The Plague of Fantasies (31)

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

p. 163: Today's racism is strictly (post)modern, it is a reaction to the 'disenchantment' inflicted by the new phase of global capitalism. One of the commonplaces of the contemporary 'post-ideological' attitude is that today, we have more or less outgrown divisive political fictions (of class struggle, etc.) and reached political maturity, which enables us to focus on real problems (ecology, economic growth...) relieved of their ideological ballast--however, it is as if today, when the dominant attitude defines the terrain of the struggle as that of the Real ('real problems' versus 'ideological chimeras'), the very foreclosed political, as it were, returns in the Real--in the guise of racism, which grounds political differences in the (biological or social) Real of the race. One could thus claim that what the 'post-ideological' attitude of the sober pragmatic approach to reality excludes as 'old ideological fictions' of class antagonism, as the domain of 'political passions' which no longer have any place in today's rational social administration, is the historical Real itself.

[....] Or, to put it in ontological terms: the moment the function of the dark spot which keeps open the space for something for which there is no place in our reality is suspended, we lose our very 'sense of reality'.

p. 175: [....] the three fundamental dimensions which, according to Lacan, structure the human universe: the Real (the 'hard', traumatic reality which resists symbolization), the Symbolic (the field of language, of symbolic structure and communication), and the Imaginary (the domain of images with which we identify, and which capture our attention).

p. 179: [....] jouissance is torn between the Symbolic and the Real. On the one hand, jouissance is 'private', the kernel which resists public disclosure (look how embarrassing it is to us when our intimate modes of enjoyment, private tics, etc., are publicly disclosed); on the other hand, however, jouissance 'counts' only as registered by the big Other; it tends in itself toward this inscription [....]

p. 213-214: [....] an ethics grounded in reference to the traumatic Real which resists symbolization, the Real which is experienced in the encounter with the abyss of the Other's desire (the famous 'Che vuoi?', What do you want [from me]'?). There is ethics--that is to say, an injunction which cannot be grounded in ontology--in so far as there is a crack in the ontological edifice of the universe: at its most elementary, ethics designates fidelity to this crack.

The crucial point on which the consistency of Lacan's position hinges is thus the difference between reality and the Real.

p. 215: Lacan (dialectical materialism) accepts idealism's basic ontological premiss (the transcendental subjective constitution of 'objective reality'), and supplements it with the premiss that this very act of ontological positing of 'objective reality' is always-already 'stained', 'tainted' by a particular object which confers upon the subject's 'universal' view of reality a particular 'pathological' twist. This particular object, objet petit a is thus the paradox of a 'pathological a priori', of a particular object which, precisely as radically 'subjective' (objet petit a is, in a way, subject itself in its 'impossible' objectality, the objectal correlate of the subject), sustains constitutive transcendental universality itself; in other words, obet petit a is not only the 'objective factor of subjectivization' but also the very opposite, the 'subjective factor of objectivization'. [....]

The traumatic Real is thus that which, precisely, prevents us from assuming a neutral-objective view of reality, a stain which blurs our clear perception of it. And this example also brings home the ethical dimension of fidelity to the Real qua impossible: the point is not simply to 'tell the entire truth about it,' but, above all, to confront the way we ourselves, by means of our subjective position of enunciation, are always-already involved, engaged in it....

p. 216: Or--with respect to truth: the Real qua trauma is not the ultimate 'unspeakable' truth which the subject can approach only asymptotically, but that which makes every articulated symbolic truth forever 'not-all', failed, a bone stuck in the throat of the speaking being which makes it impossible to 'tell everything'. This is also how the Real of antagonism ('class struggle') functions within the social field: antagonism, again, is not the ultimate referent which anchors and limits the unending drift of the signifiers ('the ultimate meaning of all social phenomena is determined by their position in class struggle'), but the very force of their constant displacement--that on account of which socio-ideological phenomena never mean what they seem/purport to mean--for example, 'class struggle' is that on account of which every direct reference to universality (of 'humanity', of 'our nation', etc.) is, always in a specific way, 'biased', dislocated with regard to its literal meaning. 'Class struggle' is the Marxist name for this basic 'operator of dislocation'; as such, 'class struggle' means that there is no neutral metalanguage allowing us to grasp society as a given 'objective' totality, since we always-already 'take sides'. The fact that there is no 'neutral', 'objective' concept of class struggle is thus the crucial constituent of this notion.

