“I would prefer not to” is to be taken literally:

Excerpted from The Parallax View by Slavoj Žižek:

And this brings us back to Melville’s Bartleby. His “I would prefer not to” is to be taken literally: it says “I would prefer not to,” not “I don’t prefer (or care) to”—so we are back at Kant’s distinction between negative and in finite judgment. In his refusal of the Master’s order, Bartleby does not negate the predicate; rather, he affirms a non-predicate: he does not say that he doesn’t want to do it; he says that he prefers (wants) not to do it. This is how we pass from the politics of “resistance” or “protestation,” which para-sitizes upon what it negates, to a politics which opens up a new space outside the hegemonic position and its negation.We can imagine the varieties of such a gesture in today’s public space: not only the obvious “There are great chances of a new career here! Join us!”—“I would prefer not to”; but also “Discover the depths of your true self, find inner peace!”—“I would prefer not to”; or “Are you aware how our environment is endangered? Do something for ecology!”—“I would prefer not to”; or “What about all the racial and sexual injustices that we witness all around us? Isn’t it time to do more?”—“I would prefer not to.” This is the gesture of subtraction at its purest, the reduction of all qualitative differences to a purely formal minimal difference.

Are we not making the same point here as Hardt and Negri in Empire, who also refer to Bartleby as the figure of resistance, of saying No! to the existing universe of social machinery? The difference is double. First, for HN, Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” is interpreted as merely the first move of, as it were, clearing the table, of acquiring a distance toward the existing social universe; what is then needed is a move toward the painstaking work of constructing a new community—if we remain stuck at the Bartleby stage, we end up in a suicidal marginal position with no consequences.... From our point of view, however, this, precisely, is the conclusion to be avoided: in its political mode, Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” is not the starting point of “abstract negation” which should then be overcome in the patient positive work of the “deter-minate negation” of the existing social universe, but a kind of arche, the underlying principle that sustains the entire movement: far from “overcoming” it, the subsequent work of construction, rather, gives body to it.

This brings us back to the central theme of this book: the parallax shift. Bartleby’s attitude is not merely the first, preparatory, stage for the second, more “constructive,” work of forming a new alternative order; it is the very source and background of this order, its permanent foundation. The difference between Bartleby’s gesture of withdrawal and the formation of a new order is—again, and for the last time—that of parallax: the very frantic and engaged activity of constructing a new order is sustained by an underlying “I would prefer not to” which forever reverberates in it—or, as Hegel
might have put it, the new postrevolutionary order does not negate its founding gesture, the explosion of the destructive fury that wipes away the Old; it merely gives body to this negativity. The difficulty of imagining the New is the difficulty of imagining Bartleby in power. Thus the logic of the move from the superego-parallax to the Bartleby-parallax is very precise: it is the move from something to nothing, from the gap between two “somethings” to the gap that separates a something from nothing, from the void of its own place.That is to say: in a “revolutionary situation,” what, exactly, happens to the gap between the public Law and its obscene superego supplement? It is not that, in a kind of metaphysical unity, the gap is simply abolished, that we obtain only a public regulation of social life, deprived of any hidden obscene supplement. The gap remains, but reduced to a structural minimum: to the “pure” difference between the set of social regulations and the void of their absence. In other words, Bartleby’s gesture is what remains of the supplement to the Law when its place it emptied of all its obscene superego content.

We should draw the same conclusions at the most general level of ontological difference itself: it brings to an extreme the traditional philosophical difference between the physical level and the metaphysical level, between the empirical and the transcendental, by reducing it to the “minimal” difference between what is, something, and—not another, “higher,” reality, but—nothing. Overcoming metaphysics does not mean reducing the metaphysical dimension to ordinary physical reality (or, in a more “Marxist” way, showing how all metaphysical specters arise from the antagonisms of real life), but reducing the difference between material reality and another, “higher” reality to the immanent difference, gap, between this reality and its own void; that is, to discern the void that separates material reality from itself, that makes it “non-all.” And the same goes for the ultimate parallax of political economy, the gap between the reality of everyday material social life (people interacting among themselves and with nature, suffering, consuming, and so on) and the Real of the speculative dance of Capital, its self-propelling movement which seems to be disconnected from ordinary reality. We can experience this gap very tangibly when we visit a country where life is obviously in a shambles, we see a lot of ecological decay and human misery; the econ- omist’s report we read afterward however, informs us that the country’s economic situation is “financially sane.”. . . Marx’s point here is not primarily to reduce the second dimension to the fi rst (to demonstrate how the supranatural mad dance of commodities arises out of the antagonisms of “real life”); his point is, rather, that we cannot properly grasp the first (the social reality of material production and social interaction) without the second: it is the self-propelling metaphysical dance of Capital that runs the show, that provides the key to real-life developments and catastrophes.

Second (and more important, perhaps), the withdrawal expressed by “I would prefer not to” is not to be reduced to the attitude of “saying no to the Empire” but, first and foremost, to all the wealth of what I have called the rumspringa of resistance, all the forms of resisting which help the system to reproduce itself by ensuring our participation in it—today, “I would prefer not to” is not primarily “I would prefer not to participate in the market economy, in capitalist competition and profiteering,” but—much more problematically for some—“I would prefer not to give to charity to support a Black orphan in Africa, engage in the struggle to prevent oil-drilling in a wildlife swamp, send books to educate our liberal-feminist-spirited women in Afghanistan. . . .” A distance toward the direct hegemonic interpellation—“Involve yourself in market competition, be active and productive!”—is the very mode of operation of today’s ideology: today’s ideal subject says to himself: “I am well aware that the whole business of social competition and material success is just an empty game, that my true Self is elsewhere!” If anything, “I would prefer not to” expresses, rather, a refusal to play the “Western Buddhist” game of “social reality is just an illusory game.”

― Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View

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 I WOULD PREFER NOT TO.  

Bartleby, the Scrivener: “I would prefer not to.”

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Reading Žižek – Where to Start?

ZIZEK BOOKS

Slavoj Žižek: Freud Lives!

In recent years, it’s often been said that psychoanalysis is dead. New advances in the brain sciences have finally put it where it belongs, alongside religious confessors and dream-readers in the lumber-room of pre-scientific obscurantist searches for hidden meaning. As Todd Dufresne put it, no figure in the history of human thought was more wrong about all the fundamentals – with the exception of Marx, some would add. The Black Book of Communism was followed last year by the Black Book of Psychoanalysis, which listed all the theoretical mistakes and instances of clinical fraud perpetrated by Freud and his followers. In this way, at least, the profound solidarity of Marxism and psychoanalysis is now there for all to see.

A century ago, Freud included psychoanalysis as one of what he described as the three ‘narcissistic illnesses’. First, Copernicus demonstrated that the Earth moves around the Sun, thereby depriving humans of their central place in the universe. Then Darwin demonstrated that we are the product of evolution, thereby depriving us of our privileged place among living beings. Finally, by making clear the predominant role of the unconscious in psychic processes, Freud showed that the ego is not master even in its own house. Today, scientific breakthroughs seem to bring further humiliation: the mind is merely a machine for data-processing, our sense of freedom and autonomy merely a ‘user’s illusion’. In comparison, the conclusions of psychoanalysis seem rather conservative.
Is psychoanalysis outdated? It certainly appears to be. It is outdated scientifically, in that the cognitivist-neurobiologist model of the human mind has superseded the Freudian model; it is outdated in the psychiatric clinic, where psychoanalytic treatment is losing ground to drug treatment and behavioural therapy; and it is outdated in society more broadly, where the notion of social norms which repress the individual’s sexual drives doesn’t hold up in the face of today’s hedonism. But we should not be too hasty. Perhaps we should instead insist that the time of psychoanalysis has only just arrived.

