Slavoj Žižek – From Che vuoi? to Fantasy: Lacan with Eyes Wide Shut
Lecture · Oskar ·
2006 · 0:43:49 · 6,654 words
with Narrator, Voice Actor (TV ad clip)
psychoanalysisideologysexuality-gendersubjectivityethicscinema-art-culturereligion-theologyphilosophy-general
A narrated Žižek essay on the ambiguity of the Lacanian big Other, split between the anonymous symbolic order and the radical alterity of another subject, and on the neighbor as the monstrous Thing (das Ding) that divine law exists to keep at a proper distance. It develops a 'practical anti-humanism' that fearlessly confronts the inhuman core of humanity, then turns to fantasy as the screen that shields us from the Real and teaches us how to desire, grounding the impossibility of the sexual relationship. Film examples (Ryan's Daughter, Reds, Eyes Wide Shut), Rumsfeld's 'unknown knowns,' and Freud's burning-child dream stage the thesis that reality itself is an escape from the Real and that the passage à l'acte is a false exit from fantasy.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 19
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “big Other”
The ambiguous agency that is BOTH the anonymous automatism of the symbolic order AND the radical alterity of another subject forever separated from me by the wall of language; when subjectivized it appears as the deus absconditus.
Theology's name for the hidden god; the dimension in which the big Other gets subjectivized as an impenetrable third subject standing above human interaction and demanding sacrifice.
as “che vuoi”
Lacan's question 'what do you want?' put to the other's enigmatic desire; it really asks 'what's bugging you?', what makes the other unbearable to itself as well as to us.
as “the inhuman neighbor”
The neighbor as Thing/das Ding, the evil that potentially lurks beneath every homely face; against New-Age/Jungian mirror-images, the law exists to keep this monster at proper distance.
as “das Ding / the Thing”
Freud's term for the ultimate object of desire in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability; Lacan applies it to the monstrous neighbor lurking beneath every homely human face.
Speech acts ('you are my master') that constitute a person's symbolic identity; they are acts of symbolic trust engaged precisely because the confronted other is an unfathomable absolute other.
as “the symbolic order”
The anonymous mechanism of laws and obligations whose main function is to keep the monstrous neighbor at a proper distance so that coexistence does not explode in murderous violence.
Lacan's ethics that goes beyond Nietzsche's 'human, all too human' and fearlessly confronts the inhuman/monstrous core of humanity, posed against Althusser's merely theoretical anti-humanism.
as “negative vs. indefinite judgment”
Kant's distinction: 'he is not dead' (negative) vs 'he is undead' (indefinite); the indefinite judgment opens a third monstrous domain, the inhuman as a terrifying excess inherent to being human itself.
as “cause of desire / partial object (the 'factor')”
The partial object the partner is reduced to in fantasy, the private 'factor' or catalyst that turns one on; it dispossesses the subject, reducing them to a puppet-like level beyond dignity and freedom.
His inversion of 'close your eyes and think of England': real sex itself must be filtered through the asexual screen of Revolution, reversing the cliché that everything is really about sex.
as “the unknown knowns”
Žižek's fourth term added to Rumsfeld's known/unknown matrix: the things we don't know that we know, the disavowed beliefs, i.e. the Freudian unconscious.
as “the unconscious (unknown knowns)”
Freud's 'knowledge that doesn't know itself', the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not aware of adhering to yet which determine our acts and feelings.
Psychoanalysis formulates phenomena that are not phenomena of a subject appearing to a subject; the subject is involved only in the mode of exclusion, as divided, unable to assume its own core.
The self-obliteration of the subject that occurs when one ventures too close to the phantasmatic kernel of one's being; the subject loses symbolic consistency and disintegrates.
The traumatic raw encounter that fantasy screens; it is met more directly in dreams than in waking reality, so that reality itself becomes the escape from the Real.
as “fantasy / fundamental fantasy”
The screen that protects us from the Real and tells us how to desire and what we are for our others; at its core it is inaccessible/repressed and constitutes the de-centered core of the subject's being.
The false exit, a stopgap act (e.g. the final 'fuck' in Eyes Wide Shut) aimed at keeping the spectral netherworld of fantasies at bay rather than superseding fantasy with real satisfaction.
as “the true awakening”
Lacan's ultimate ethical task, to awaken not only from sleep but from the spell of fantasy that controls us even more when we are awake.
Stories he reaches for 4
Rumsfeld's 2003 amateur philosophizing listed known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns but forgot the fourth term, the unknown knowns, the disavowed beliefs we don't know we know, which is precisely the Freudian unconscious.
“what he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term. the unknown knowns”
Freud's dream of the father who sleeps beside his son's coffin and dreams the dead child whispering 'Father, can't you see I'm burning?', Lacan reads the father as waking into reality to escape the unbearable trauma of his responsibility encountered in the dream.
“father, you cannot see that i am burning”
At the end of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, after the couple's fantasizing is laid bare, Kidman answers 'what should we do?' with 'fuck', the passage à l'acte as a stopgap to stifle teeming fantasies before they overwhelm them again, not a real supersession.
“the passage to the act is presented as a stopgap, as a desperate preventative measure”
In The Shining a modest failed-writer father gradually turns into a killer beast who slaughters his family, the evil Thing lurking beneath the homely human face.
“the father, a modest failed writer, gradually turns into a killer beast”
Works invoked 13
Dennett's 'objectively subjective', the way things actually, objectively seem to you even if they don't seem that way to you, is borrowed to define fantasy's ontological category.
Freud's burning-child dream and the little-girl strawberry-cake fantasy are both deployed to reframe fantasy and waking.
Eyes Wide Shut film
Kubrick's film: Kidman's final 'fuck' as the passage à l'acte, the blunt false exit that stifles fantasy before it can overwhelm the couple again.
Reds film
Beatty's film integrates the October Revolution into Hollywood by staging it as the metaphorical screen for the central couple's sex, 'close your eyes and think of the October revolution.'
Lacan's reading of the burning-child dream: the father wakes into reality to escape the more-than-real trauma encountered in the dream.
21 Grams film
Arriaga's film supplies the scene used to develop the violence of declaring love and Lacan's 'giving what one doesn't have to someone who doesn't want it.'
The frog-kissed-into-a-man / woman-kissed-into-a-bottle ad is the setpiece for the asymmetry of fantasy and the non-existence of the sexual relationship.
