of subjectivity: in order to be an active subject, I have to get rid of--and transpose on to the other--the inert passivity which contains the density of my substantial being. In this precise sense, the opposition signifier/object overlaps with the opposition interactivity/interpassivity: the signifier is interactive, it is active on my behalf, in my place, while the object is interpassive, it suffers for me. Transposing my very passive experience on to another is a much more uncanny phenomenon than that of being active through another: in interpassivity I am decentred in a much more radical way than I am in interactivity, since interpassivity deprives me of the very kernel of my substantial identity.

Consequently, the basic matrix of interpassivity follows from the very notion of subject as the pure activity of (self)positing, as the fluidity of pure Becoming, devoid of any positive, firm Being: if I am to function as pure activity, I have to externalize my (passive) Being--in short: I have to be passive through another. This inert object which 'is' my Being, in which my inert Being is externalized, is the Lacanian objet petit a. In so far as the elementary, constitutive structure of subjectivity is hysterical--in so far, that is, as hysteria is defined by the question 'What for an object am I (in the eyes of the Other, for the Other's desire)?', it confronts us with interpassivity at its purest: what the hysterical subject is unable to accept, what gives rise to an unbearable anxiety in him, is the presentiment that the Other(s) perceive him in the passivity of his Being, as an object to be exchanged, enjoyed or otherwise 'manipulated'. Therein lies the 'ontological axiom' of Lacanian subjectivity: the more I am active, the more I must be passive in another's place--that is to say, the more there must be another object which is passive in my place, on my behalf. (This axiom is realized in its utmost simplicity in the proverbial senior manager who, from time to time, feels compelled to visit prostitutes to be exposed to masochistic rituals and 'treated as a mere object'.) What psychoanalysis is looking for in an active subject is precisely the fundamental fantasy which sustains his disavowed passivity.

The Plague of Fantasies (22)

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

p. 109: And is not the primordial version of this substitution by means of which 'somebody else does it for me' the very substitution of a signifier for the subject? In such a substitution lies the basic, constitutive feature of the symbolic order: a signifier is precisely an object-thing which substitutes for me, acts in my place.

p. 111: If we radicalize the relationship of substitution (i.e. the first aspect of the notion of fetishism) in this way, then the connections between the two aspects, the opposition 'persons versus things', their relation of substitution ('things instead of people', or one person instead of another, or a signifier instead of the signified), and the opposition 'structure versus one of its elements', becomes clear: the differential/formal structure occluded by the element-fetish, can emerge only if the gesture of substitution has already occurred. In other words, the structure is always, by definition, a signifying structure, a structure of signifiers which are substituted for the signified content, not a structure of the signified. For the differential/formal structure to emerge, the real has to redouble itself in the symbolic register; a reduplicatio has to occur, on account of which things no longer count as what they directly 'are,' but only with regard to their symbolic place. This primordial substitution of the big Other, the Symbolic Order, for the Real of the immediate Life-Substance [....] gives rise to $, to the 'barred subject' who is then 'represented' by the signifiers--that is, on whose behalf signifiers 'act', who acts through signifiers....

p. 113: This paradox of interpassivity, of believing or enjoying through the other, also opens up a new approach to aggressivity: aggressivity is provoked in a subject when the other subject, through which the first subject believed or enjoyed, does something which disturbs the functioning of this transference. Look, for example, at the attitude of some Western Leftist academics towards the disintegration of Yugoslavia: since the fact that the people of ex-Yugoslavia rejected ('betrayed') Socialism disturbed the belief of these academics--that is, prevented them from persisting in their belief in 'authentic' self-management Socialism through the Other which realizes it--everyone who did not share their Yugo-nostalgic attitude was dismissed as a proto-Fascist nationalist.

pp. 114-115: *In the case of commodity fetishism, our belief is laid upon the Other: I think I do not believe, but I believe through the Other. The gesture of criticism here consists in the assertion of identity: no, it is you who believe through the Other (in the theological whimsies of commodities, in Santa Claus...).