[And the Real is] that which 'skews' the discursive universe, preventing us from grounding its formulations in 'hard reality'--that on account of which every symbolization of sexual difference is forever unstable and displaced with regard to itself.

p. 217: In this precise sense, real (antagonism) is inherent to the symbolic (system of differences), not the transcendent Beyond which the signifying process tries to grasp in vain [....]. And the Real cannot be signified not because it is outside, external to the symbolic order, but precisely because it is inherent to it, its inherent limit: the Real is the internal stumbling block on account of which the symbolic system can never 'become itself', achieve its self-identity. Because of its absolute immanence to the symbolic, the Real cannot be positively signified; it can only be shown, in a negative gesture, as the inherent failure of symbolization [....].

p. 218: Later, with the shift of emphasis on to the Real, fantasy is no longer reduced to an imaginary formation (over)determined by the absent symbolic network, but conceived as the formation which fills in the gap of the Real--as Lacan put it, 'one does not interpret fantasy [....].' Phenomenology is now reasserted as the description of the ways in which the Real shows itself in phantasmic formations, without being signified in them: it is the description, not interpretation, of the spectral domain of mirages, of 'negative magnitudes' which positivize the lack in the symbolic order.

p. 223: The true horror of the act resides in this self-referential abyss--or, to put it another way, it is crucial to bear in mind the gap between the act and Will: the act occurs as a 'crazy', unaccountable event which, precisely, is not 'willed'. The subject's will is, by definition, split with regard to an act: since attraction to an repulsion against the act are inextricably mixed in it, the subject can never fully 'assume' the act.

p. 239: Lacan's ne pas céder sur son désir (the ethical injunction not to compromise on one's desire) in no way condones the suicidal persistence in following one's Thing; on the contrary, it enjoins us to remain faithful to our desire as sustained by the Law of maintaining a minimal distance towards the Thing--one is faithful to one's desire by maintaining the gap which sustains desire, the gap on account of which the incestuous Thing forever eludes the subject's grasp.

p. 241: note 30: Along the same lines, the Lacanian desire grounded in symbolic Law is also a defence against the lethal jouissance.

The Plague of Fantasies (30)

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

p. 154: The suspension of the function of the (symbolic) Master is the crucial feature of the Real whose contours loom on the horizon of the cyberspace universe: the moment of implosion when humanity will attain the limit that is impossible to transgress; the moment at which the co-ordinates of our societal life-world will be dissolved. At that moment, distances will be suspended (I will be able to communicate instantly through teleconferences with any place on the globe); all information, from texts to music to video, will be instantly available on my interface. However, the obverse of this suspension of the distance which separates me from a faraway foreigner is that, due to a gradual disappearance of contact with 'real' bodily others, a neighbour will no longer be a neighbour, since he or she will be progressively replaced by a screen spectre; general availability will induce unbearable claustrophobia; excess of choice will be experienced as the impossibility to choose; universal direct participatory community will exclude all the more forcefully those who are prevented from participating in it.

[....] The proximity of the Other which makes a neighbour a neighbour is that of jouissance: when the presence of the Other becomes unbearable, suffocating, it means that we experience his or her mode of jouissance as too intrusive. And what is contemporary 'postmodern' racism if not a violent reaction to this virtualization of the Other, a return of the experience of the neighbour in his or her (or their) intolerable, traumatic presence? The feature which disturbs the racist in his Other (the way they laugh, the smell of their food...) is thus precisely the little piece of the Real which bears witness to their presence beyond the symbolic order.

p. 155: We must focus on what gets lost when these voids in the text are filled in--what gets lost is the real presence of the Other. Therein lies the paradox: the oppressive and simultaneously elusive presence of the Other subsists in the very absences (holes) of the symbolic texture.

[....] We are thus a long way from bemoaning the loss of contact with a 'real', flesh-and-blood other in cyberspace, in which all we encounter are digital phantoms: our point, rather, is that cyberspace is not spectral enough. That is to say: the status of what we have called the 'real presence of the Other' is inherently spectral: the little piece of the Real by means of which the racist identifies the Other-jouissance is a kind of minimal guarantee of the spectre of the Other who threatens to swallow us or to destroy 'our way of life'.