Paul's account of the law giving rise to the desire to violate it underwrites the reading of human rights as rights to break the Ten Commandments.
Rilke's image of the neighbor as a pathogen that enters the ear and flourishes in the brain, the model for the neighbor as traumatic Thing.
Ryan's Daughter film
David Lean's film: the waterfall-sound accompaniment as the phantasmatic screen that dematerializes and filters out the Real of the sexual act.
Source of the opening passage equating the big Other with the impenetrability of another subject beyond the wall of language.
Source of 'man's desire is the other's desire' and che vuoi as the question that leads the subject to the path of his desire.
The Shining (novel) book
Stephen King's novel of the father turned killer beast illustrates the neighbor as monstrous Thing lurking beneath the homely face.
People invoked 18
John Ruskin positive
His 'factor', a statuesque woman without pubic hair, is cited as an example of the partial object / cause of desire that dispossesses the subject.
Rainer Maria Rilke positive
Quoted from the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge on the neighbor as a pathogen that enters the ear and devours the brain, the model for the neighbor as traumatic Thing.
Warren Beatty positive
Reds (dir. and starring Beatty as John Reed) stages the October Revolution as the phantasmatic screen for the central couple's sexual act.
Emmanuel Levinas negative
Criticized for the ethical domestication of the neighbor: his notion of the neighbor as the abyssal point of ethical responsibility obfuscates the monstrosity of the neighbor.
Jacques Lacan positive
The central interlocutor throughout: the big Other, che vuoi, das Ding applied to the neighbor, fantasy as screen, the burning-child dream reading, and the ethics of the true awakening.
Louis Althusser negative
Foils his 'theoretical anti-humanism' (in theory treat humans as structural elements, in practice act humanist) against Lacan's 'practical anti-humanism' that confronts the inhuman core of humanity.
Donald Rumsfeld positive
Mocked as an amateur philosopher but productively extended: his known/unknown matrix is missing the fourth term, the 'unknown knowns,' which is precisely the Freudian unconscious.
Stanley Kubrick positive
Eyes Wide Shut's final 'fuck' is read as the passage à l'acte, the false exit keeping the spectral netherworld of fantasies at bay.
Daniel Dennett positive
Borrowed for the 'objectively subjective', the way things actually, objectively seem to you even if they don't seem that way to you, to define fantasy's ontological status (Consciousness Explained).
Stephen King positive
The Shining is used twice, the 'not dead / undead' reader-known distinction and the father turning killer beast, to stage the monstrous Thing beneath the homely face.
Carl Jung negative
Jungian psychology reduces others to externalizations/projections of disavowed aspects of my own personality, the New-Age mirror-image approach that obfuscates the neighbor's radical Otherness.
Guillermo Arriaga positive
21 Grams supplies the scene of Paul declaring love to Christina and her complaint about the violence of being declared-loved-to, the founding word and the trauma of being loved.
Paul the Apostle positive
Cited on Romans, the law gives rise to the desire to violate it; liberal-permissive human rights confirm Paul's insight by being rights to break the Ten Commandments.
Sigmund Freud positive
Followed on the neighbor, das Ding, fantasy, the founding word, the burning-child dream, and the split hysterical position as constitutive of subjectivity.
Immanuel Kant positive
The negative/indefinite judgment distinction ('not dead' vs 'undead') opens the monstrous third domain of the inhuman inherent to subjectivity; the Kantian revolution locates the excess in the core of subjectivity itself.
Friedrich Nietzsche positive
Cited for 'human, all too human', the dimension practical anti-humanism must go beyond.
Ludwig Wittgenstein positive
His secret diaries report masturbating at the front while thinking about mathematical problems, used to show that even real sex needs a phantasmatic screen.
David R.S. Lean positive
Ryan's Daughter's waterfall-sound sex scene illustrates the phantasmatic screen that filters out the Real of the sexual act.
What it argues
The two faces of the big Other: symbolic automatism vs. the abyssal other subjectThe neighbor as monstrous Thing (das Ding) and the law as distance-keeperPractical anti-humanism: confronting the inhuman core of humanityFantasy as the screen that teaches desire and shields from the RealThere is no sexual relationship: impossibility screened by private fantasyThe unknown knowns: the unconscious as disavowed beliefReality as escape from the Real; the passage à l'acte as false exit
Dialectical moves 9
“It is not that dreams are for those who cannot endure reality. Reality itself is for those who cannot endure the Real that announces itself in their dream.”
Waking into reality is itself an escape from the traumatic Real met in the dream, the standard dream/reality opposition is reversed.
“Instead of the proverbial 'close your eyes and think of England' we have here: close your eyes and think of the October revolution.”
The cliché that everything is secretly about sex is inverted: real sex itself must be filtered through the asexual screen of Revolution.
“The ultimate function of the law is not to enable us not to forget the neighbour, but on the contrary to keep the neighbour at a proper distance.”
The law's true role is to shield us from the monstrous neighbor-Thing, the opposite of bringing us into ethical proximity to the neighbor.
“The main dangers are, on the contrary, the unknown knowns.”
Against Rumsfeld, the real danger is the disavowed beliefs we don't know we hold, the Freudian unconscious, not the threats we cannot even suspect.
“The father literally woke up so that he could go on dreaming.”
In the burning-child dream the father awakens into reality to evade the unbearable trauma of his responsibility encountered in the dream.
“We do not dream about fucking when we are not able to do it. Rather we fuck in order to escape and quell the exorbitant power of the dream.”
The sexual passage à l'acte is an escape from fantasy, not the realization of an unattainable fantasized act.
“These gestures are the exact opposite of what they claim to be — escapes from the real.”
Postmodern self-reflexive and Brechtian alienation gestures are desperate attempts to avoid the Real of the illusion itself.
“He is not human is not the same as he is inhuman.”
Kant's indefinite judgment opens a third domain, the inhuman as a terrifying excess inherent to being human, not external to humanity.
“The easy way out would have been to read in this discrepancy the sign of a shift in Lacan's development... while there is a limited truth in this solution, it obfuscates the central mystery of the big Other.”
The big Other is at once the anonymous symbolic order and the radical alterity of a subject; the split is constitutive, not a chronological early/late shift.