*In the case of a video recorder viewing and enjoying a film for me (or of the canned laughter, or of the weepers who cry and mourn for you, or of the Tibetan prayer wheel) it is the other way round: you think you enjoyed the show, but the Other did it for you. The gesture of criticism here is that, no, it was not you who laughed, it was the Other (the TV set) who did it.

Is not the key to this distinction that we are dealing here with the opposition between belief and jouissance, between the Symbolic and the Real? In the case of (symbolic) belief, you disavow the identity (you do not recognize yourself in the belief which is yours); in the case of (real) jouissance, you misrecognize the decentrement in what you (mis)perceive as 'your own' jouissance. Perhaps the fundamental attitude which defines the subject is neither that of passivity nor that of autonomous activity, but precisely that of interpassivity. This interpassivity is to be opposed to the Hegelian List der Vernunft ('cunning of Reason'): in the case of the 'cunning of Reason', I am active through the other--that is, I accede to the other the passive aspect (of enjoying), while I can remain actively engaged (I can continue to work in the evening, while the VCR passively enjoys for me; I can make financial arrangements for the deceased's fortune while the weepers mourn for me). This allows us to propose the notion of false activity: you think you are active, while your true position, as embodied in the fetish, is passive....

The Plague of Fantasies (21)

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

p. 105: Beneath the apparently humanist-ideological opposition between 'human beings' and 'things' lurks another, much more productive notion, that of the mystery of substitution and/or displacement: how is it ontologically possible that the innermost 'relations between people' can be displaced on to (or substituted by) 'relations between things'? That is to say: is it not a basic feature of the Marxian notion of commodity fetishism that 'things believe instead of us, in place of us'? The point worth repeating again and again is that in Marx's notion of fetishism the place of the fetishist inversion is not in what people think that they are doing, but in their actual social activity itself: a typical bourgeois subject is, in terms of his conscious attitude, a utilitarian nominalist--it is in his social activity, in exchange on the market, that he acts as if commodities were not simple objects but objects endowed with special powers, full of 'theological whimsies'. In other words, people are well aware of how things really stand; they know very well that the commodity-money is nothing but a reified form of the appearance of social relations, that beneath the 'relations between things' there are 'relations between people'--the paradox is that in their social activity they act as if they do not know this, and follow the fetishist illusion. The fetishist belief, the fetishist inversion, is displaced on to things; it is embodied in what Marx calls 'social relations between things'. And the crucial mistake to be avoided here is the properly 'humanist' notion that this belief, embodied in things, displaced on to things, is nothing but a reified form of direct human belief: the task of the phenomenological reconstitution of the genesis of 'reification' is then to demonstrate how original human belief was transposed on to things....

p. 106: The paradox to be maintained is that displacement is original and constitutive: there is no immediate, self-present living subjectivity to whom the belief embodied in 'social things' can be attributed, and who is then dispossessed of it. There are some beliefs, the most fundamental ones, which are from the very outset 'decentred' beliefs of the Other; the phenomenon of the 'subject supposed to believe' is thus universal and structurally necessary.

p. 107: [....] belief is symbolic and knowledge is real (the big Other involves, and relies on, a fundamental 'trust'). Belief is always minimally 'reflective', a 'belief in the belief of the other' [....], while knowledge is precisely not knowledge about the fact that there is another who knows. For this reason, I can believe through the other, but I cannot know through the other.

p. 108: The crucial mistake to be avoided here is, again, the properly 'humanist' notion that this belief embodied in things, displaced on to things, is nothing but a reified form of direct human belief, in which case the task of the phenomenological reconstitution of the genesis of 'reification' would be to demonstrate how the original human belief was transposed on to things....The paradox to be maintained, in contrast to such attempts at phenomenological genesis, is that displacement is original and constitutive: there is no immediate, self-present living subjectivity to whom the belief embodied in 'social things' can be attributed, and who is then dispossessed of it.