[....] the Other loses his spectral quality, he turns into an ordinary worldly being towards whom we can maintain a normal distance. In short, we pass from the spectral Real to reality, from the obscene ethereal presence of the Other to the Other who is simply an object of representation.

p. 156: [....] I, as it were, return to a symbiotic relationship with an Other in which the deluge of semblances seems to abolish the dimension of the Real.

In a recent interview, Bill Gates celebrated cyberspace as opening up the prospect of what he called 'friction-free capitalism'--this expression encapsulates perfectly the social fantasy which underlies the ideology of cyberspace capitalism: the fantasy of a wholly transparent, ethereal medium of exchange in which the last trace of material inertia vanishes. The crucial point not to be missed here is that the 'friction' we get rid of in the fantasy of 'friction-free capitalism' does not refer only to the reality of material obstacles which sustain any exchange process, but, above all, to the Real of the traumatic social antagonisms, power relations, and so on, which brand the space of social exchange with a pathological twist. In his Grundrisse manuscript, Marx pointed out how the very material mechanism of a nineteenth-century industrial production site directly materializes the capitalist relationship of domination (the worker as a mere appendix subordinated to the machinery which is owned by the capitalist); mutatis mutandis, the same goes for cyberspace: in the social conditions of late capitalism, the very materiality of cyberspace automatically generates the illusory abstract space of 'friction-free' exchange in which the particularity of the participants' social position is obliterated.

p. 157: [....] what is obfuscated in such direct 'naturalization' of the World Wide Web or market is the set of power relations--political decisions, institutional conditions--within which [....] internet (or market or capitalism...) can only thrive.

This brings us back to the problem of the Master-Signifier: a Master-Signifier is always virtual in the sense of involving some structural ambiguity.

p. 158: [....] What the emptiness of the Master-Signifier conceals is thus the inconsistency of its content (its signified) [....] And again, this virtual status of the Master-Signifier is what gets lost in cyberspace, with its tendency to 'fill in the gaps'.

The suspension of the Master, which reveals impotence, in no way gives rise to liberating effects: the knowledge that 'the Other doesn't exist' (that the Master is impotent, that Power is an imposture) imposes on the subject an even more radical servitude than the traditional subordination to the full authority of the Master.

pp. 159-160: [....] for Lacan, modern science is not just another local narrative grounded in its specific conditions, since it does relate to the (mathematical) Real beneath the symbolic universe.

The Plague of Fantasies (29)

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

pp. 150-151: The supreme example of symbolic virtuality, of course, is that of (the psychoanalytic notion of) castration: the feature which distinguishes symbolic castration from the 'real' kind is precisely its virtual character. That is to say: Freud's notion of castration anxiety has any meaning at all only if we suppose that the threat of castration (the prospect of castration, the 'virtual' castration) already produces real 'castrating' effects. This actuality of the virtual, which defines symbolic castration as opposed to the 'real' kind, has to be connected to the basic paradox of power, which is that symbolic power is by definition virtual, power-in-reserve, the threat of its full use which never actually occurs (when a father loses his temper and explodes, this is by definition a sign of his impotence, painful as it may be). The consequence of this conflation of actual with virtual is a kind of transubstantiation: every actual activity appears as a 'form of appearance' of another 'invisible' power whose status is purely virtual--the 'real' penis turns into the form of appearance of (the virtual) phallus, and so on. That is the paradox of castration: whatever I do in reality, with my 'real' penis, is just redoubling, following as a shadow, another virtual penis whose existence is purely symbolic--that is, phallus as a signifier. Let us recall the example of a judge who, in 'real life', is a weak and corrupt person, but the moment he puts on the insignia of his symbolic mandate, it is the big Other of the symbolic institution which is speaking through him: without the prosthesis of his symbolic title, his 'real power' would instantly disintegrate. And Lacan's point apropos of the phallus as signifier is that the same 'institutional' logic is at work already in the more intimate domain of male sexuality: just as a judge needs his symbolic crutches, his insignia, in order to exert his authority, a man needs a reference to the absent-virtual Phallus if his penis is to exert its potency.

