Fundamental fantasy Shame is not simply passivity, but an ACTIVELY ASSUMED PASSIVITY: if I am raped, I have nothing to be ashamed of; but if I enjoy being raped, then I deserve to feel ashamed. Actively assuming passivity thus means, in Lacanian terms, finding jouissance in the passive situation in which one is caught. And since the coordinates of jouissance are ultimately those of the fundamental fantasy, which is the fantasy of (finding jouissance in) being put in the passive position (like the Freudian “My father is beating me”), what exposes the subject to shame is not the disclosure of how he is put in the passive position, treated only as the body. Shame emerges only when such a passive position in social reality touches upon the (disavowed intimate) fantasy. Let us take two women, the first, liberated and assertive, active; the other, secretly daydreaming about being brutally handled by her partner, even raped. The crucial point is that, if both of them are raped, the rape will be much more traumatic for the second one, on account of the fact that it will realize in “external” social reality the “stuff of her dreams.” Why? There is a gap which forever separates the fantasmatic kernel of the subject’s being from the more “superficial” modes of his or her symbolic and/or imaginary identifications—it is never possible for me to fully assume (in the sense of symbolic integration) the fantasmatic kernel of my being. … Is the psychoanalytic treatment not the experience of rendering public (to the analyst, who stands for the big Other) one’s most intimate fantasies and thus the experience of losing one’s face in the most radical sense of the term? This is already the lesson of the very material dispositif of the psychoanalytic treatment: NO face-to-face between the subject-patient and the analyst; instead, the subject lying and the analyst sitting behind him, both staring into the same void in front of them. There is no “intersubjectivity” here, only the two without face-to-face, the First and the Third. Zizek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence”, in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, Slavoj Zizek, Eric L. Santner, Kenneth Reinhard, The University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp.147-8
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 19:52:28 +0000
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