One of the consistent themes of today’s conservative cultural critique is that, in our permissive era, children lack firm limits and prohibitions. This frustrates them, driving them from one excess to another. Only a firm boundary set up by some symbolic authority can guarantee stability and satisfaction – the satisfaction that comes of violating the prohibition. In order to make clear the way negation functions in the unconscious, Freud cited the comment one of his patients made after recounting a dream about an unknown woman: ‘Whoever this woman in my dream is, I know she is not my mother.’ A clear proof, for Freud, that the woman was his mother. What better way to characterise the typical patient of today than to imagine his reaction to the same dream: ‘Whoever this woman in my dream is, I’m sure she has something to do with my mother!’

Traditionally, psychoanalysis has been expected to enable the patient to overcome the obstacles preventing his or her access to normal sexual satisfaction: if you are not able to get it, visit an analyst and he will help you to lose your inhibitions. Now that we are bombarded from all sides by the injunction to ‘Enjoy!’, psychoanalysis should perhaps be regarded differently, as the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy: not ‘not allowed to enjoy’, but relieved of the pressure to enjoy.
Nowhere is this paradoxical change in the role of psychoanalytic interpretation clearer than in the case of dreams. The conventional understanding of Freud’s theory of dreams is that a dream is the phantasmic realisation of some censored unconscious desire, which is as a rule of a sexual nature. At the beginning of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud provides a detailed interpretation of his own dream about ‘Irma’s injection’. The interpretation is surprisingly reminiscent of an old Soviet joke: ‘Did Rabinovitch win a new car on the state lottery?’ ‘In principle, yes, he did. Only it was not a car but a bicycle, it was not new but old, and he did not win it, it was stolen from him!’ Is a dream the manifestation of the dreamer’s unconscious sexual desire? In principle, yes. Yet in the dream Freud chose to demonstrate his theory of dreams, his desire is neither sexual nor unconscious, and, moreover, it’s not his own.

The dream begins with a conversation between Freud and his patient Irma about the failure of her treatment because of an infection caused by an injection. In the course of the conversation, Freud approaches her and looks deep into her mouth. He is confronted with the unpleasant sight of scabs and curly structures like nasal bones. At this point, the horror suddenly changes to comedy. Three doctors, friends of Freud, among them one called Otto, appear and begin to enumerate, in ridiculous pseudo-professional jargon, possible (and mutually exclusive) causes of Irma’s infection. If anyone had been to blame, it transpires in the dream, it is Otto, because he gave Irma the injection: ‘Injections ought not to be made so thoughtlessly,’ the doctors conclude, ‘and probably the syringe had not been clean.’ So, the ‘latent thought’ articulated in the dream is neither sexual nor unconscious, but Freud’s fully conscious wish to absolve himself of responsibility for the failure of Irma’s treatment. How does this fit with the thesis that dreams manifest unconscious sexual desires?
A crucial refinement is necessary here. The unconscious desire which animates the dream is not merely the dream’s latent thought, which is translated into its explicit content, but another unconscious wish, which inscribes itself in the dream through the Traumarbeit (‘dream-work’), the process whereby the latent thought is distorted into the dream’s explicit form. Here lies the paradox of the dream-work: we want to get rid of a pressing, disturbing thought of which we are fully conscious, so we distort it, translating it into the hieroglyph of the dream. However, it is through this distortion that another, much more fundamental desire encodes itself in the dream, and this desire is unconscious and sexual.

What is the ultimate meaning of Freud’s dream? In his own analysis, Freud focuses on the dream-thought, on his ‘superficial’ wish to be blameless in his treatment of Irma. However, in the details of his interpretation there are hints of deeper motivations. The dream-encounter with Irma reminds Freud of several other women. The oral examination recalls another patient, a governess, who had appeared a ‘picture of youthful beauty’ until he looked into her mouth. Irma’s position by a window reminds him of a meeting with an ‘intimate woman friend’ of Irma’s of whom he ‘had a very high opinion’; thinking about her now, Freud has ‘every reason to suppose that this other lady, too, was a hysteric’. The scabs and nasal bones remind him of his own use of cocaine to reduce nasal swelling, and of a female patient who, following his example, had developed an ‘extensive necrosis of the nasal mucous membrane’. His consultation with one of the doctors brings to mind an occasion on which Freud’s treatment of a woman patient gave rise to a ‘severe toxic state’, to which she subsequently ‘succumbed’; the patient had the same name as his eldest daughter, Mathilde. The unconscious desire of the dream is Freud’s wish to be the ‘primordial father’ who possesses all the women Irma embodies in the dream.

However, the dream presents a further enigma: whose desire does it manifest? Recent commentaries clearly establish that the true motivation behind the dream was Freud’s desire to absolve Fliess, his close friend and collaborator, of responsibility and guilt. It was Fliess who botched Irma’s nose operation, and the dream’s desire is not to exculpate Freud himself, but his friend, who was, at this point, Freud’s ‘subject supposed to know’, the object of his transference. The dream dramatises his wish to show that Fliess wasn’t responsible for the medical failure, that he wasn’t lacking in knowledge. The dream does manifest Freud’s desire – but only insofar as his desire is already the Other’s (Fliess’s) desire.

Why do we dream? Freud’s answer is deceptively simple: the ultimate function of the dream is to enable the dreamer to stay asleep. This is usually interpreted as bearing on the kinds of dream we have when some external disturbance – noise, for example – threatens to wake us. In such a situation, the sleeper immediately begins to imagine a situation which incorporates this external stimulus and thereby is able to continue sleeping for a while longer; when the external stimulus becomes too strong, he finally wakes up. Are things really so straightforward? In another famous example from The Interpretation of Dreams, an exhausted father, whose young son has just died, falls asleep and dreams that the child is standing by his bed in flames, whispering the horrifying reproach: ‘Father, can’t you see I’m burning?’ Soon afterwards, the father wakes to discover that a fallen candle has set fire to his dead son’s shroud. He had smelled the smoke while asleep, and incorporated the image of his burning son into his dream to prolong his sleep. Had the father woken up because the external stimulus became too strong to be contained within the dream-scenario? Or was it the obverse, that the father constructed the dream in order to prolong his sleep, but what he encountered in the dream was much more unbearable even than external reality, so that he woke up to escape into that reality.

In both dreams, there is a traumatic encounter (the sight of Irma’s throat, the vision of the burning son); but in the second dream, the dreamer wakes at this point, while in the first, the horror gives way to the arrival of the doctors. The parallel offers us the key to understanding Freud’s theory of dreams. Just as the father’s awakening from the second dream has the same function as the sudden change of tone in the first, so our ordinary reality enables us to evade an encounter with true trauma.
Adorno said that the Nazi motto ‘Deutschland, erwache!’ actually meant its opposite: if you responded to this call, you could continue to sleep and dream (i.e. to avoid engagement with the real of social antagonism). In the first stanza of Primo Levi’s poem ‘Reveille’ the concentration camp survivor recalls being in the camp, asleep, dreaming intense dreams about returning home, eating, telling his relatives his story, when, suddenly, he is woken up by the Polish kapo’s command ‘Wstawac!’ (‘Get up!’). In the second stanza, he is at home after the war, well fed, having told his story to his family, when, suddenly, he imagines hearing again the shout, ‘Wstawac!’ The reversal of the relationship between dream and reality from the first stanza to the second is crucial. Their content is formally the same – the pleasant domestic scene is interrupted by the injunction ‘Get up!’ – but in the first, the dream is cruelly interrupted by the wake-up call, while in the second, reality is interrupted by the imagined command. We might imagine the second example from The Interpretation of Dreams as belonging to the Holocaust survivor who, unable to save his son from the crematorium, is haunted afterwards by his reproach: ‘Vater, siehst du nicht dass ich verbrenne?’
In our ‘society of the spectacle’, in which what we experience as everyday reality more and more takes the form of the lie made real, Freud’s insights show their true value. Consider the interactive computer games some of us play compulsively, games which enable a neurotic weakling to adopt the screen persona of a macho aggressor, beating up other men and violently enjoying women. It’s all too easy to assume that this weakling takes refuge in cyberspace in order to escape from a dull, impotent reality. But perhaps the games are more telling than that. What if, in playing them, I articulate the perverse core of my personality which, because of ethico-social constraints, I am not able to act out in real life? Isn’t my virtual persona in a way ‘more real than reality’? Isn’t it precisely because I am aware that this is ‘just a game’ that in it I can do what I would never be able to in the real world? In this precise sense, as Lacan put it, the Truth has the structure of a fiction: what appears in the guise of dreaming, or even daydreaming, is sometimes the truth on whose repression social reality itself is founded. Therein resides the ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.