The Plague of Fantasies (20)

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

pp. 102-4: The central paradox (and perhaps the most succinct definition) of postmodernity is that the very process of production, the laying-bare of its mechanism, functions as a fetish which conceals the crucial dimension of the form, that is, of the social mode of production. In a step further in this discussion of Marx, one is thus tempted to propose a schema of three successive figures of fetishism, which form a kind of Hegelian 'negation of negation'; first, traditional interpersonal fetishism (Master's charisma); then standard commodity fetishism ('relations between things instead of relations between people', that is, the displacement of the fetish on to an object); finally, in our postmodern age, what we witness as the gradual dissipation of the very materiality of the fetish. With the prospect of electronic money, money loses its material presence and turns into a purely virtual entity (accessible by means of a bank card or even an immaterial computer code); this dematerialization, however, only strengthens its hold; money (the intricate network of financial transactions) thus turns into an invisible, and for that very reason all-powerful, spectral frame which dominates our lives. One can now see in what precise sense production itself can serve as a fetish: the postmodern transparency of the process of production is false in so far as it obfuscates the immaterial virtual order which effectively runs the show....This shift towards electronic money also affects the opposition between capital and money. Capital functions as the sublime irrepresentable Thing, present only in its effects, in contrast to a commodity, a particular material object which miraculously 'comes to life', starts to move as if endowed with an invisible spirit. In one case, we have the excess of materiality (social relations appearing as the property of a pseudo-concrete material object); in the other, the excess of invisible spectrality (social relations dominated by the invisible spectre of Capital). Today, with the advent of electronic money, the two dimensions seem to collapse: money itself increasingly acquires the features of an invisible spectral Thing discernible only through its effects.

Again, the paradox is that with this spectralization of the fetish, with the progressive disintegration of its positive materiality, its presence becomes even more oppressive and all-pervasive, as if there is no way the subject can escape its hold...why? Crucial for the fetish-object is that it emerges at the intersection of the two lacks: the subject's own lack as well as the lack of his big Other. Therein lies Lacan's fundamental paradox: within the symbolic order (the order of differential relations based on a radical lack), the positivity of an object occurs not when the lack is filled but, on the contrary, when two lacks overlap. The fetish functions simultaneously as the representative of the Other's inaccessible depth and as its exact opposite, as the stand-in for that which the Other itself lacks ('mother's phallus'). At its most fundamental, the fetish is a screen concealing the liminal experience of the Other's impotence--the experience best epitomized by the vertiginous awareness that 'the secrets of the Egyptians were also secrets for the Egyptians themselves', or (as in Kafka's novels) that the all-pervasive gaze of the Law is a mere semblance staged in order to fascinate the subject's gaze.

Within the domain of psychoanalytic treatment, this ambiguity of the object which involves the reference to the two lacks becomes visible in the guise of the opposition between the fetish and the phobic object: in both cases we are fascinated, our attention is transfixed, by an object which functions as the stand-in for castration; the difference is that in the case of the fetish, the disavowal of castration succeeds; while in the case of the phobic object, this disavowal fails, and the object directly announces the dimension of castration. Gaze, for example, can function as the fetish-object par excellence (nothing fascinates me more than the Other's gaze, which is fascinated in so far as it perceives that which is 'in me more than myself', the secret treasure at the kernel of my being), but it can also easily shift into the harbinger of the horror of castration (the gaze of the Medusa's head). The phobic object is thus a kind of reflection-into-self of the fetish: in it, the fetish as the substitute for the lacking (maternal) phallus, turns into the harbinger of this very lack....The point not to be missed is that we are dealing with one and the same object: the difference is purely topological. Phobia articulates the fear of castration, while in fetishist perversion (symbolic) castration is that which the subject is after, his object of desire. That is to say: even with the fetishist disavowal of castration, things are more ambiguous than they may seem. Contrary to the doxa, the fetish (or the perverse ritual which stages the fetishist scene) is not primarily an attempt to disavow castration and stick to the (belief in the) maternal phallus; beneath the semblance of this disavowal, it is easy to discern traces of the desperate attempt, on the part of the perverse subject, to stage the symbolic castration--to achieve separation from the mother, and thus obtain some space in which one can breathe freely. For that reason, when the fetishist staging of castration disintegrates, the Other is no longer experienced by the subject as castrated; its domination over the subject is complete....