Claims 15
reframes
The big Other is simultaneously the anonymous automatism of the symbolic order AND the radical alterity of another subject; the discrepancy is a constitutive mystery, not a sign of a shift from early to late Lacan.the nature of the Lacanian big Other
asserts
The ultimate function of divine law is to keep the monstrous neighbor at a proper distance and shield us from the monstrosity next door — not to bring us closer to the neighbor.law and the neighbor-Thing
asserts
Our cherished human rights are at their core simply rights to break the Ten Commandments — the right to privacy as adultery, property as stealing, free expression as lying, etc. — confirming Paul's insight that the law gives rise to the desire to violate it.human rights and the moral law
asserts
Judaism, unlike New-Age or Jungian psychology, preserves the traumatic alien kernel in the neighbor as an impenetrable enigmatic presence that hystericizes me.Judaism vs. Jungian/New-Age neighbor
asserts
Lacan advocates a practical anti-humanism — an ethics confronting the inhuman core of humanity — which goes beyond Althusser's merely theoretical anti-humanism that leaves practice humanist.practical vs. theoretical anti-humanism
reframes
Fantasy teaches us how to desire and answers what I am for my others; it is not the hallucinatory satisfaction of an already-given desire.the function of fantasy
asserts
There is no sexual relationship: there is no universal guarantee of a harmonious sexual relation, so every subject must invent a private fantasy formula, and the act can only function screened through fantasy.the impossibility of the sexual relationship
reframes
The main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq (and generally) are the unknown knowns — disavowed beliefs we don't know we hold — not Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns.Rumsfeld's known/unknown matrix and the unconscious
reframes
The subject is de-centered not merely by objective unconscious mechanisms but by being deprived of even its most intimate subjective experience — the fundamental fantasy that can never be consciously assumed.Lacan's de-centered subject
reframes
We wake up into reality in order to avoid the Real encountered in the dream; reality is for those who cannot endure the Real that announces itself in the dream.dream, reality and the Real
reframes
The passage à l'acte is a false exit — a stopgap aimed at stifling teeming fantasies before they overwhelm us, not a real-life satisfaction that supersedes fantasizing.passage à l'acte (Eyes Wide Shut ending)
reframes
Acknowledging that a woman may fantasize about rape in no way legitimizes actual rape but makes it more traumatic, because it realizes in social reality the very stuff of her dreams.rape fantasy and standard-feminist axioms
asserts
The actualization in social reality of the phantasmatic kernel of my being is the worst, most humiliating violence — it undermines the very basis of my identity.phantasmatic kernel and social reality
asserts
In Reds the October Revolution functions as the phantasmatic screen for the sexual act, inverting Soviet socialist-realist logic where love is a contribution to the revolutionary cause.Reds and socialist-realist convention
rejects
Postmodern self-reflexive and Brechtian alienation gestures in art are escapes FROM the Real, the exact opposite of what they claim to be — desperate attempts to avoid the Real of the illusion itself.Brechtian/self-reflexive alienation gestures
Quotes 8
“it is not that dreams are for those who cannot endure reality. reality itself. is for those who cannot endure. the real that announces itself in their dream.”Slavoj Žižek · reality as escape from the Real
“instead of the proverbial close your eyes and think of england we have here. close your eyes and think of the october revolution.”Slavoj Žižek · sex filtered through Revolution's screen
“the main dangers are, on the contrary, the unknown knowns. the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to ourselves. but which nonetheless determine our acts and feelings.”Slavoj Žižek · the unknown knowns / the unconscious
“the ultimate function of the law is not to enable us not to forget the neighbour... but on the contrary to keep the neighbour at a proper distance, to shield us against the monstrosity next door”Slavoj Žižek · law vs the monstrous neighbor
“we do not dream about fucking when we are not able to do it. rather we fuck in order to escape and quell the exorbitant power of the dream that would otherwise overwhelm us.”Slavoj Žižek · fucking as escape from fantasy
“psychoanalysis allows us to formulate a paradoxical phenomenology. without a subject. phenomena arise that are not phenomena of a subject.”Slavoj Žižek · phenomenology without a subject
“i am deprived of even my most intimate subjective experience. the way things really seem to me”Slavoj Žižek · the de-centered subject
“the passage to the act is presented as a stopgap, as a desperate preventative measure. aimed at keeping at bay the spectral netherworld of fantasies.”Slavoj Žižek · passage à l'acte as false exit
Transcript 17 turns
Narrator
three
three
Narrator
from Convoi to fantasy. lacan with eyes wide shut. and why the other with the capital o? for no doubt mad reason. in the same way as it is madness every time we are obliged to bring in signs supplementary to those given by language. here the mad reason is the following. you and my wife. after all, what do you know about it? you are my master. in reality, are you so sure of that? what creates the founding value of those words is that what is aimed at in the message as well as what is manifest in the pretense. is that the other is there qua absolute other. absolute. that is to say, he is recognized. but is not known in the same way what constitutes pretence is that in the end you don't know whether it's a pretense or not. essentially it is this unknown element in the alterity of the other which characterizes the speech relation on the level on which it is spoken to the other. jacques lacan. seminar 3. the psychoses. this passage should surprise anyone acquainted with lacan. it equates to big other. with the impenetrability of another subject beyond the wall of language. putting us. at the opposite end of the predominant image lacan presents of the big other. that of the inexorable logic of an automatism that runs the show. so that when the subject speaks, he is. unbeknownst to himself. merely spoken. not master in his own house. what then is the big other? is it the anonymous mechanism of the symbolic order? or another subject in his or her radical alterity. a subject from whom i am forever separated by the wall of language. the easy way out of this predicament would have been to read in this discrepancy. the sign of a shift in lacan's development. from the early lacan focused on the intersubjective dialectic of recognition to the later lacan who puts forward the anonymous mechanism that regulates the interaction of subjects. in philosophical terms, from phenomenology to structuralism. while there is a limited truth in this solution, it obfuscates the central mystery of the big other. the point at which the big other the anonymous symbolic order. gets subjectivized. the exemplary case is divinity. is what we call god, not the big other personified. addressing us as a person larger than life. a subject beyond all subjects. in a similar way, we talk about history asking something of us. of our cause. calling us to make the necessary sacrifice. what we get here is an uncanny subject who is not simply another human being. but the third, the subject who stands above the interaction of real human individuals, and the terrifying enigma is, of course, what does this impenetrable subject want from us? theology refers to this dimension as that of the deus absconditus. for lacan, we do not have to evoke god to get a taste of this abyssal dimension. it is present in every human being. quote. man's desire is the other's desire. in which the de of provides what grammarians call a subjective determination. namely, that it is quoi. as. other? that man