― Slavoj Zizek, How To Read Lacan

Reading Žižek – Where to Start?

 

Slavoj Zizek: From Joyce-the-Symptom...

What does Lacan's thesis on "Joyce-the-symptom" aim at? Joyce's famous statement that he wrote Finnegans Wake in order to keep literary historians busy for the next 400 years has to be read against the background of Lacan's assertion that, within a psychoanalytic cure, a symptom is always addressed at the analyst and as such points forward towards its interpretation. The "modernism" of Joyce resides in the fact that his works, at least Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, are not simply external to their interpretation but, as it were, in advance take into account their possible interpretations and enter into dialogue with them. Insofar as an interpretation or theoretical explanation of a work of art endeavors to frame its object, one can say that this modernist dialectics provides another example of how the frame is always included in, is a part of, the framed content: in modernism, theory about the work is comprised in the work, the work is a kind of preemptive strike at possible theories about itself. On that account, it is inappropriate to reproach Joyce for no longer writing for a naive reader capable of an immediate consumption of his works, but for a "reflected" reader who is only able to read with an eye on possible theoretical interpretations of what he is reading-in short, for a literary scientist. Such an approach in no way diminishes our enjoyment in the work: quite the contrary, it supplements our reading with a surplus-enjoyment which is one of the trademarks of true modernism.

What interests us here, however, is the general background of the all-pervasive reflectivity of everyday life within which this Joycean attitude is inscribed. In one of his letters, Freud refers to the well-known joke about the newly married man who, when asked by his friend how his wife looks, how beautiful she is, answers: "I personally don't like her, but that's a matter of taste." The paradox of this answer does not point towards an attitude of selfish calculation ("True, I don't like her, but I married her for other reasons-her wealth, the social influence of her parents..."). Its crucial feature is that by providing this answer, the subject pretends to assume the standpoint of universality from which "to be likeable" appears as an idiosyncrasy, as a contingent pathological feature which, as such, is not to be taken into consideration. The joke therefore relies on the impossible/untenable position of enunciation of the newly married: from this position, marriage appears as an act which belongs to the domain of universal symbolic determinations and should as such be independent of personal idiosyncrasies-as if the very notion of marriage does not involve precisely the pathological fact of liking a particular person for no particular rational reason.

One encounters the same impossible position of enunciation in contemporary postmodern racism. We all remember one of the highlights of Bernstein's West Side Story, "Officer Krupke," the song in which the delinquents provide the amazed policeman with the socio-psychological explanation of their attitude: they are victims of disadvantageous social circumstances and unfavorable family relations. When asked about the reasons for their violence against foreigners, neo-Nazi skinheads in Germany tend to give the same answers: they suddenly start to talk like social workers, sociologists and social psychologists, quoting diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, etc. The same goes even for Zhirinovsky: in interviews to the "enlightened" Western press, he also speaks the language of pop-sociologists and psychologists. That is to say, there are two main pop-scientific cliches about the rise of populist demagogues: they feed on the frustrations of ordinary people at the economic crisis, and social insecurity; the populist totalitarian leader is a distorted personality who, by means of his aggressivity, abreacts the traumatic personal past, the lack of genuine parental love and support in his childhood — the very two reasons quoted by Zhirinovsky when he is asked to explain his success: "If there were a healthy economy and security for the people, I would lose all the votes I have."; "It seems to have been my fate that I never experienced real love or friendship." This is what Lacan had in mind when he claimed that "there is no metalanguage": what Zhirinovsky or skinheads assert is a lie even if, or rather precisely insofar as, it is factually true — their assertions are belied by their very position of enunciation, i.e. by the neutral, disengaged position from which the victim is able to tell the objective truth about itself. And it is easy to imagine a more theoretically updated version of such a false attitude — a racist, for example, who claims he is not the true author of his violent verbal outbursts against the African-Americans or Jews or Arabs: the charges against him presuppose traditional metaphysical notions which have to be deconstructed; in his performative utterance, which by itself perpetrated an act of violence, he was merely referring to, quoting, drawing from the historically available stock of insults, so that the entire historical tradition, not himself, must be put to trial; the very notion that there exists a self-identical responsible subject who can be held accountable for racist outbursts is an illusion already denounced by Nietzsche who proved that the deed or rather the doing is original, and that the "doer" behind the doing is a symbolic fiction, a metaphysical hypostasis, etc.

This impossible position of enunciation characterizes the contemporary cynical attitude: in it, ideology can lay its cards on the table, reveal the secret of its functioning, and still continue to function. Exemplary is here Robert Zemeckis' Forest Gump, a film which offers as the point of identification, as the ideal ego, a simpleton, and thus directly asserts stupidity as a key category of ideology. The principal ideological axis of Forest Gump is the opposition of the hero and his life-long love. Gump is a blessedly-innocent simpleton with a "heart of gold" who executes the orders of his superiors undisturbed by any ideological qualms or fanatical devotions. Renouncing even a minimum of "cognitive mapping"(Jameson), he is caught in a tautological symbolic machine towards which he lacks any ironic distance — a passive witness and/or participant of great historico-political battles whose significance he doesn't even try to understand (he never asks himself why he has to fight in Vietnam, why he is suddenly sent to China to play ping-pong, etc.). His love is a girl fully engaged in the ideological struggles of the last decades (anti-Vietnam demonstrations, etc.) — in a word, she participates in history and endeavours to understand what is effectively going on. The first thing to note about the film is that Gump is ideology at its purest: the opposition of Gump and his girlfriend does not stand for the opposition between the extra-ideological zero-degree of social life and ideological struggles which divide the social body; it rather exemplifies the tension between Ideology in its zero-degree (the meaningless ideological machine) and the antagonisms Ideology endeavours to master and/or render invisible. Gump, this slow-witted, automatic executor of orders, who doesn't even try to understand anything, gives body to the impossible pure subject of Ideology, to the ideal of a subject in whom Ideology would function flawlessly. The ideological mystification of the film resides in the fact that it presents Ideology at its purest as non-ideology, as extra-ideological good-natured participation in social life. That is to say, the ultimate lesson of the film is: do not try to understand, obey, and you shall succeed! (Gump ends up as a famous millionaire.) His girl, who endeavours to acquire a kind of "cognitive mapping" of the social situation, is symbolically punished for her thirst of knowledge: at the end of the film, she dies of AIDS. Forest Gump reveals the secret of ideology (the fact that its successful functioning involves the stupidity of its subjects) in such an open way that, in different historical circumstances, it would undoubtedly have subversive effects; today, however, in the era of cynicism, ideology can afford to reveal the secret of its functioning (its constitutive idiocy, which the traditional, pre-cynical ideology had to keep secret) without in the least affecting its efficiency.

This cynical attitude also provides a key for today's resurgent ethnic and religious "fundamentalisms". Lacan already emphasized how a cynic doesn't believe in words (in the "symbolic efficiency"), but only in the real of jouissance — and is the Nation—Thing not today's supreme embodiment of political jouissance? This accounts for the paradox that, today, the cynically "enlightened" intellectuals who are no longer able to believe in any social Cause are the first to fall prey to "fanatical" ethnic fundamentalism. The link between cynicism and (ethnic or religious) fundamentalism does not concern primarily the fact that, in today's "society of spectacle", fundamentalism itself is just another mediatic show and, as such, feigned, a cynical mask of power interests, but rather its opposite: the cynical distance itself relies on the unacknowledged attachment to an ethnic (or religious) Thing — the more this attachment is disavowed, the more violent its sudden eruption... We should always bear in mind that, within our ideological space, the reference to one's Nation is the supreme form of ideology in the guise of anti— or non-ideology (in short, of ideology tout court): "let's leave aside our petty political and ideological struggles, it's the fate of our nation which is at stake now".