The theoretical lesson of this is that one should invert the commonplace according to which fetishism involves the fixation on some particular content, so that the dissolution of the fetish enables the subject to accomplish the step towards the domain of symbolic universality, within which he is free to move from one object to another, sustaining towards each of them a mediated dialectical relationship. In contrast to this cliché, one should fully accept the paradoxical fact that the dimension of universality is always sustained by the fixation on some particular point.

The Plague of Fantasies (19)

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

pp. 97-98: In the false alternative between 'naive historicist realism' and 'discursive idealism', both sides accuse each other of 'fetishism': for historicist realists, discursive idealism fetishizes the 'prison-house of language', while for discursivists, every notion of pre-discursive reality is to be denounced as a 'fetish'. What makes this polemic of theoretical interest is the fact that these mutually exclusive uses of the term 'fetishism' point towards a certain split which cuts through the very heart of the notion of fetishism.

Marx opens his discussion of commodity fetishism in Capital with the statement: 'a commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another': this standard notion of fetishism relies on a clear common-sense distinction between what the object is 'in itself', in its external material reality, and the externally imposed fetishist aura, the 'spiritual' dimension, which adheres to it (for example, in 'primitive' fetishist religion, a tree which is 'in itself' merely a tree acquires an additional spectral dimension as the seat of the Spirit of the Forest--or, in commodity fetishism, an object which satisfies some human want also becomes the bearer of Value, the material embodiment of social relations). In German Idealism, however, (and in the radical versions of Hegelian Marxism, like Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness), 'objectivity' as such, as the firm, stable, immediate, determinate Being opposed to the fluidity of subjective mediation, is conceived (and denounced) as a 'fetish', as something 'reified', as the domain whose appearance of stable Being conceals its subjective mediation. From this perspective, the very notion of the object's external material being, directly identical to itself ('the way things really are'), is the ultimate fetish beneath which the critical-transcendental analysis should recognize its subjective mediation/production. The fetish is thus at one and the same time the false appearance of In-itself, and the imposition on this In-itself of some spiritual dimension foreign to it.

It may seem that this split simply indicates the opposition between materialism (which maintains the In-itself of reality, independent of subjective mediation) and idealism (which conceives of every material reality as something posited/mediated by the subject); on closer inspection, however, these two opposed poles reveal a profound hidden solidarity, a shared matrix or framework. For the Marxist historical materialist, the very ideal agency which allegedly 'posits' or mediates every material reality (the 'transcendental subject') is already a fetish of its own, an entity which 'abbreviates' and thus conceals, the complex process of sociohistorical praxis. For a deconstructionist 'semiotic materialist', the notion of 'external reality' is--no less than the notion of the 'transcendental subject'--a 'reified' point of reference which conceals the textual process which generates it. And this game can go on almost indefinitely: in a Marxist response to deconstructionism, the very notion of 'arche-writing' or Text is again dismissed as a fetish which conceals the process of historical material practice....

The theoretical problem behind these impasses is: how are we to conceive of some 'immediacy' which would not act as a 'reified' fetishistic screen, obfuscating the process which generates it? Lacan agrees with the German Idealist argument whereby any reference to 'external reality' falls short: our access to this 'reality' is always-already 'mediated' by the symbolic process. At this point, however, it is crucial to bear in mind the distinction between reality and the Real: the Real as 'impossible' is precisely the excess of 'immediacy' which cannot be 'reified' in a fetish, the unfathomable X which, although nowhere present, curves/distorts any space of symbolic representation and condemns it to ultimate failure. If we are to discern the contours of this Real, we cannot avoid the meanderings of the notion of fetishism.