desires. this is why the others question. that comes back to the subject from the place from which he expects an oracular reply. which takes some such form as che vuoi what do you want? is the question that best leads the subject to the path of his own desire. end quote. the subversion of the subject. and the dialectic of desire. in the freudian unconscious. man's formula is ambiguous. it is. quoi other. that man desires. first means that man's desire is structured by the deed big other. the symbolic order. what i desire is predetermined by the big other, the symbolic space within which i dwell. even where my desires are transgressive, even when they violate social norms, this very transgression relies on what it transgresses. paul knows this very well when, in the famous passage in romans, he describes how the law gives rise to the desire to violate it. since the moral edifice of our societies still revolves around the ten commandments. the law that paul referred to. the experience of our liberal-permissive society confirms paul's insight. it continually demonstrates that our cherished human rights are, at their core, simply rights to break the ten commandments. the right to privacy. the right to adultery committed in secret when no one sees me or has the right to meddle in my life. the right to pursue happiness and to possess private property. the right to steal. to exploit others. freedom of the press and the expression of opinion. the right to lie. the right of free citizens to possess weapons the right to kill. and ultimately, freedom of religious belief. the right to worship false gods. there is however, another meaning of man's desire is the other's desire. the subject desires only insofar as it experiences the other itself as desiring. as the sight of an unfathomable desire as if an opaque desire is emanating from him or her. not only does the other address me with an enigmatic desire, it also confronts me with the fact that i myself do not know what i really desire. with the enigma of my own desire. for lacan. who follows freud here. this abyssal dimension of another human being. the abyss of the depth of another personality, its utter impenetrability. first found its full expression in judaism. with its injunction to love your neighbor as yourself. for freud as well as for lacan, this injunction is deeply problematic, since it obfuscates the fact that beneath the neighbor as my mirror image, the one who resembles me with whom i can emphasize. there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical otherness. of one about whom i finally know nothing. can i really rely on him? who is he? how can he be sure that his words are not a mere pretense? in contrast to the new age attitude that ultimately reduces my neighbors to my mirror images, or the means to the end of my self realization as is the case in jungian psychology, where others around me finish up as externalizations, projections of the disavowed aspects of my own personality. judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my neighbor. the neighbor remains an inert impenetrable enigmatic presence that hystericizes me. the core of this presence, of course, is the neighbor's desire. an enigma not only for us, but also for the neighbor. for this reason, lacan's che vuoi. does not simply ask. what do you want, but rather what's bugging you? what is it in you that makes you so unbearable, not only for us? but also for yourself. that you yourself obviously do not control. the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication of the neighbor. for example, what emmanuel levinas did with his notion of the neighbor as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates. what levinas obfuscates. is the monstrosity of the neighbor. a monstrosity on account of which lacan applies to the neighbor the term thing das ding. used by freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity. and impenetrability. one should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction. the neighbor is the evil thing. that potentially lurks beneath every homely human face. think about stephen king's the shining, in which the father, a modest failed writer, gradually turns into a killer beast who with an evil grin, goes on to slaughter his entire family. no wonder then that judaism is also the religion of divine law, which regulates relations between people. this law is strictly correlative to the emergence of the neighbor as inhuman thing. that is to say, the ultimate function of the law is not to enable us not to forget the neighbour, to retain our proximity to the neighbour, but on the contrary to keep the neighbour at a proper distance, to shield us against the monstrosity next door as rainer maria rilke put it in the notebooks of malte laurids.
from Convoi to fantasy. lacan with eyes wide shut. and why the other with the capital o? for no doubt mad reason. in the same way as it is madness every time we are obliged to bring in signs supplementary to those given by language. here the mad reason is the following. you and my wife. after all, what do you know about it? you are my master. in reality, are you so sure of that? what creates the founding value of those words is that what is aimed at in the message as well as what is manifest in the pretense. is that the other is there qua absolute other. absolute. that is to say, he is recognized. but is not known in the same way what constitutes pretence is that in the end you don't know whether it's a pretense or not. essentially it is this unknown element in the alterity of the other which characterizes the speech relation on the level on which it is spoken to the other. jacques lacan. seminar 3. the psychoses. this passage should surprise anyone acquainted with lacan. it equates to big other. with the impenetrability of another subject beyond the wall of language. putting us. at the opposite end of the predominant image lacan presents of the big other. that of the inexorable logic of an automatism that runs the show. so that when the subject speaks, he is. unbeknownst to himself. merely spoken. not master in his own house. what then is the big other? is it the anonymous mechanism of the symbolic order? or another subject in his or her radical alterity. a subject from whom i am forever separated by the wall of language. the easy way out of this predicament would have been to read in this discrepancy. the sign of a shift in lacan's development. from the early lacan focused on the intersubjective dialectic of recognition to the later lacan who puts forward the anonymous mechanism that regulates the interaction of subjects. in philosophical terms, from phenomenology to structuralism. while there is a limited truth in this solution, it obfuscates the central mystery of the big other. the point at which the big other the anonymous symbolic order. gets subjectivized. the exemplary case is divinity. is what we call god, not the big other personified. addressing us as a person larger than life. a subject beyond all subjects. in a similar way, we talk about history asking something of us. of our cause. calling us to make the necessary sacrifice. what we get here is an uncanny subject who is not simply another human being. but the third, the subject who stands above the interaction of real human individuals, and the terrifying enigma is, of course, what does this impenetrable subject want from us? theology refers to this dimension as that of the deus absconditus. for lacan, we do not have to evoke god to get a taste of this abyssal dimension. it is present in every human being. quote. man's desire is the other's desire. in which the de of provides what grammarians call a subjective determination. namely, that it is quoi. as. other? that man desires. this is why the others question. that comes back to the subject from the place from which he expects an oracular reply. which takes some such form as che vuoi what do you want? is the question that best leads the subject to the path of his own desire. end quote. the subversion of the subject. and the dialectic of desire. in the freudian unconscious. man's formula is