p. 153: The decline of this function of the Master in contemporary Western societies exposes the subject to radical ambiguity in the face of his desire. The media constantly bombard him with requests to choose, addressing him as the subject supposed to know what he really wants (which book, clothes, TV programme, holiday destination...) [....] At a more fundamental level, however, the new media deprive the subject radically of the knowledge of what he wants: they address a thoroughly malleable subject who has constantly to be told what he wants--that is, the very evocation of a choice to be made performatively creates the need for the object of choice. One should bear in mind here that the main function of the Master is to tell the subject what he wants--the need for the Master arises in answer to the subject's confusion, in so far as he does not know what he wants. What happens, then, in the situation of the decline of the Master, when the subject himself is constantly bombarded with the request to give a sign of what he wants? The exact opposite of what one would expect: it is when there is no one to tell you what you really want, when all the burden of the choice is on you, that the big Other dominates you completely, and the choice effectively disappears--is replaced by its mere semblance. One is again tempted to paraphrase here Lacan's well-known reversal of Dostoevsky ('If there is no God, nothing at all is Permitted'): if no forced choice confines the field of free choice, the very freedom of choice disappears.

The Plague of Fantasies (28)

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

p. 138: This is one way to read Lacan's dictum 'Truth has the structure of a fiction': I can articulate the hidden truth about my drives precisely in so far as I am aware that I am simply playing a game on the screen. In cyberspace sex, there is no 'face-to-face', just the external impersonal space in which everything, including my most intimate internal fantasies, can be articulated with no inhibitions....What one encounters here, in this pure 'flux of desire', is, of course, the unpleasant surprise of what the Frankfurt School called 'repressive desublimation': the universe, freed of everyday inhibitions, turns out to be a universe of unbridled sadomasochistic violence and will to domination....The usual complaint against cybersex is that instead of the truly arousing and intensive encounter with another body, we get a distanced, technologically mediated procedure. However, is not precisely this gap, this distance towards immediate Erlebnis, which can also add sexual arousal to a sexual encounter? People use pornography (or other technical sex devices) not only when they lack 'flesh-and-blood' partners but also in order to 'spice up' their 'real' sex life. The status of sexual supplement is thus again radically ambiguous and 'undecidable': it can spoil the game, yet it can also intensify enjoyment.

p. 139: However, this ambiguity, although irreducible, is not symmetrical. What one should introduce here is the elementary Lacanian distinction between imaginary projection-identification and symbolic identification. The most concise definition of symbolic identification is that it consists in assuming a mask which is more real and binding than the true face beneath it [....]

p. 140: [....] what is this middle-mediating level, this third domain interposing itself between 'real life' and 'mere imagination', this domain in which we are not directly dealing with reality, but not with 'mere words' either (since our words do have real effects), if not the symbolic order itself?

p. 141: The subject who suffers from [multiple personality disorder] is rather too firmly anchored in 'true reality': what he lacks is, in a sense, lack itself: the void which accounts for the constitutive dimension of subjectivity. That is to say: the 'multiple Selves' [....] are 'what I want to be', the way I would like to see myself, the representations of my ideal ego; as such, they are like the layers of an onion: there is nothing in the middle, and the subject is this 'nothing' itself. It is therefore crucial to introduce here the distinction between 'Self' ('person') and subject: the Lacanian 'decentred subject' is not simply a multiplicity of good old 'Selves', partial centres; the 'divided' subject does not mean there are simply more Egos/Selves in the same individual [....]. The 'decentrment' is the decentrement of the $ (the void of the subject) with regard to its content ('Self', the bundle of imaginary and/or symbolic identifications); the 'splitting' is the splitting between $ and the phantasmic 'persona' as the 'stuff of the I'. The subject is split even if it possesses only one 'unified' Self, since this split is the very split between $ and Self....In more topological terms: the subject's division is not the division between one Self and another, between two contents, but the division between something and nothing, between the feature of identification and the void.

'Decentrement' thus first designates the ambiguity, the oscillation between symbolic and imaginary identification--the undecidability as to where my true point is, in my 'real' self or in my external mask, with the possible implication that my symbolic mask can be 'more true' than what it conceals, the 'true face' behind it. At a more radical level, it points towards the fact that the very sliding from one identification to another, or among 'multiple selves', presupposes the gap between identification as such and the void of $ (the 'barred subject') which identifies itself--serves as the empty medium of identification. In other words, the very process of shifting among multiple identifications presupposes a kind of empty band which makes the leap from one identity to another possible, and this empty band is the subject itself.

p. 142: [....] Lacan's point is that ego itself is always-already 'alter' with regard to the subject whose ego it is. For that reason, the subject entertains towards it the relationship of acceptance-through-disavowal [....]