The Plague of Fantasies (18)

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

pp. 90-91: Is not Lacan's futur anterieur his version of Marx's Thesis 11? The repressed past is never known 'as such', it can become known only in the very process of its transformation, since the interpretation itself intervenes in its object and changes it: for Marx, the truth about the past (class struggle, the antagonism which permeates the entire past history) can become visible only to a subject caught up in the process of its revolutionary transformation. What is at play here is the distinction between the subject of the enunciated and the subject of the enunciation: when, during psychoanalytic treatment, the analysand subjectively fully accepts the fact that his identification is that of a worthless scum or excrement,this very recognition is the unmistakable sign that he has effectively already overcome this identification. (Schelling made the same point apropos of the fundamental existential decision which concerns what I am in the kernel of my being: the moment this decision is explicitly taken, brought to consciousness, it is in reality already undone.)

pp. 91-92: Adorno's famous thesis that nothing is more true in Freud's theory than its exaggerations is to be taken literally, not reduced to the common-sense 'wisdom' according to which exaggeration in one direction corrects the existing opposite exaggeration, and thus re-establishes the proper balance. One has to abandon the textbook notion of the Hegelian dialectical process in which the first exaggeration is supplanted by the opposite one until, finally, the proper balance between the two is established, and each is reduced to its proper limited place, as in politics: one needs neither organic links that are too strong (which give us an inflexible corporate state unable to accommodate individual freedom, that is, the infinite right of subjectivity) nor a too-strong unilateral emphasis on abstract individual freedom (which leads to liberal anarchy and the disintegration of concrete social links, and as such gives rise to a mechanical state which is again experienced as an external power limiting the subjects' freedom), but the proper 'synthesis' of the two....

Hegel's point is not a new version of the yin/yang balance, but its exact opposite: 'truth' resides in the excess of exaggeration as such. That is to say: here one has to apply the fundamental Hegelian logical principle according to which the two species of the genus are the genus itself and its one species, so that we do not have the two exaggerations (finally reunited in a synthesis), but the balance as such and the disruptive 'exaggeration' which disturbs its poise. And of course, Hegel's point is the exact opposite of the standard wisdom: the harmonious balanced totality is not the 'truth' within which particular exaggerations, deprived of their excess, must find their proper place; on the contrary, the excess of 'exaggeration' is the truth which undermines the falsity of the balanced totality. In other words, in the choice between the Whole and its Part, one has to choose the Part and elevate it to the Principle of the Whole--this 'crazy' reversal introduces the dynamics of the process. One can also put it in terms of the opposition between 'being' and 'event', of the subject qua event, articulated by Alain Badiou: the subject emerges in the event of 'exaggeration', when a part exceeds its limited place and explodes the constraints of balanced totality.

pp. 93-95: [....] what is of interest in pragmatism is not a rather common-sense notion that the meaning of a term is always embedded in the use of this term within a concrete life-world context, but the much more radical thesis that the meaning of a term 'as such' is nothing but the multitude of its uses; what makes Oswald Ducrot's notion of argumentative topoi so interesting is not merely the premiss that each statement or predicate also has an argumentative dimension, that we use it in order to argue for some attitude towards the designated content--Ducrot claims that not only is the descriptive content of a predicate always accompanied by some argumentative attitude, but that this very 'descriptive content' is in itself nothing but a reified bundle of argumentative topoi; and so forth. Again, the key Hegelian point not to be missed here is that the enlightening 'truth-effect' of each of these theories resides not in the reduced kernel of truth beneath the false exaggeration ('not all meaning can be reduced to argumentative attitude, but a limited argumentative stance supplements its referential content in every statement we make...') but in the very 'unilateral' reductionist exaggeration.

Is not the whole point of Hegel, however, that one should pass from one position to the next through the self-resolution of its constrained character? Yes, but Hegel's point is that this passage occurs only and precisely when we fully assume the 'unilateral' reductionist gesture: Hegelian totality is not an organic Whole within which each element sticks to its limited place, but a 'crazy' totality in which a position reverts to its Other in the very movement of its excessive exaggeration--the dialectical 'link' of partial elements emerges only through their 'exaggeration'. Back to Ducrot: the Hegelian point to be made is not that each predicate has a descriptive aspect as well as an argumentative aspect, but that the descriptive aspect itself emerges when an argumentative attitude is brought to its extreme, 'reified', and thus self-negates.