ambiguous. it is. quoi other. that man desires. first means that man's desire is structured by the deed big other. the symbolic order. what i desire is predetermined by the big other, the symbolic space within which i dwell. even where my desires are transgressive, even when they violate social norms, this very transgression relies on what it transgresses. paul knows this very well when, in the famous passage in romans, he describes how the law gives rise to the desire to violate it. since the moral edifice of our societies still revolves around the ten commandments. the law that paul referred to. the experience of our liberal-permissive society confirms paul's insight. it continually demonstrates that our cherished human rights are, at their core, simply rights to break the ten commandments. the right to privacy. the right to adultery committed in secret when no one sees me or has the right to meddle in my life. the right to pursue happiness and to possess private property. the right to steal. to exploit others. freedom of the press and the expression of opinion. the right to lie. the right of free citizens to possess weapons the right to kill. and ultimately, freedom of religious belief. the right to worship false gods. there is however, another meaning of man's desire is the other's desire. the subject desires only insofar as it experiences the other itself as desiring. as the sight of an unfathomable desire as if an opaque desire is emanating from him or her. not only does the other address me with an enigmatic desire, it also confronts me with the fact that i myself do not know what i really desire. with the enigma of my own desire. for lacan. who follows freud here. this abyssal dimension of another human being. the abyss of the depth of another personality, its utter impenetrability. first found its full expression in judaism. with its injunction to love your neighbor as yourself. for freud as well as for lacan, this injunction is deeply problematic, since it obfuscates the fact that beneath the neighbor as my mirror image, the one who resembles me with whom i can emphasize. there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical otherness. of one about whom i finally know nothing. can i really rely on him? who is he? how can he be sure that his words are not a mere pretense? in contrast to the new age attitude that ultimately reduces my neighbors to my mirror images, or the means to the end of my self realization as is the case in jungian psychology, where others around me finish up as externalizations, projections of the disavowed aspects of my own personality. judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my neighbor. the neighbor remains an inert impenetrable enigmatic presence that hystericizes me. the core of this presence, of course, is the neighbor's desire. an enigma not only for us, but also for the neighbor. for this reason, lacan's che vuoi. does not simply ask. what do you want, but rather what's bugging you? what is it in you that makes you so unbearable, not only for us? but also for yourself. that you yourself obviously do not control. the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication of the neighbor. for example, what emmanuel levinas did with his notion of the neighbor as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates. what levinas obfuscates. is the monstrosity of the neighbor. a monstrosity on account of which lacan applies to the neighbor the term thing das ding. used by freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity. and impenetrability. one should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction. the neighbor is the evil thing. that potentially lurks beneath every homely human face. think about stephen king's the shining, in which the father, a modest failed writer, gradually turns into a killer beast who with an evil grin, goes on to slaughter his entire family. no wonder then that judaism is also the religion of divine law, which regulates relations between people. this law is strictly correlative to the emergence of the neighbor as inhuman thing. that is to say, the ultimate function of the law is not to enable us not to forget the neighbour, to retain our proximity to the neighbour, but on the contrary to keep the neighbour at a proper distance, to shield us against the monstrosity next door as rainer maria rilke put it in the notebooks of malte laurids.
Narrator
brigge. there exists a creature that is perfectly harmless.
brigge. there exists a creature that is perfectly harmless.
Narrator
when it passes before your eyes, you hardly notice it and immediately forget it again. but as soon as it somehow invisibly gets into your ears, it begins to develop. itatches. and cases have been known where it has penetrated into the brain and flourished there devastatingly. like the pneumococci in dogs, which gain entrance through the nose. this creature is... your neighbor. it is for this reason that finding oneself in the position of the beloved is so violent a discovery. even traumatic. being love makes me feel directly the gap between what i am. as a determinate being and the unfathomable x in me that causes love. the k's definition of love. love is giving something one doesn't have. has to be supplemented with to someone who doesn't want it. is this not confirmed by our most elementary experience when somebody unexpectedly declares passionate love to us. the first reaction, preceding the possible positive reply, is that something obscene, intrusive? is being forced upon us. in the middle of guillermo arriaga's 21 grams, paul who is dying of a weak heart gently declares his love to christina who is traumatized by the recent death of her husband and two young children. the next time they meet, christina bursts out into a complaint about the violent nature of declaring love.
when it passes before your eyes, you hardly notice it and immediately forget it again. but as soon as it somehow invisibly gets into your ears, it begins to develop. itatches. and cases have been known where it has penetrated into the brain and flourished there devastatingly. like the pneumococci in dogs, which gain entrance through the nose. this creature is... your neighbor. it is for this reason that finding oneself in the position of the beloved is so violent a discovery. even traumatic. being love makes me feel directly the gap between what i am. as a determinate being and the unfathomable x in me that causes love. the k's definition of love. love is giving something one doesn't have. has to be supplemented with to someone who doesn't want it. is this not confirmed by our most elementary experience when somebody unexpectedly declares passionate love to us. the first reaction, preceding the possible positive reply, is that something obscene, intrusive? is being forced upon us. in the middle of guillermo arriaga's 21 grams, paul who is dying of a weak heart gently declares his love to christina who is traumatized by the recent death of her husband and two young children. the next time they meet, christina bursts out into a complaint about the violent nature of declaring love.
Narrator
i'm not anything in this world.
i'm not anything in this world.
Narrator
i'm just not anything. here. christina looks at paul. raises her hands and desperately starts to kiss him on the mouth. so it is not that she did not like him and did not desire carnal contact. the problem for her was on the contrary that she did want it. the point of her complaint was, what right did he have to stir up her desire? it is from this abyss of the other as thing that we can understand what lacan means. by what he calls the founding
i'm just not anything. here. christina looks at paul. raises her hands and desperately starts to kiss him on the mouth. so it is not that she did not like him and did not desire carnal contact. the problem for her was on the contrary that she did want it. the point of her complaint was, what right did he have to stir up her desire? it is from this abyss of the other as thing that we can understand what lacan means. by what he calls the founding
Narrator
word.
word.