p. 143: One can thus say that the phallus is the [....] point at which the very gap that separates the series of mental causes from the series of bodily causes is inscribed into our body....

p. 144: [....] there is no reality without its phantasmic support: social reality [....] can occur only if it is supported by (at least) two fantasies, two phantasmic scenarios.

p. 148: [....] you can have it all only if you pass through the 'zero point,' and agree to lose it all [....] a suicidal moment has to occur in which the hero casts off the fake position and assumes an authentic position. [....] the subject occupies, fills in, the empty place in some pre-existing symbolic network [....] gradually identifies with this symbolic place and fully assumes it, up to the point where he is prepared to stake his life on it.

This line of development is properly materialist: it accounts for the process in the course of which what was at the outset a manipulated movement with a faked Leader can outgrow its initial conditions and turn into an authentic movement. That is to say: much more interesting than the idealist narrative of gradually corrupted innocence is the opposite story: since we all live within ideology, the true enigma is how we can outgrow our 'corrupted' initial condition--how something which was planned as ideological manipulation can all of a sudden miraculously start to lead an authentic life of its own.

The Plague of Fantasies (27)

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

pp. 135-7: At a more fundamental level, however, this 'derailment'--this lack of support, of a fixed instinctual standard, in the co-ordination between the natural rhythm of our body and its surrounding--characterizes man as such: man as such is 'derailed'; he eats more than is 'natural'; he is obsessed with sexuality more than is 'natural': he follows his drives with an excess far beyond 'natural' (instinctual) satisfaction, and this excess of drive has to be 'gentrified' through 'second nature' (man-made institutions and patterns). The old Marxist formula about 'second nature' is thus to be taken more literally than usual: the point is not only that we are never dealing with pure natural needs, that our needs are always-already mediated by the cultural process; moreover, the labour of culture has to reinstate the lost support in natural needs, to re-create a 'second nature' as the recompense for the loss of support in the 'first nature'--the human animal has to reaccustom itself to the most elementary bodily rhythm of sleep, feeding, movement.

What we encounter here is the loop of (symbolic) castration, in which one endeavors to reinstate the lost 'natural' co-ordination on the ladder of desire: on the one hand, one reduces bodily gestures to the necessary minimum (of clicks on the computer mouse...); on the other, one attempts to recover lost bodily fitness by means of jogging, body-building, and so on; on the one hand, one reduces the bodily odours to a minimum (by taking regular showers, etc.); on the other, one attempts to recover these same odours through toilet water and perfumes; and so on. This paradox is condensed in the phallus as the signifier of desire--as the point of inversion at which the very moment of 'spontaneous' natural power turns into an artificial prosthetic element. That is to say: against the standard notion of the phallus as the siege of male 'natural' penetrative-aggressive potency-power (to which one then opposes the 'artificial' playful prosthetic phallus), the point of Lacan's concept of the phallus as a signifier is that the phallus 'as such' is a kind of 'prosthetic', 'artificial' supplement: it designates the point at which the big Other, a decentred agency, supplements the subject's failure. When Judith Butler, in her criticism of Lacan, emphasizes the parallel between mirror-image (ideal ego) and phallic signifier, one should shift the focus to the feature they effectively share: both mirror-image and phallus qua signifier are 'prosthetic' supplements for the subject's foregoing dispersal/failure, for the lack of co-ordination and unity; in both cases, the status of this prosthesis is 'illusory', with the difference that in the first case we are dealing with imaginary illusion (identification with a decentred immobile image), while in the second, the illusion is symbolic; it stands for phallus as pure semblance. The opposition between the 'true', 'natural' phallus and the 'artificial' prosthetic supplement ('dildo') is thus false and misleading: phallus qua signifier is already 'in itself' a prosthetic supplement. (This state of phallus also accounts for Lacan's identification of woman with phallus: what phallus and woman share is the fact that their being is reduced to a pure semblance. In so far as femininity is a masquerade, it stands for phallus as the ultimate semblance.