In the standard notion of the opposition between subject and object, the subject is conceived as the dynamic pole, as the active agent able to transcend every fixed situation, to 'create' its universe, to adapt itself to every new condition, and so on, in contrast to the fixed, inert domain of objects. Lacan supplements this standard notion with its obverse: the very dimension which defines subjectivity is a certain 'exaggerated', excessive, unbalanced fixation or 'freeze' which disturbs the ever-changing balanced flow of life, and can assume three forms, in accordance with the triad of Imaginary, Symbolic and Real:

*At the level of the Imaginary, Lacan--as is well-known--locates the emergence of the ego in the gesture of the precipitous identification with the external, alienated mirror-image which provides the idealized unity of the Self as opposed to the child's actual helplessness and lack of coordination. The feature to be emphasized here is that we are dealing with a kind of 'freeze of time': the flow of life is suspended, the Real of the dynamic living process is replaced by a 'dead', immobilized image--Lacan himself uses the metaphor of cinema projection, and compares the ego to the fixed image which the spectator perceives when the reel gets jammed. So, already at this most elementary level, one has to invert the commonplace according to which an animal is caught in its environs, in the self-enclosed organic whole of Innenwelt and Aussenwelt, while man can transcend this closure, dialectically subvert the confines of his environs, build new, artificial environs, and so on--yes, but what makes this transcendence possible is precisely an excessive fixation on the mirror image.

*The answer to this deadlock may seem to reside in the opposition between imaginary fixity and the dialectic fluidity and mediating power of the symbolic process: an animal remains stuck at the imaginary level, it is caught in the mirror-relationship to its environs, while man is able to transcend this closure by being engaged in the process of symbolization. It is the realm of 'symbolic fictions' which enables us to adapt ourselves to ever new situations, radically to change our self-perception, and so on. Is not the ultimate feature of the symbolic order found in its utter contingency? We can never derive the 'story we tell about ourselves' from our 'real situation', there is always a minimal gap between the real and the mode(s) of its symbolization....Here however, again, the very plasticity of the process of symbolization is strictly correlative to--even grounded in--the excessive fixation on an empty signifier: to put it in a somewhat simplified way, I can change my symbolic identity precisely and only in so far as my symbolic universe includes 'empty signifiers' which can be filled in by a new particular content. For example, the democratic process consists of the elaboration of ever new freedoms and equalities (of women, of workers, of minorities...); but throughout this process, the reference to the signifier 'democracy' is a constant, and the ideological struggle is precisely the struggle to impose an ever new meaning on this term (say, to claim that democracy which is not inclusive of democracy for women, which does not also preclude workers' enslavement, which does not also include respect for religious, ethnic, sexual, etc., minorities, is not true democracy...). The very plasticity of the signified content (the struggle for what democracy 'really means') relies on the fixity of the empty signifier 'democracy'. What characterizes human existence is thus the 'irrational' fixation on some symbolic Cause, materialized in a Master-Signifier to whom we stick regardless of the consequences, disregarding our most elementary interest, survival itself: it is the very 'stubborn attachment' to some Master-Signifier (ultimately a 'signifier without signified') which enables man to maintain free flexibility towards every signified content (the fact that I fear God absolutely enables me to overcome my fear of any worldly threat, etc.).

*According to this second commonplace, the self-transcending plasticity and freedom of man is grounded in the distance between 'things' and 'words', in the fact that the way we relate to reality is always mediated by a contingent symbolic process. Here again, however, a certain excessive fixity intervenes: according to psychoanalytic theory, a human subject can acquire and maintain a distance towards (symbolically mediated) reality only through the process of 'primordial repression': what we experience as 'reality' constitutes itself through the foreclosure of some traumatic X which remains the impossible-real kernel around which symbolization turns. What distinguishes man from animals is thus again the excessive fixation on the trauma (of the lost object, of the scene of some shattering jouissance, etc.); what sets the dynamism that pertains to the human condition in motion is the very fact that some traumatic X eludes every symbolization. 'Trauma' is that kernel of the Same which returns again and again, disrupting any symbolic identity.

So, at each of the three levels, the very dynamic, adaptive, self-transcending capacity which defines subjectivity is grounded in an excessive fixation.