We encounter a homologous falsity in the attitude of those traditional psychoanalysts who prefer their patients to be "naive" and ignorant of psychoanalytic theory — this ignorance allegedly enables them to produce "purer" symptoms, i.e. symptoms in which their unconscious is not too much distorted by their rational knowledge. For example, the incestuous dream of a patient who already knows all about the Oedipus complex will be far more distorted, resorting to more complex strategies to conceal its desire, than the dream of a "naive" patient. We all have a longing for the good old heroic times of psychoanalysis, in which a patient told his analyst "Last night, I had a dream about killing a dragon and then advancing through a thick forest to a castle...", whereupon the analyst triumphantly answered "Elementary, my dear patient! Dragon is your father and the dream expresses your desire to kill him in order to return to the safe haven of the maternal castle...". Lacan's wager is here exactly the opposite: the subject of psychoanalysis is the modern subject of science, which means — among other things — that his symptoms are by definition never "innocent", they are always addressed to the analyst qua subject supposed to know (their meaning) and thus as it were imply, point towards, their own interpretation. For that reason, one is quite justified in saying that we have symptoms which are Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian, etc., i.e. whose reality involves implicit reference to some psychoanalytic theory. Today, the "free associations" of a typical educated analysand consist for the most part of attempts to provide a psychoanalytic explanation of their disturbances...

So, at the political level, the problem today is how to counteract this "reflected" racism: is there a specific kind of knowledge which renders impossible the act, a knowledge which can no longer be co-opted by cynical distance ("I know what I am doing, but I am nevertheless doing it")? Or must we leave behind the domain of knowledge and have recourse to a direct, extra-symbolic, bodily intervention, or to an intuitive "Enlightenment", a change of subjective attitude, beyond knowledge? The fundamental wager of psychoanalysis is that there exists such a knowledge which produces effects in the Real, that we can "undo things (symptoms) with words" — the whole point of psychoanalytic cure is that it operates exclusively at the level of "knowledge" (words), yet has effects in the Real of bodily symptoms.

How, then, are we to specify this "knowledge" which, even in our era of cynicism, brings about effects in the Real? Perhaps the best approach to it is via the opposition between violent coercion and "genuine" subordination. This opposition, of course, is never to be accepted at its face value: subordination (of women to men in a patriarchal society, of a "lower" to a "higher" race, of a colonized to the colonizer, etc.), precisely when it is experienced as "genuine" and "sincere" by the subordinated subjects themselves, presents a case of ideological delusion beneath which critical analysis should be able to discern the traces of (internalized, "naturalized") external brute coercion. However, what about the far more sinister inverse operation which makes us (mis)perceive as mere coercion to which we submit ourselves in a wholly external way, something that effectively has a hold on us "from within"? In a first approach, i.e. at an immediate-abstract level, our yielding to the raw coercion is, of course, to be contrasted to a relationship towards some "genuine" authority in which I experience my subordination to it as the fulfillment of my personality, not as something that thwarts my self-realization — by way of subordinating myself to a genuine authority, I realize my own essence (in a traditional patriarchal society, for example, a woman is supposed to fulfill her inner vocation by subordinating herself to her husband). The "spirit" of such an immediate opposition between external coercion and genuine subordination is, however, profoundly anti-Hegelian: Hegel's wager is precisely to demonstrate how the two opposites pass over into each other (see his exemplary analyses of "noble" and "low" consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit).

On the one hand, a close dialectical analysis renders visible how our external subordination to brutal coercion is never simply external, i.e. how this very experience of the force to which we yield as simply external is an illusion of abstract consciousness. Suffice it to recall the traditional liberal attitude towards State as a "mechanical" instrument of external coercion which limits my freedom: what this liberal individualist attitude fails to notice is how this limitation of my freedom involved in the notion of a citizen is not external but the self-limitation which actually increases my true freedom, i.e. elevates me to the level of a free rational being — that part of me which resists the State order, which experiences this order as a threat, is the unfree aspect of my personality. In it, I am effectively enslaved to the contingent "pathological" features of my non-rational nature, to the insignificant whims of my particular nature — as such, this part has to be sacrificed if I am to become a truly free individual. Perhaps an even better example is provided by an adolescent who resists his father's authority and experiences it as external "repression", misrecognizing thereby the extent to which this authority holds him in sway "from within" and guarantees the integrity of his self-experience — witness the disorientation, the sense of loss, which takes place when the paternal authority effectively disintegrates ... As a true Hegelian, Lacan was fully justified in inverting the commonplace about the liberating potential of the unconscious impulses which resist the "repression" of the Authority to which we submit consciously: the Master is unconscious, he exerts his hold upon us in the unconscious. On the other hand, insofar as "human being" implies the infinite freedom of subjectivity, an element of falsehood sticks to every allegedly "genuine" subordination: beneath it, there always lurks a hypocritical calculation or a fear of raw violence. The dialectic of liberation resides precisely in breaking the spell of "genuine" authority, in denouncing it as a mask of brutal coercion; exemplary is here (again) the case of the feminist critique that discerns the traces of brutal coercion in what, within the patriarchal space, appears as woman's "natural" vocation. At a more general level, one can assert that "progress" does not consist only in reducing the amount of violent coercion but also in recognizing violent coercion in what was previously perceived as the "natural" state of things. The logic of this recognition involves the properly Hegelian dialectical tension between the In-itself and the For-itself: it is wrong simply to claim that the patriarchal subordination of women always was founded on violent coercion and that liberating reflection just brings to light an already existing state of things; yet it is no less wrong to claim that, prior to feminist critical reflection, things just took their course without any antagonistic tension and that violence becomes violence only when it is experienced as such. The paradox of reflection is that it retroactively makes the past state of things what it always-already "truly was": by means of the feminist retroactive gaze, the past is retroactively posited in its "truth".

On that account, one should be very careful not to reify the psychic impact of a certain sexual practice into its immediate property. For some feminists, for example, fellatio stands for the worst humiliation and debasement of the woman — what if, on the contrary, we imagine an intersubjective relationship in which fellatio bears witness to men's humiliation, to his abasement to a passive bearer of his phallus, a plaything in woman's hands? Our point here is not merely that the relationship of domination in a sexual contact is always tainted with ambiguity, but that it is the very ambiguity, "undecidability", of a Master/Servant relationship that "sexualizes" it. In the minimal dispositif of sexual intercourse, the one stares blindly, intoxicated with enjoyment, while the other "works" — who is here the Master and who the Servant? Who effectively serves whom as the means of his or her enjoyment? Is not the apparent Master the Slave of his Slave, is not the true Master he who demands of his Slave that he play the role of Master? In the standard (hetero)sexual act, man "takes", "makes use of", a woman — but with a small shift in perspective, it is possible to assert that he effectively reduces himself to an instrument of her enjoyment, subordinating himself to the insatiable superego-injunction "Encore!" (the title of Lacan's Seminar XX).