Narrator
statements that confer on a person some symbolic title and make him or her what they are proclaimed to be. constituting their symbolic identity. you and my wife. my master. this notion is usually perceived as an echo of the theory of performatives. of speech acts that accomplish, in the very act of their enunciation, the state of affairs that they declare. when i say this meeting is closed, i thereby effectively close the meeting.
statements that confer on a person some symbolic title and make him or her what they are proclaimed to be. constituting their symbolic identity. you and my wife. my master. this notion is usually perceived as an echo of the theory of performatives. of speech acts that accomplish, in the very act of their enunciation, the state of affairs that they declare. when i say this meeting is closed, i thereby effectively close the meeting.
Narrator
however,...
however,...
Narrator
it is clear from the passage that opens this chapter that lacan aims at something more. performatives are, at their most fundamental acts of symbolic trust and engagement. when i tell someone, you are my master, i oblige myself to treat him in a certain way, and in the same move, i oblige him to treat me in a certain way. lacan's point is that we need this recourse to performativity. to the symbolic engagement precisely and only insofar as the other whom we confront is not only my mirror double, someone like me, but also the elusive absolute other. who ultimately remains an unfathomable mystery. the main function of the symbolic order with its laws and obligations is to render our coexistence with others minimally bearable. a third has to step in between me and my neighbors. so that our relations do not explode in murderous violence. back in the 1960s. in the era of structuralism, theories based on the notion that all human activity is regulated by unconscious symbolic mechanisms louis althusser launched the notorious formula of theoretical anti-humanism. allowing demanding even that it be supplemented by practical humanism. in our practice, we should act as humanists. respecting others, treating them as free persons with full dignity. as creators of their world. however, in theory, we should always bear in mind that humanism is an ideology. the way we spontaneously experience our predicament. and that a true knowledge of humans and their history should treat individuals not as autonomous objects, but as elements in a structure that follows its own laws. in contrast to althusser. lacan advocates that we recognize practical anti-humanism. an ethics that goes beyond the dimension of what nietzsche called human all too human and confronts the inhuman core of humanity. this means an ethics that fearlessly stands up to the latent monstrosity of being human. diabolic dimension that erupted in the phenomena broadly covered by the label.
it is clear from the passage that opens this chapter that lacan aims at something more. performatives are, at their most fundamental acts of symbolic trust and engagement. when i tell someone, you are my master, i oblige myself to treat him in a certain way, and in the same move, i oblige him to treat me in a certain way. lacan's point is that we need this recourse to performativity. to the symbolic engagement precisely and only insofar as the other whom we confront is not only my mirror double, someone like me, but also the elusive absolute other. who ultimately remains an unfathomable mystery. the main function of the symbolic order with its laws and obligations is to render our coexistence with others minimally bearable. a third has to step in between me and my neighbors. so that our relations do not explode in murderous violence. back in the 1960s. in the era of structuralism, theories based on the notion that all human activity is regulated by unconscious symbolic mechanisms louis althusser launched the notorious formula of theoretical anti-humanism. allowing demanding even that it be supplemented by practical humanism. in our practice, we should act as humanists. respecting others, treating them as free persons with full dignity. as creators of their world. however, in theory, we should always bear in mind that humanism is an ideology. the way we spontaneously experience our predicament. and that a true knowledge of humans and their history should treat individuals not as autonomous objects, but as elements in a structure that follows its own laws. in contrast to althusser. lacan advocates that we recognize practical anti-humanism. an ethics that goes beyond the dimension of what nietzsche called human all too human and confronts the inhuman core of humanity. this means an ethics that fearlessly stands up to the latent monstrosity of being human. diabolic dimension that erupted in the phenomena broadly covered by the label.
Narrator
auschwitz.
auschwitz.
Narrator
perhaps the best way to describe the status of this inhuman dimension of the neighbor is with reference to kant's philosophy. in his critique of pure reason, kant introduced the key distinction between negative and indefinite judgment. the positive statement, the soul is mortal, can be negated in two ways. we can either deny a predicate, the soul is not mortal. or affirm a non-predicate. the soul is non-mortal. the difference is exactly the same as the one known to every reader of stephen king. between he is not dead and he is undead. the indefinite judgment opens up a third domain that undermines the distinction between dead and non-dead. alive. the undead are neither alive nor dead. they are precisely the monstrous living dead. and the same goes for inhuman. he is not human is not the same as he is inhuman. he is not human means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine. while he is inhuman means something thoroughly different namely the fact that he is neither human nor inhuman but marked by a terrifying excess which although it negates what we understand as humanity. is inherent to being human. and perhaps one should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the kantian philosophical revolution. in the pre-kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, while with kant, the excess to be fought is imminent and concerns the very core of subjectivity itself. which is why in german idealism the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is night. the knight of the world. in contrast to the enlightenment notion of the light of reason. fighting the darkness around. in the pre-kantian universe, when a hero goes mad, he's deprived of his humanity. and animal passions or divine madness take over. with kent. madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being. how are we to avoid the traumatic impact of being too directly exposed to this terrifying abyss of the other? how are we to cope with that hazardous encounter with the other's desire? for lacan. fantasy provides an answer to the enigma of the other's desire. the first thing to note about fantasy is that it literally teaches us how to desire. fantasy does not mean that when i desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality i fantasize about eating it. the problem is rather, how do i know that i desire a strawberry cake in the first place? this is what fantasy tells me. this role of fantasy hinges on the deadlock in our sexuality. designated by lacan in his paradoxical statement there is no sexual relationship. there is no universal guarantee of a harmonious sexual relationship with one's partner. every subject has to invent a fantasy. of his or her own. private formula for the sexual relationship. the relationship with a woman. it's possible only in as much as the partner adheres to this formula. a couple of years ago, slovene feminists raised a hue and cry against a poster for sun lotion issued by a large cosmetics factory, depicting a number of suntanned female rears clad in clinging swimsuits and accompanied by the slogan, to each her own factor. of course, this ad was based on a tacky double entendre. the slogan ostensibly referred to the sun lotion, which was offered to customers with different sun factors so as to suit different skin types. however, its entire effect was based on its obvious male chauvinist reading. each woman can be had if only the man knows her factor. her a specific catalyst. what turns her on. the freudian viewpoint is that each subject, female or male, possesses such a factor. which regulates her or his desire. a woman viewed from behind on her hands and knees was the factor for wolf man freud's most famous patient a statuesque woman without pubic hair was john ruskin's factor. there