Back to the threatened limit/surface which separates inside from outside: the very threat to this limit determines today's form of the hysterical question--that is to say: today, hysteria stands predominantly under the sign of vulnerability, of a threat to our bodily and/or psychic identity. We have only to recall the all-pervasiveness of the logic of victimization, from sexual harassment to the dangers of food and tobacco, so that the subject itself is increasingly reduced to 'that which can be hurt'. Today's form of the obsessional question 'Am I alive or dead?' is 'Am I a machine (does my brain really function as a computer) or a living human being (with a spark of spirit or something else that is not reducible to the computer circuit)?; it is not difficult to discern in this alternative the split between A (Autre) and J (jouissance), between the 'big Other', the dead symbolic order, and the Thing, the living substance of enjoyment. According to Sherry Turkle, our reaction to this question goes through three phases: (1) the emphatic assertion of an irreducible difference: man is not a machine, there is something unique about him...; (2) fear and panic when we become aware of all the potential of a machine: it can think, reason, answer our questions...; (3) disavowal, that is, recognition through denial: the guarantee that there is some feature of man inaccessible to the computer (sublime enthusiasm, anxiety...) allows us to treat the computer as a 'living and thinking partner' since 'we know this is only a game, the computer is not really like that'.

The Plague of Fantasies (26)

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

pp. 127-8: When one is dealing with a universal structuring principle,one always automatically assumes that--in principle, precisely--it is possible to apply this principle to all its possible elements, so that the principle's empirical non-realization is merely a matter of contingent circumstances. A symptom, however, is an element which--although the non-realization of the universal principle in it appears to hinge on contingent circumstances--has to remain an exception, that is, the point of suspension of the universal principle: if the universal principle were to apply also to this point, the universal system would itself disintegrate.

In the paragraphs on civil society in his Philosophy of Right, Hegel demonstrates how the growing class of 'rabble [Pöbel]' in modern civil society is not an accidental result of social mismanagement, inadequate government measures, or simple economic bad luck: the inherent structural dynamic of civil society necessarily gives rise to a class which is excluded from its benefits (work, personal dignity, etc.)--a class deprived of elementary human rights, and therefore also exempt from duties towards society, an element within civil society which negates its universal principle, a kind of 'non-Reason inherent in Reason itself'--in short, its symptom. Do we not witness the same phenomenon in today's growth of an underclass which is excluded, sometimes even for generations, from the benefits of liberal-democratic affluent society? Today's 'exceptions' (the homeless, the ghettoized, the permanent unemployed) are the symptom of the late-capitalist universal system, the permanent reminder of how the immanent logic of late capitalism works: the proper capitalist utopia is that through appropriate measures (affirmative action and other forms of state intervention for progressive liberals; the return to self-care and family values for conservatives), this 'exception' could be--in the long term and in principle, at least--abolished. And is not an analogous utopianism at work in the notion of a 'rainbow coalition': in the idea that, at some utopian moment to come, all progressive struggles (for gay and lesbian rights; for the rights of ethnic and religious minorities; the ecological struggle; the feminist struggle; and so on) will be united in a common 'chain of equivalences'?

The necessary failure here is structural: it is not simply that, because of the empirical complexity of the situation, all particular progressive fights will never be united, that 'wrong' chains of equivalences will always occur (say, the enchainment of the fight for African-American ethnic identity with patriarchal and homophobic attitudes), but, rather, that occurrences of 'wrong' enchainments are grounded in the very structuring principle of today's progressive politics of establishing 'chains of equivalences': the very domain of the multitude of particular struggles, with their continuously shifting displacements and condensations, is sustained by the 'repression' of the key role of economic struggle. The Leftist politics of the 'chains of equivalences' among the plurality of struggles is strictly correlative to the abandonment of the analysis of capitalism as a global economic system--that is, to the tacit acceptance of capitalist economic relations and liberal-democratic politics as the unquestioned framework of our social life.

In this precise sense, symptom turns a dispersed collection into a system (in the precise sense this term acquired in German Idealism): we are within a system the moment we breach the gap which separates the a priori form from its contingent content--the moment we envisage the necessity of what appears to be a contingent intrusion which 'spoils the game'. A system indicates the fact that 'there is One' (Lacan's y a de l'un), an inherent element which subverts the universal frame from within; to return to our example: the 'systemic' nature of late-capitalist political struggle means that the chain of equivalences of today's identity struggles is necessarily never completed, that the 'populist temptation' always leads to the 'wrong' chain of equivalences.

p. 129: This necessity of the utter, imbecilic contingency, this enigmatic notion of an unexpected intrusion which none the less pops up with absolute inevitability (and has to pop up, since its non-arrival would entail the dissolution of the whole domain of the search for the Goal), is the highest speculative mystery, the true 'dialectical synthesis of contingency and necessity' to be opposed to platitudes about the deeper necessity which realizes itself through surface contingencies. One is tempted to contend that when Hegel makes his 'panlogistic' claim according to which 'Reason rules the world' (or 'what is actual is reasonable'), its actual content is this kind of necessary intrusion of a contingency: when one is sure that 'Reason rules the world', this means that one can be sure that a contingency will always emerge which will prevent the direct realization of our Goal.