What we must avoid here, apropos of such dialectical passages of an opposite into its other, is the lure of symmetry: Hegel's point is not that the two reversals (of "genuine" authority into external coercion and vice versa) are somehow exchangeable, that they follow the same logic. Their asymmetry is best epitomized by means of reference to the couple of cynicism and irony. The fundamental gesture of cynicism is to denounce "genuine authority" as a pose, whose sole effective content is raw coercion or submission for the sake of some material gain, while an ironist doubts if a cold calculating utilitarian is really what he pretends to be, i.e,. he suspects that this appearance of calculating distance can conceal a much deeper commitment. The cynicist is quick to denounce the ridiculous pretense of solemn authority; the ironist is able to discern true attachment in dismissive disdain or in feigned indifference. In matters of love, for example, the cynicist excels in denigrating exalted declarations of deep spiritual affinity as a stratagem to exploit sexually or otherwise the partner, whereas the ironist is prone to ascertain, in a melancholic mood, how the brutal making sport of our partner, even humiliation, often just expresses our unreadiness to admit to ourselves the full depth of our attachment... Perhaps, the artist of irony par excellence was none other than Mozart — suffice it to recall his masterpiece Cosi fan tutte. The trio Soave il vento, of course, can be read in a cynical way, as the faked imitation of a sad farewell which barely conceals a glee at the coming erotic intrigue; the ironic point of it is that the subjects who sing it, inclusive of don Alfonzo, the manipulator who staged the event, are nonetheless authentically taken with the sadness of the situation — this unexpected authenticity is what eludes the grasp of the cynicist.

In a first approach, cynicism may appear to involve a much more radical distance than irony: is irony not a benevolent ridicule "from above", from within the confines of the symbolic order, i.e. the distance of a subject who views the world from the elevated position of the big Other towards those who are enticed by vulgar earthly pleasures, an awareness of their ultimate vanity, while cynicism relies on the "earthly" point-of-view which undermines "from below" our belief in the binding power of the Word, of the symbolic pact, and advances the substance of enjoyment as the only thing that really matters — Socrates versus Diogenes the Cynicist? The true relationship is, however, the reverse: from the right premise that "the big Other doesn't exist", i.e. that the symbolic order is a fiction, the cynicist draws the wrong conclusion that the big Other doesn't "function", that its role can simply be discounted — due to his failure to notice how the symbolic fiction nonetheless regulates his relationship to the real of enjoyment, he remains all the more enslaved to the symbolic context that defines his access to the Thing-Enjoyment, caught in the symbolic ritual he publicly mocks. This, preciely, is what Lacan has in mind with his les non-dupes errent: those who are not duped by the symbolic fiction are most deeply in error. The ironist's apparently "softer" approach, on the other hand, far more effectively unbinds the nodal points that hold together the symbolic universe, i.e. it is the ironist who effectively assumes the non-existence of the Other.

A common notion of psychoanalysis, of course, makes it almost an epitome of cynicism as an interpretative attitude: does psychoanalytic interpretation not involve in its very essence the act of discerning "lower" motivations (sexual lust, unacknowledged aggressivity) behind the apparently "noble" gestures of spiritual elevation of the beloved, of heroic self-sacrifice, etc.? Perhaps, however, this notion is somewhat too slick; perhaps the original enigma that psychoanalysis endeavours to explain is exactly the opposite: how can the effective behaviour of a person who professes his/her freedom from "prejudices" and "moralistic constraints" bear witness to inumerable inner impediments, unavowed prohibitions, etc.? Why does a person free to "enjoy life" engage in systematic "pursuit of unhappiness", methodically organizing his/her failures? What's in it for him/her, what perverse libidinal profit?

Another way to define the trap into which cynicism gets caught is via the difference between the public Law and its obscene underside, the unwritten superego rules: cynicism mocks the public Law from the position of its obscene underside which, consequently, it leaves intact. A personal experience revealed to me this inherent obscenity of Power in a most distastefully-enjoyable way. In the '70s, I did my (obligatory) army service in the old Yugoslav People's Army, in small barracks with no proper medical facilities. In a room which also served as sleeping quarters for a private trained as a medical assistant, once a week a doctor from the nearby military hospital held his consulting hours. On the frame of the large mirror above the wash-basin in this room, the soldier had stuck a couple of postcards of half-naked girls — a standard resource for masturbation in those pre-pornography times, to be sure. When the doctor was paying us his weekly visit, all of us who had reported for medical examination were seated on a long bench alongside the wall opposite the wash-basin and were then examined in turn. So, one day while I was also waiting to be examined, it was the turn of a young, half-illiterate soldier who complained of pains in his penis (which, of course, was in itself sufficient to trigger obscene giggles from all of us, the doctor included): the skin on its head was too tight, so he was unable to draw it back normally. The doctor ordered him to pull down his trousers and demonstrate his trouble; the soldier did so and the skin slid down the head smoothly, though the soldier was quick to add that his trouble occurred only during erection. The doctor then said: "OK, then masturbate, get an erection, so that we can check it!" Deeply embarrassed and red in the face, the soldier began to masturbate in front of all of us but, of course, failed to produce an erection; the doctor then took one of the postcards of half-naked girls from the mirror, held it close to the soldier's head and started to shout at him: "Look! What breasts, what a cunt! Masturbate! How is it that you don't get the erection? What kind of a man are you! Go on, masturbate!" All of us in the room, including the doctor himself, accompanied the spectacle with obscene laughter; the unfortunate soldier himself soon joined us with an embarrassed giggle, exchanging looks of solidarity with us while continuing to masturbate... This scene brought about in me an experience of quasi-epiphany: in nuce, there was everything in it, the entire dispositive of Power — the uncanny mixture of imposed enjoyment and humiliating exercise of Power, the agency of Power which shouts severe orders, but simultaneously shares with us, his subordinates, obscene laughter bearing witness to a deep solidarity...

One could also say that this scene renders the symptom of Power: the grotesque excess by means of which, in a unique short-circuit, attitudes which are officially opposed and mutually exclusive reveal their uncanny complicity, where the solemn agent of Power suddenly starts to wink at us across the table in a gesture of obscene solidarity, letting us know that the thing (i.e. his orders) is not to be taken too seriously and thereby consolidating his power. The aim of the "critique of ideology", of the analysis of an ideological edifice, is to extract this symptomal kernel which the official, public ideological text simultaneously disavows and needs for its undisturbed functioning.

Source: www.lacan.com

Didn't Lacan say that Japanese do not have an unconscious?

"But there is another Japan, the psycho-analytic. Whenever you have the multi-culturalist approach, the almost standard example is Japan and its way of 'Verneinung', saying no. There are thirty ways to say no. You say no to your wife in one way, no to a child in another way. There is not one negation. There exists a small Lacanian volume, 'La chose japonaise.' They elaborate the borrowing of other languages, all these ambiguities. Didn't Lacan say that Japanese do not have an unconscious? For the West, Japan is the ambiguous Other: at the same time it fascinates you and repels you."

Zizek, Slavoj and Geert Lovink (Interviewer). "Japan through a Slovenian Looking Glass: Reflections of Media and Politic and Cinema." in: Inter Communications No. 14. 1995.

ジャック=マリー=エミール・ラカン

A photo posted by Freud Quotes (@freud.quotes) on Feb 6, 2016 at 7:22am PST

ジャック=マリー=エミール・ラカン（Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan、1901年4月13日 - 1981年9月9日）は、フランスの哲学者、精神科医、精神分析家。

But No One Stops Smoking.

Lacan's definition of human deception:

"Lacan's definition of human deception: We deceive the Other by means of the truth itself; in a universe in which all are looking for the true face beneath the mask, the best way to lead them astray is to wear the mask of truth itself."

Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology

Slavoj Žižek – Masterclass: Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

Masterclass 1: Lacan’s Hypothesis: Psychoanalysis as the Ex-Timate Core of Philosophy 

(31 October 2016)

Masterclass 1 - download audio

"In the entire span of his teaching, Lacan was engaged in an intense debate with philosophy and philosophers, from ancient Greek materialists to Plato, from Stoics to Thomas Acquinas, from Descartes to Spinoza, from Kant to Hegel, from Marx to Kierkegaard, from Heidegger to Kripke. It is through the reference to philosophers that Lacan deploys his fundamental concepts: transference through Plato, the Freudian subject through Descartes’s cogito, surplus-enjoyment through Marx’s surplus-value, anxiety and repetition through Kierkegaard, the ethics of psychoanalysis through Kant, etc. Through this continuous engagement, Lacan is of course distancing himself from philosophy; however, all his desperate attempts to draw the line of separation again and again re-assert his commitment to philosophy – as if the only way for him to delineate the basic concepts of psychoanalysis is through a philosophical detour. Although psychoanalysis is not philosophy, its subversive dimension is grounded in the fact that it is not simply a particular science or practice but has radical consequences for philosophy: psychoanalysis is a “no” to philosophy that is internal to it, i.e., psychoanalytic theory refers to a gap/antagonism which philosophy blurs but which simultaneously grounds philosophy (Heidegger called this gap ontological difference). Without this link to philosophy – more precisely, to the blind spot of philosophy, to what is “primordially repressed” in philosophy – psychoanalysis loses its subversive dimension and becomes just another ontic practice."