is nothing uplifting about our awareness of this factor. it is uncanny. horrifying even. since it somehow dispossesses the subject. reducing her or him to a puppet-like level beyond dignity. and freedom. however, the thing to add at once is that the desire staged in fantasy is not the subject's own. but the others desire. the desire of those around me with whom i interact. fantasy. phantasmatic scene or scenario. is an answer to you're saying this, but what is it that you actually want by saying it? the original question of desire is not directly what do i want? but what do others want from me? what do they see in me? what am i for those others? a small child is embedded in a complex network of relations. he serves as a kind of catalyst and battlefield for the desires of those around him. his father, mother, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts fight their battles in his name. the mother sends a message to the father through her care for the son. while being well aware of this role, the child cannot fathom just what kind of object he is for these others. just what kind of games they are playing with him. fantasy provides an answer to this enigma. at its most fundamental. fantasy tells me what i am for my others. this intersubjective character of fantasy is discernible even in the most elementary cases. like the one, reported by freud, of his little daughter fantasizing about eating a strawberry cake. what we have here is by no means the simple case of the direct hallucinatory satisfaction of a desire. she wanted a cake, didn't get it, so she fantasized about it. the crucial feature is that while tucking into a strawberry cake, the little girl noticed how her parents were deeply satisfied by the sight of her enjoyment. what the fantasy of eating a strawberry cake was really about. was her attempt to form an identity of the one who fully enjoys eating a cake given by the parents. that would satisfy her parents and make her the object of their desire. since sexuality is the domain in which we get closest to the intimacy of another human being, totally exposing ourselves to him or her. sexual enjoyment is real for lacan. something traumatic in its breathtaking intensity. yet impossible in the sense that we cannot ever make sense of it. this is why a sexual relation in order to function. has to be screened through some fantasy recall the encounter between sarah miles. and her illicit lover the english officer in david lean's ryan's daughter. the depiction of the sexual act in the midst of the forest with waterfall sounds supposed to render their subdued passion cannot but strike us today as a mishmash of cliches. however, the role of the absurd sound accompaniment is profoundly ambiguous. by way of emphasizing the ecstasy of the sexual act. these sounds, in a way, dematerialize the act and rid us of the weight of its presence. a small mental experiment. makes this point clear. let us imagine that in the midst of such a pathetic rendering of the sexual act the music is suddenly muted and all that remains are quick snappy gestures their painful silence interrupted by the occasional rustle or groan compelling us to confront the inert presence of the sexual act. in short, the paradox of the scene from ryan's daughter is that the waterfall sound itself functions as the phantasmatic screen that filters out the real of the sexual act. the singing of the international in reds plays exactly the same role as the waterfall sound in ryan's daughter. the role of the phantasmatic screen that enables us to sustain the real of the sexual act. reds integrates the october revolution. for hollywood, the most traumatic historical event. into the hollywood universe by staging it as the metaphorical background for the sexual act between the movie's main characters. john reed played by warren beatty himself. and his lover, diane keaton. in the film. the october revolution takes place immediately after a crisis in their relationship. by delivering a fierce revolutionary oration to the turbulent crowd bt mesmerizes keaton. the two exchanged desirous glances. and the cries of the crowd serve as a metaphor for the rebirth of passion. the key mythical scenes of the revolution street demonstrations the storm of the winter palace alternate with the depiction of the couple's loveaking. against the background of the crowd singing the international. the mass scenes function as vulgar metaphors for the sexual act. when the black mass approaches and encircles the phallic tramway is this not a metaphor for keaton who in the sexual act, plays the active role on top of b. here we have the exact opposite of that soviet socialist realism in which lovers would experience their love as a contribution to the struggle for socialism, making a vow to sacrifice all their private pleasures. for the cause of revolution and to drown themselves in the masses. in reds, on the contrary, revolution itself appears as a metaphor for the successful sexual encounter. the common wisdom, usually attributed to psychoanalysis, about sexuality as the universal hidden referent of every activity. whatever we do, we are thinking about that. is here inverted. it is real sex itself, which... in order to be palatable. must be filtered through the asexual screen of the october revolution. instead of the proverbial close your eyes and think of england we have here. close your eyes and think of the october revolution. the logic is the same as that of a native american tribe. whose members have discovered that all dreams have some hidden sexual meaning. all except the overtly sexual ones. these are just where one has to look for another meaning. in his recently discovered secret diaries, wittgenstein reports that while masturbating at the front during world war i, he was thinking about mathematical problems. and it is also the same in reality. with so-called real sex, it also needs some phantasmatic screen. any contact with the real flesh and blood other any sexual pleasure that we find in touching another human being. is not something evident. but something inherently traumatic. and can be sustained only insofar as this other enters the subject's fantasy frame. what, then, is fantasy at its most elementary? the ontological paradox, scandal even, of fantasy resides in the fact that it subverts the standard opposition of subjective and objective. of course, fantasy is by definition not objective. referring to something that exists independently. of the subject's perceptions. however, it is also not subjective. something that belongs to the subject's consciously experienced intuitions. product of his or her imagination. fantasy rather belongs to the bizarre category of the objectively subjective. the way things actually, objectively seem to you, even if they don't seem that way to you. daniel dennett, consciousness explained. when, for example, we claim that someone who is consciously well-disposed towards jews nonetheless harbors profound anti-semitic prejudices, he is not consciously aware of. do we not claim that, insofar as these prejudices do not render the way jews really are? but the way they appear to him. he is not aware how jews really seem to him. in march 2003, donald rumsfeld engaged in a brief bout of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown. there are known knowns. these are things we know that we know. there are known unknowns. that is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. but there are also unknown unknowns. there are things we don't know, we don't know. what he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term. the unknown knowns. things we don't know that we know, which is precisely the freudian unconscious. the knowledge that doesn't know itself. as lacan used to say. the core of which is fantasy. if rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with iraq are the unknown unknowns, the threats from saddam or his successors about which we do not even suspect what they may be what we should say in reply is that the main dangers are, on the contrary, the unknown knowns. the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to ourselves. but which nonetheless determine our acts and feelings. this is also one of the ways to specify the meaning of lein's claim that the subject is always d-centered. his point is not that my subjective experience is regulated by objective unconscious mechanisms that are de-centered with regard to my self-ex experience. and as such beyond my control. the 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 deprived of the fundamental fantasy that constitutes and guarantees the core of