Enjoyment and suture One has only to recall all the famous formulas of Ludwig Feuerbach on the divine Beyond as a specular, reversed image of earthly misery. Yet for this operation to work, a third, properly symbolic moment must intervene which somehow mediates between the two opposite poles of the imaginary dyad (the fearful earthly below versus the blissful divine Beyond): the fear of God -- that is, the horrifying reverse of the celestial Beyond itself. … This is one of the ways to draw the line that divides the Imaginary from the Symbolic: on the imaginary level, we react to earthly fears by have patience, eternal bliss is waiting for you in the Beyond ...; whereas on the symbolic level, what delivers us from earthly fears is the assurance that the only thing we have to fear is God Himself – an ADDITIONAL fear that retroactively cancels all the others. One can discern the same operation in Fascist anti-Semitism: what does Hitler do in Mein Kampf to explain to the Germans the misfortunes of the epoch, economic crisis, social disintegration, moral decadence, and so on? He constructs a new terrifying subject, a unique cause of Evil who pulls the strings behind the scene and is the sole precipitator of the series of evils: the Jew. The simple evocation of the Jewish plot explains everything: all of a sudden things become clear, perplexity is replaced by a firm sense of orientation, all the diversity of earthly miseries is conceived as the manifestation of the Jewish plot. In other words, the Jew is Hitlers point de capiton. … Therein consists also the function of the Jew in anti-Semitic ideology: in so far as an ideological edifice gains consistency from organizing its heterogeneous raw material into a coherent narrative, the entity called Jew is a device enabling us to unify in a single large narrative the experiences of economic crisis, moral decadence and loss of values, political frustration and national humiliation, and so on. As soon as we perceive as their common thread the Jewish plot, they became part of the same (narrative) PLOT. … (See note 16 below) The real questions, however, are: How is this purely formal inversion possible? On what does it rely? More precisely: How is it possible that the result of a purely formal inversion acquires enough substantiality to be perceived as a flesh-and-blood personality? The psychoanalytic answer is, of course, enjoyment -- the only substance acknowledged by psychoanalysis, according to Lacan. The “Jew” cannot be reduced to a purely formal organizational device; the efficacy of this figure cannot be explained by reference to the textual mechanism of quilting; the surplus on which this mechanism relies is the fact that we impute to the Jew an impossible, unfathomable enjoyment, allegedly stolen from us. … Let us recall how the King -- this exemplar of point de capiton, this individual who quilts the social edifice -- was conceptualized by Hegel: the King is undoubtedly the point of the suture of social totality, the point whose intervention transforms a contingent collection of individuals into a rational totality – yet precisely as such, as the point which sutures Nature and Culture, as the point at which a cultural-symbolic function (that of being a king) immediately coincides with a natural determination (who will be king is determined by nature, by biological lineage), the King radically DESUTURES all other subjects; makes them lose their roots in some preordained organic social body that would fix their place in society in advance and forces them to acquire their social status by means of hard labour. It is therefore not sufficient to define the King as the only immediate junction of Nature and Culture -- the point is rather that this very gesture by means of which the King is posited as their suture de-sutures all other subjects, makes them lose their footing; throws them into a void where they must, so to speak, create themselves. Therein consists the accent of the Lacanian notion of suture, passed over in silence in Anglo-Saxon deconstructivism (in deconstructivist cinema theory, for example): to put it succinctly, the only thing that actually de-sutures is suture itself. This paradox comes to light in a palpable way apropos of the ambiguous and contradictory nature of the modern nation. On the one hand, nation of course designates modern community delivered of the traditional organic ties, a community in which the pre-modern links tying down the individual to a particular estate, family, religious group, and so on, are broken -- the traditional corporate community is replaced by the modern nation-state whose constituents are citizens: people as abstract individuals, not as members of particular estates, and so forth. On the other hand, nation can never be reduced to a network of purely symbolic ties: there is always a kind of surplus of the Real that sticks to it -- to define itself, national identity must appeal to the contingent materiality of the common roots, of blood and soil, and so on. In short, nation designates at one and the same time the instance by means of reference to which traditional organic links are dissolved AND the remainder of the pre-modern in modernity: the form organic inveteracy acquires within the modern, post-traditional universe; the form organic substance acquires within the universe of the substanceless Cartesian subjectivity. The crucial point is again to conceive both aspects in their interconnection: it is precisely the new suture effected by the Nation which renders possible the desuturing, the disengagement from traditional organic ties. Nation is a pre-modern leftover which functions as an inner condition of modernity itself, as an inherent impetus of its progress. An attentive reader of Lacan will have noted how, apropos of the fear of God as quilting point, he produces the formula of GENERAL EQUIVALENT: the fear of God springs up as the general equivalent of all fears -- all fears are exchanged against what is called the fear of God. Do we not consequently encounter here the very logic which is at work in the dialectic of the commodity-form, when Marx infers the appearance of money, the general equivalent of all commodities? The moment all commodities are exchangeable against money -- the moment their value, their universal dimension, is incarnated in a sole commodity -- all other commodities undergo a transubstantiation and start to function as the appearance of the universal Value embodied in money; as with religion, where all fears start to function as the appearance of the fear of God. 16 (…) why are we so fascinated by the everyday details about royal families (has Princess Diana a lover? is Prince Andrew gay? is it true that Queen Elizabeth often gets drunk?) -- that is to say, by details which, in other, ordinary families, we definitely would not find noticeable? Because, as a result of the above-mentioned purely formal operation, these everyday features undergo a kind of transubstantiation and start to function as the emanation of kingliness. Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, Verso, 2008 (second edition), p.17, 18, 19, 20 and 21.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 18:00:56 +0000
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