Masterclass 2: Is it Possible to Move Beyond the Transcendental?

(1 November 2016)

Masterclass 2 - download audio

Masterclass 3: The Prospect of the Post-Human

(2 November 2016)

Masterclass 3 - download audio

Thanks mariborchan.si for uploading the videos!

See also:

 Slavoj Zizek: Lacan’s Four Discourses | 2 Full Lectures

Philosophers on Tinder

„365 Etudes For Celebrating Pleasure“ is the title of a multimedia project made by visual artist Kamran Behrouz. His work consists of daily drawings and text research regarding to philosophy, Art, psychoanalysis, political science, Pop culture etc.

From "Philosophers on Tinder":

“Philosophers on Tinder is a satiric series of illustrations reflecting on the notion of sexuality, desire and identity in relation to the idea of virtual reality.

The attempt is made to raise questions regarding to our desires through the lens of different philosophers and psychoanalysts.

Questions such as what Part of the the "Real" is really considered real for each individual? And what do we want from virtual reality or a Virtual platform (e.g. tinder) and how does the virtual resembling the process of Phantasy. And how does the virtual or phantasy forging our realities as humans of 21th century.”

One Of the outcomes of 365 etudes for celebrating pleasure is a book with the same title. It Will be publish on November/December 2016.

“Obviously, I have some anal fixation here” Žižek, Ideology and Toilets

“In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. [...] It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement. Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. [...] The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology.”

― Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies

Slavoj Zizek | Post-Modern Architecture

The following is the full version of a lecture delivered by Slavoj Zizek on Architecture and Aesthetics in which he talks about a range of issues including, but not limited to, the meanings and implications of public spaces (what he says is the ‘privatized public spaces’), the invisible space (i.e., canalization referring to sewage system), the sanitatization of the city, ideology embedded in our everyday architecture (i.e., toilet), the notions of ‘more’ imbedded in ‘less’, etc.

See also:

"You are allowed not to enjoy": Psychoanalysis today according to Zizek

 Slavoj Zizek: Lacan’s Four Discourses | 2 Full Lectures

Zizek's Sigmund Freud Lecture: Theology, Negativity, and the Death-Drive

Slavoj Žižek: Why Todestrieb is a Philosophical Concept

Reading Žižek – Where to Start?

ZIZEK BOOKS

Slavoj Zizek: The Reality of the Virtual

In this tour de force filmed lec­ture, Sla­voj Žižek lucidly and com­pel­lingly reflects on belief – which takes him from Father Christ­mas to demo­cracy – and on the vari­ous forms that belief takes, draw­ing on Lacanian cat­egor­ies of thought. In a rad­ical dis­missal of today’s so called post-polit­ical era, he mobil­izes the para­dox of uni­ver­sal truth urging us to dare to enact the impossible. It is a char­ac­ter­istic vir­tu­oso per­form­ance, mov­ing promis­cu­ously from sub­ject to sub­ject but keep­ing the lar­ger argu­ment in view.

See also:

"You are allowed not to enjoy": Psychoanalysis today according to Zizek

 Slavoj Zizek: Lacan’s Four Discourses | 2 Full Lectures

Zizek's Sigmund Freud Lecture: Theology, Negativity, and the Death-Drive

Slavoj Žižek: Why Todestrieb is a Philosophical Concept

Reading Žižek – Where to Start?

ZIZEK BOOKS

Slavoj Zizek: “God is Dead, but He Doesn’t Know It”

“The true formula of atheism is not God is dead – even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder, Freud protects the father – the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious.”

― Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts

In order to properly understand this passage, one has to read it together with another thesis of Lacan. These two dispersed statements should be treated as the pieces of a puzzle to be combined into one coherent proposition. It is only their interconnection (plus the reference to the Freudian dream of the father who doesn’t know that he is dead)[2] that enables us to deploy Lacan’s basic thesis in its entirety:

As you know, the father Karamazov’s son Ivan leads the latter into those audacious avenues taken by the thought of the cultivated man, and in particular, he says, if God doesn’t exist… – If God doesn’t exist, the father says, then everything is permitted. Quite evidently, a naïve notion, for we analysts know full well that if God doesn’t exist, then nothing at all is permitted any longer. Neurotics prove that to us every day.[3]

The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God. What characterizes modernity is no longer the standard figure of the believer who secretly harbors intimate doubts about his belief and engages in transgressive fantasies; today, we have, on the contrary, a subject who presents himself as a tolerant hedonist dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, and whose unconscious is the site of prohibitions: what is repressed are not illicit desires or pleasures, but prohibitions themselves. “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is prohibited” means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment. (One should not forget to supplement this thesis with its opposite: if God exists, then everything is permitted – is this not the most succinct definition of the religious fundamentalist’s predicament? For him, God fully exists, he perceives himself as His instrument, which is why he can do whatever he wants, his acts are in advance redeemed, since they express the divine will…)

Instead of bringing freedom, the fall of the oppressive authority thus gives rise to new and more severe prohibitions. How are we to account for this paradox? Think of the situation known to most of us from our youth: the unfortunate child who, on Sunday afternoon, has to visit his grandmother instead of being allowed to play with friends. The old-fashioned authoritarian father’s message to the reluctant boy would have been: “I don’t care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to grandmother and behave there properly!” In this case, the child’s predicament is not bad at all: although forced to do something he clearly doesn’t want to, he will retain his inner freedom and the ability to (later) rebel against the paternal authority. Much more tricky would have been the message of a “postmodern” non-authoritarian father: “You know how much your grandmother loves you! But, nonetheless, I do not want to force you to visit her – go there only if you really want to!” Every child who is not stupid (and as a rule they are definitely not stupid) will immediately recognize the trap of this permissive attitude: beneath the appearance of a free choice there is an even more oppressive demand than the one formulated by the traditional authoritarian father, namely an implicit injunction not only to visit the grandmother, but to do it voluntarily, out of the child’s own free will. Such a false free choice is the obscene superego injunction: it deprives the child even of his inner freedom, ordering him not only what to do, but what to want to do.

For decades, a classic joke has circulated among Lacanians to exemplify the key role of the Other’s knowledge: a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to the mental institution where the doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man. When he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling. There is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that it will eat him. “Dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man”. “Of course I know that,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken know it?” Therein resides the true stake of psychoanalytic treatment: it is not enough to convince the patient about the unconscious truth of his symptoms, the unconscious itself must be brought to assume this truth. The same holds true for the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism:

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. [4]

Marx does not claim, in the usual way of Enlightenment critique, that critical analysis should demonstrate how a commodity – what appears a mysterious theological entity – emerged out of the “ordinary” real-life process; he claims, on the contrary, that the task of critical analysis is to unearth the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” in what appears at first sight just an ordinary object. Commodity fetishism (our belief that commodities are magic objects, endowed with an inherent metaphysical power) is not located in our mind, in the way we (mis)perceive reality, but in our social reality itself. In other words, when a Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, the Marxist’s reproach to him is not “The commodity may seem to you to be a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified expression of relations between people” but 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.” We can imagine a bourgeois subject visiting a course of Marxism where he is taught about commodity fetishism. After the finished course, he comes back to his teacher, complaining that he is still the victim of commodity fetishism. The teacher tells him “But you know now how things stand, that commodities are only expressions of social relations, that there is nothing magic about them!”, to which the pupil replies: “Of course I know all that, but the commodities I am dealing with seem not to know it!” This is what Lacan aimed at in his claim that the true formula of materialism is not “God doesn’t exist,” but “God is unconscious.” Suffice it to recall what, in a letter to Max Brod, Milena Jesenska wrote about Kafka:

Above all, things like money, stock-exchange, the foreign currency administration, type-writer, are for him thoroughly mystical (what they effectively are, only not for us, the others). [5]

Jesenska touches here Kafka at his Marxist best: a bourgeois subject knows very well that there is nothing magic about money, that money is just an object which stands for a set of social relations, but he nevertheless acts in real life as if he were to believe that money is a magic thing. This, then, gives us a precise insight into Kafka’s universe: Kafka was able to experience directly these fantasmatic beliefs that we “normal” people disavow. Kafka’s “magic” is what Marx referred to as the “theological freakishness” of commodities. If once upon a time we publicly pretended to believe, while, in our intimacy, we were skeptics or even engaged in obscene mocking of our public beliefs, today we publicly tend to profess our skeptical/hedonist/relaxed attitude, while intimately we remain haunted by beliefs and severe prohibitions. And it is against this background that one can locate Dostoyevsky’s mistake. Dostoyevsky provided the most radical version of “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted” idea in “Bobok,” his weirdest short story, which even today continues to perplex interpreters. Is this bizarre “morbid fantasy” simply a product of the author’s own mental disease? Is it as cynical sacrilege, an abominable attempt to parody the truth of the Revelation? [6] In “Bobok,” an alcoholic literary man named Ivan Ivanovich is suffering from auditory hallucinations:

I am beginning to see and hear strange things, not voices exactly, but as though someone beside me were muttering, ‘bobok, bobok, bobok!’
What’s the meaning of this bobok? I must divert my mind.
I went out in search of diversion, I hit upon a funeral.

So he attends the funeral of a distant relative; he remains in the cemetery where he unexpectedly overhears the cynical, frivolous conversations of the dead:

And how it happened I don’t know, but I began to hear things of all sorts being said. At first I did not pay attention to it, but treated it with contempt. But the conversation went on. I heard muffled sounds as though the speakers’ mouths were covered with a pillow, and at the same time they were distinct and very near. I came to myself, sat up and began listening attentively.

He discovers from these exchanges that human consciousness goes on for some time after the death of the physical body, lasting until total decomposition, which the deceased characters associate with the awful gurgling onomatopoeia “bobok.” One of them comments:

The great thing is that we have two or three months more of life and then – bobok! I propose to spend these two months as agreeably as possible, and so to arrange everything on a new basis. Gentlemen! I propose to cast aside all shame.

The dead, realizing their complete freedom from earthly conditions, decide to entertain themselves by telling tales of their existence during their lives:

‘/…/ meanwhile I don’t want us to be telling lies. That’s all I care about, for that is one thing that matters. One cannot exist on the surface without lying, for life and lying are synonymous, but here we will amuse ourselves by not lying. Hang it all, the grave has some value after all! We’ll all tell our stories aloud, and we won’t be ashamed of anything. First of all I’ll tell you about myself. I am one of the predatory kind, you know. All that was bound and held in check by rotten cords up there on the surface. Away with cords and let us spend these two months in shameless truthfulness! Let us strip and be naked!’
‘Let us be naked, let us be naked!’ cried all the voices.’

The terrible stench that Ivan Ivanovich smells is not the smell of the decaying corpses, but a moral stench. Then Ivan Ivanovich suddenly sneezes, and the dead fall silent; the spell is lost and we are back into ordinary reality:

And here I suddenly sneezed. It happened suddenly and unintentionally, but the effect was striking: all became as silent as one expects it to be in a churchyard, it all vanished like a dream. A real silence of the tomb set in. I don’t believe they were ashamed on account of my presence: they had made up their minds to cast off all shame! I waited five minutes – not a word, not a sound.

Mikhail Bakhtin saw in “Bobok” the quintessence of Dostoevsky’s art, a microcosm of his entire creative output which renders its central motif: the idea that “everything is permitted” if there is no God and no immortality of the soul. In the carnivalesque underworld of life “between the two deaths,” all rules and responsibilities are suspended, the undead can cast aside all shame, act insanely, and laugh at honesty and justice. The ethical horror of this vision is that it displays the limit of the “truth and reconciliation” idea: what if we have a perpetrator for whom the public confession of his crimes not only does not give rise to any ethical catharsis in him, but even generates an additional obscene pleasure?

The “undead” situation of the deceased is opposed to that of the father from one of the dreams reported by Freud, who goes on living (in the dreamer’s unconscious) because he doesn’t know that he is dead. The deceased in Dostoyevsky’s story are fully aware that they are dead – it is this awareness that allows them to cast away all shame. So what is the secret the deceased carefully conceal from every mortal? In “Bobok,” we do not hear any of the shameless truths – the specters of the dead withdraw at the very point at which they should finally “deliver their goods” to the listener and tell their dirty secrets. Maybe the solution is the same as that at the end of the parable of the Door of the Law from Kafka’s The Trial, when, at his deathbed, the man from the country who has spent years waiting to be admitted by the guardian, learns that the door was here only for him? What if, in “Bobok” also, the entire spectacle of the corpses promising to spill out their dirtiest secrets is staged only to attract and impress poor Ivan Ivanovich? In other words, what if the spectacle of the “shameless truthfulness” of the living corpses is only a fantasy of the listener – and of a religious listener, at that? We should not forget that the scene Dostoyevsky paints is not that of a godless universe. The talking corpses experience their life after (biological) death, which is in itself a proof of God’s existence – God is here, keeping them alive after death, which is why they can say everything.

What Dostoyevsky stages is a religious fantasy which has nothing whatsoever to do with a truly atheist position – although he stages it to illustrate the terrifying godless universe in which “everything is permitted.” So what is the compulsion that pushes the corpses to engage in the obscene sincerity of “saying it all”? The Lacanian answer is clear: superego – not as the ethical agency, but as the obscene injunction to enjoy. This provides the insight into what is perhaps the ultimate secret that the deceased want to keep from the narrator: their impulse to shamelessly tell all the truth is not free, the situation is not “now, we can finally say (and do) all that we wanted, but were prevented by the rules and constraints of our normal lives.” Instead, their impulse is sustained by a cruel superego imperative: the specters have to do it. If, however, what the undead hide from the narrator is the compulsive nature of their obscene enjoyment, and if we are dealing with a religious fantasy, then there is one more conclusion to be made: that the undead are under the compulsive spell of an evil God. Therein resides Dostoyevsky’s ultimate lie: what he presents as a terrifying fantasy of a godless universe is effectively a Gnostic fantasy of evil obscene God. A more general lesson should be drawn from this case: when religious authors condemn atheism, they all too often construct a vision of the “godless universe” which is a projection of the repressed underside of religion itself.

I have used here the term “gnosticism” in its precise meaning, as the rejection of a key feature of the Judeo-Christian universe: the externality of truth. There is an overwhelming argument for the intimate link between Judaism and psychoanalysis: in both cases, the focus is on the traumatic encounter with the abyss of the desiring Other, with the terrifying figure of an impenetrable Other who wants something from us, without making it clear what this something is – the Jewish people’s encounter of their God whose impenetrable Call throws off the rails the routine of human daily existence; the child’s encounter of the enigma of the Other’s (in this case, parental) enjoyment. In clear contrast to this Jewish-Christian notion of truth as relying on an external traumatic encounter (the divine Call to the Jewish people, God’s call to Abraham, the inscrutable Grace – all totally incompatible with our inherent qualities, even with our innate ethics), both paganism and Gnosticism (the reinscription of the Jewish-Christian stance back into paganism) conceive the path to truth as the “inner journey” of spiritual self-purification, as the return to one’s true Inner Self, the self’s “rediscovery.” Kierkegaard was right when he pointed out that the central opposition of the Western spirituality is Socrates versus Christ: the inner journey of remembrance versus the rebirth through the shock of the external encounter. Within the Jewish-Christian field, God Himself is the ultimate harasser, the intruder who is brutally disturbing the harmony of our lives.