The Plague of Fantasies (25)

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

pp. 120-121: This is also one way of specifying the meaning of Lacan's assertion of the subject's constitutive 'decentrement': its point is not that my subjective experience is regulated by objective unconscious mechanisms which are 'decentred' with regard to my self-experience and, as such, beyond my control (a point asserted by every materialist) but, rather, something much more unsettling: I am deprived of even my most intimate 'subjective' experience, the way things 'really seem to me', that of the fundamental fantasy which constitutes and guarantees the kernel of my being, since I can never consciously experience and assume it....According to the standard view, the dimension which is constitutive of subjectivity is that of the phenomenal (self-)experience--I am a subject the moment I can say to myself: 'No matter what unknown mechanism governs my acts, perceptions and thoughts, nobody can take from me what I see and feel now.' Lacan turns this standard view around: the 'subject of the signifier' emerges only when a key aspect of the subject's phenomenal (self-)experience (his fundamental fantasy) becomes inaccessible to him; that is to say: is 'primordially repressed'. At its most radical, the Unconscious is the inaccessible phenomenon, not the objective mechanism which regulates my phenomenal experience.

p. 121: [....] fantasy is objectively subjective (it designates an innermost subjective content, a product of fantasizing, which, paradoxically, is 'desubjectivized', rendered inaccessible to the subject's immediate experience).

pp. 121-122: It would, however, be a serious misunderstanding to read this radical decentrement involved in the notion of fetishism (I am deprived of my innermost beliefs, fantasies, etc.) as 'the end of Cartesian subjectivity'. What this deprivation (i.e. the fact that a phenomenological reconstitution which would generate 'reified' belief out of the presupposed 'first-person' belief necessarily fails, the fact that substitution is original, the fact that even in the case of the most intimate beliefs, fantasies, etc., the big Other can 'do it for me') effectively undermines is the standard notion of the so-called 'Cartesian Theatre,' the notion of a central Screen of Consciousness which forms the focus of subjectivity, where (at a phenomenal level) 'things really happen'. In clear contrast, the Lacanian subject qua $, the void of self-referential negativity, is strictly correlative to the primordial decentrement: the very fact that I can be deprived of even my innermost psychic ('mental') content, that the big Other (or fetish) can laugh for me, believe for me, and so on, is what makes me $, the 'barred' subject, the pure void with no positive substantial content. The Lacanian subject is thus empty in the radical sense of being deprived of even the most minimal phenomenological support: there is no wealth of experiences to fill in its void. And Lacan's premiss is that the Cartesian reduction of the subject to pure cogito already implies such a reduction of every substantial content, including my innermost 'mental' attitudes--the notion of 'Cartesian Theatre' as the original locus of subjectivity is already a 'reification' of the subject qua $, the pure void of negativity.

Two interconnected conclusions are thus to be drawn from this chapter. In contrast to the commonplace according to which the new media turn us into passive consumers who just stare blindly at the screen, one should claim that the so-called threat of the new media lies in the fact that they deprive us of our passivity, of our authentic passive experience, and thus prepare us for the mindless frenetic activity. In contrast to the notion that we are dealing with a subject the moment an entity displays signs of a phantasmic 'inner life' which cannot be reduced to external behaviour, one should claim that what characterizes subjectivity is rather the gap which separates the two: fantasy, at its most elementary, is inaccessible to the subject, and it is this inaccessibility which makes the subject 'empty'. We thus obtain a relationship which totally subverts the standard notion of the subject who directly experiences himself, his 'inner states': an 'impossible' relationship between the empty, non-phenomenal subject and the phenomena which forever remain 'desubjectivized', inaccessible to the subject--the very relationship registered by Lacan's formula of fantasy, $ ◊ a.