Traces of Gnosticism are clearly discernible even in today’s cyberspace ideology. The cyberspace dream of the Self, liberated from the attachment to its natural body by turning itself into a virtual entity floating from one to another contingent and temporary embodiment, is the scientific-technological realization of the Gnostic dream of the Self getting rid of the decay and inertia of material reality. No wonder that the philosophy of Leibniz is one of the predominant philosophical references of the cyberspace theorists: Leibniz conceived the universe as composed of “monads”, microscopic substances each of which lives in its own self-enclosed inner space, with no windows onto its environs. One cannot miss the uncanny resemblance between Leibniz’s “monadology” and the emerging cyberspace community in which global harmony and solipsism strangely coexist. That is to say, does our immersion into cyberspace not go hand in hand with our reduction to a Leibnizean monad which, although “without windows” that would directly open up to external reality, mirrors in itself the entire universe? More and more, we are monads with no direct windows onto reality, interacting alone with the PC screen, encountering only the virtual simulacra, and yet immersed more than ever into the global network, synchronously communicating with the entire globe.

The space in which the (un)dead can talk without moral constraints, as imagined by Dostoyevsky, prefigures this gnostic-cyberspace dream. The attraction of cybersex is that, since we are dealing only with virtual partners, there is no harassment. This aspect of cyberspace – the idea of a space in which, because we are not directly interacting with real people, nobody is harassed and we are free to let go our dirtiest fantasies – found its ultimate expression in a proposal which recently resurfaced in some circles in the US, a proposal to “rethink” the rights of necrophiliacs (those who desire to have sex with dead bodies). Why should they be deprived of it? The idea was formulated that, in the same way people sign permission for their organs to be use for medical purposes in the case of their sudden death, one should also allow them to sign permission for their bodies to be given to necrophiliacs. This proposal is the perfect exemplification of how the Politically Correct anti-harassment stance realizes Kierkegaard’s old insight into how the only good neighbor is a dead neighbor. A dead neighbor – a corpse – is the ideal sexual partner of a “tolerant” subject trying to avoid any harassment: by definition, a corpse cannot be harassed; at the same time, a dead body does not enjoy, so the disturbing threat of the excess-enjoyment to the subject playing with the corpse is also eliminated.

“Harassment” is another of those words which, although it seems to refer to a clearly defined fact, functions in a deeply ambiguous way and perpetrates an ideological mystification. At its most elementary, the term designates brutal facts of rape, beating, and other modes of social violence which, of course, should be ruthlessly condemned. However, in the predominant use of the term “harassment,” this elementary meaning imperceptibly slips into the condemnation of any excessive proximity of another real human being, with his or her desires, fears and pleasures. Two topics determine today’s liberal tolerant attitude towards others: the respect of otherness, openness towards it, and the obsessive fear of harassment. The other is OK insofar as his presence is not intrusive, insofar as the other is not really other. Tolerance coincides with its opposite: my duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him, not to intrude into his/her space – in short, that I should respect his/her intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is what is more and more emerging as the central ‘human right’ in late-capitalist society: the right not to be harassed, i.e., to be kept at a safe distance from the others.

The courts in most of the Western societies now impose a restraining order when someone sues another person for harassing him or her (stalking him or her or making unwarranted sexual advances). The harasser can be legally prohibited from knowingly approaching the victim, and must remain at a distance of more than 100 yards. Necessary as this measure is, there is nonetheless in it something of the defense against the traumatic Real of the other’s desire: is it not obvious that there is something dreadfully violent about openly displaying one’s passion for and to another human? Passion by definition hurts its object, and even if its addressee gladly agrees to occupy this place, he or she cannot ever do it without a moment of awe and surprise. Or, to vary yet another time Hegel’s dictum “Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself”: intolerance towards the Other resides in the very gaze which perceives all around itself intolerant intruding Others. One should especially be suspect about the obsession with sexual harassment of women when it is voiced by men: after barely scratching the “pro-feminist” PC surface, one soon encounters the old male-chauvinist myth about how women are helpless creatures who should be protected not only from the intruding men, but ultimately also from themselves. The problem is not that they will not be able to protect themselves, but that they may start to enjoy being sexually harassed – that the male intrusion will set free in them a self-destructive explosion of excessive sexual enjoyment. In short, what one should focus on is what kind of the notion of subjectivity is implied in the obsession with the different modes of harassment: the “Narcissistic” subjectivity for which everything others do (address me, look at me…) is potentially a threat, so that, as Sartre put it long ago, l’enfer, c’est les autres (hell are the others). With regard to woman as an object of disturbance, the more she is covered, the more our (male) attention focuses on her and on what lies beneath the veil. The Taliban not only forced women to walk in public completely veiled, they also prohibited them wearing shoes with too solid (metal or wooden) heels, and ordered them to walk without making too loud a clicking noise which may distract men, disturbing their inner peace and dedication. This is the paradox of surplus-enjoyment at its purest: the more the object is veiled, the more intensely disturbing is the minimal trace of its remainder.

This is the case even with the growing prohibition of smoking. First, all offices were declared “smoke-free,” then flights, then restaurants, then airports, then bars, then private clubs, then, in some campuses, 50 yards around the entrances to the buildings, then – in a unique case of pedagogical censorship, reminding us of the famous Stalinist practice of retouching the photos of nomenklatura – the US Postal Service removed the cigarette from the stamps with the photo-portrait of blues guitarist Robert Johnson and of Jackson Pollock. These prohibitions target the other’s excessive and risky enjoyment, embodied in the act of “irresponsibly” lighting a cigarette and inhaling deeply with an unabashed pleasure (in contrast to Clintonite yuppies who do it without inhaling, or who have sex without actual penetration, or food without fat) – indeed, as Lacan put it, after God is dead, nothing is anymore permitted.

One of the standard topics of today’s conservative cultural critique is that, in our permissive era, children lack firm limits or prohibitions. This lack frustrates them, driving them from one to another excess. It is only a firm limit set up by some symbolic authority that can guarantee stability and satisfaction – satisfaction brought about by way of violating the prohibition, of transgressing the limit. To render clear the way denegation functions in the unconscious, Freud evoked a reaction of one of his patients to a dream of his centred around an unknown woman: ‘Whoever this woman in my dream is, I know it is not my mother.’ A clear negative proof, for Freud, that the woman was his mother. What better way to characterize today’s typical patient than to imagine his opposite reaction to the same dream: ‘Whoever this woman in my dream was, I am sure it has something to do with my mother!’

Traditionally, psychoanalysis was expected to allow the patient to overcome the obstacles which prevented him/her the access to normal sexual satisfaction: if you are not able to “get it,” go to the analyst who will enable you to get rid of your inhibitions. Today, however, we are bombarded from all sides by different versions of the injunction “Enjoy!”, from direct enjoyment in sexual performance to enjoyment in professional achievement or in spiritual awakening. Jouissance today effectively functions as a strange ethical duty: individuals feel guilty not for violating moral inhibitions by way of engaging in illicit pleasures, but for not being able to enjoy. In this situation, psychoanalysis is the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy – not prohibited to enjoy, but just relieved of the pressure to enjoy.

Notes:

[1] Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 59.

[2] So that, combining this dream with the dream we interpreted in Chapter 3 about the dead son who appears to the father with the terrible approach “Father, can’t you see I’m burning?”, Lacan’s statement can also be paraphrased as the reproach to the God-Father: “Father, can’t you see you are dead?”.

[3] Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, New York: Norton 1988, p. 128.

[4] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1990, p. 163.

[5] Quoted from Jana Cerna, Kafka’s Milena, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1993, p. 174.

[6] The very beginning of the story involves a strange denial of Rimbaud’s je est un autre (I is an other).


― Slavoj Zizek, How To Read Lacan 


 

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