my being since i can never consciously experience it. and assume it. according to the standard view the dimension that is constitutive of subjectivity is that of 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 am seeing and feeling right now. say when i am passionately in love and a biochemist informs me that all my intense sentiments are just the result of biochemical processes in my body i can answer by holding on to the appearance all that you're saying may be true but nonetheless, nothing can take from me the intensity of the passion that i am experiencing now. lacan's point, however, is that the psychoanalyst is the one who, precisely can take this away from the subject. the analyst's ultimate aim is to deprive the subject of the very fundamental fantasy that regulates the universe of his self-experience. the freudian subject of the unconscious emerges only when a key aspect of the subject's self-experience his fundamental fantasy becomes inaccessible to him. primordially repressed. at its most radical, the young conscious is the inaccessible phenomenon, not the objective mechanisms that regulate my phenomenal experience. so in contrast to the commonplace that we are dealing with a subject, the moment an entity displays signs of inner life. of a phantasmatic experience that cannot be reduced to external behaviour one should claim that what characterizes human subjectivity proper is rather the gap that separates the two. namely the fact that fantasy at its most elementary. becomes inaccessible to the subject. it is this inaccessibility that makes the subject empty. as lacan put it. we thus obtain a relationship that totally subverts the standard notion of the subject who directly experiences himself via his inner state. a strange relationship between the empty, non-phenomenal subject and the phenomena that remain inaccessible to the subject. in other words, psychoanalysis allows us to formulate a paradoxical phenomenology. without a subject. phenomena arise that are not phenomena of a subject. appearing to a subject. this does not mean that the subject is not involved here. it is, but precisely in the mode of exclusion. as divided. as the agency that is not able to assume the very core of his or her inner experience. this paradoxical status of fantasy. brings us to the ultimate point of the irreconcilable difference between psychoanalysis and feminism. that's a rate. and the masochistic fantasy sustaining it. for standard feminism at least. it is an axiom that rap is of violence imposed from without even if a woman fantasizes about being raped or brutally mistreated this is either a male fantasy about women. or a woman does it insofar as she has internalized the patriarchal libidinal economy and endorsed her victimization the underlying idea is that the moment we recognize this fact of daydreaming about rape we open the door to male chauvinist platitudes about how in being raped women only get what they secretly wanted, and had their shock and fear only expressed the fact that they were not honest enough to acknowledge their desire. so the moment one mentions that a woman may fantasize about being raped, one hears it objected that this is like saying that jews fantasize about being gassed in the camps or that african americans fantasize about being lynched. from this perspective the split hysterical position of the woman complaining about being sexually misused and exploited. while simultaneously desiring it and provoking the man to seduce her. is secondary. while for freud this split is primary. conststitutive of subjectivity. the practical conclusion from this is that while some women really may indeed dream about being raped, this fact not only in no way legitimises the actual rape. but renders it all the more violent. let us take two women. the first is liberated and assertive, active. the other daydreams in secret about being brutalized. even raped by her partner. the crucial point is that if both of them are raped, the rape will be much more traumatic for the second woman on account of the very fact that it will realize in external social reality the stuff of her dreams. there is a gap that forever separates the phantasmatic kernel of the subject's being from the more superficial modes of his or her symbolic or imaginary identifications it is never possible for me to fully assume in the sense of symbolic integration the phantasmatic kernel of my being. when i venture too close. what occurs is what lacan calls the aphanasus. the self-obliteration. of the subject. the subject loses his or her symbolic consistency. it disintegrates. and perhaps the forest actualization in social reality itself. of the phantasmatic kernel of my being is the worst, most humiliating kind of violence, a violence that undermines the very basis of my identity. of my self-image. consequently, the problem with rape, in freud's view, is that it has such a traumatic impact, not simply because it is a case of brutal external violence, but also because it touches on something disavowed in the victim herself. so, when freud writes, if what subjects long for most intensely, in their fantasies is presented to them in reality. they nonetheless flee from it. his point is that this occurs not merely because of censorship. but rather because the core of our fantasy. is unbearable to us. a couple of years ago, a charming commercial for a beer was shown on british tv. it started with the familiar fairy tale encounter. a girl is walking by a stream, sees a frog. takes it gently onto her lap, kisses it, and of course the ugly frog is transformed into a beautiful young man. however, the story isn't over. the young man casts a hungry glance at the girl, draws her towards him, kisses her, and she turns into a bottle of beer that the man holds triumphantly in his hand.
perhaps the best way to describe the status of this inhuman dimension of the neighbor is with reference to kant's philosophy. in his critique of pure reason, kant introduced the key distinction between negative and indefinite judgment. the positive statement, the soul is mortal, can be negated in two ways. we can either deny a predicate, the soul is not mortal. or affirm a non-predicate. the soul is non-mortal. the difference is exactly the same as the one known to every reader of stephen king. between he is not dead and he is undead. the indefinite judgment opens up a third domain that undermines the distinction between dead and non-dead. alive. the undead are neither alive nor dead. they are precisely the monstrous living dead. and the same goes for inhuman. he is not human is not the same as he is inhuman. he is not human means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine. while he is inhuman means something thoroughly different namely the fact that he is neither human nor inhuman but marked by a terrifying excess which although it negates what we understand as humanity. is inherent to being human. and perhaps one should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the kantian philosophical revolution. in the pre-kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, while with kant, the excess to be fought is imminent and concerns the very core of subjectivity itself. which is why in german idealism the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is night. the knight of the world. in contrast to the enlightenment notion of the light of reason. fighting the darkness around. in the pre-kantian universe, when a hero goes mad, he's deprived of his humanity. and animal passions or divine madness take over. with kent. madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being. how are we to avoid the traumatic impact of being too directly exposed to this terrifying abyss of the other? how are we to cope with that hazardous encounter with the other's desire? for lacan. fantasy provides an answer to the enigma of the other's desire. the first thing to note about fantasy is that it literally teaches us how to desire. fantasy does not mean that when i desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality i fantasize about eating it. the problem is rather, how do i know that i desire a strawberry cake in the first place? this is what fantasy tells me. this role of fantasy hinges on the deadlock in our sexuality. designated by lacan in his paradoxical statement there is no sexual relationship. there is no universal guarantee of a harmonious sexual relationship with one's partner. every subject has to invent a fantasy. of his or her own. private formula for the sexual relationship. the relationship with a woman. it's possible only in as much as the partner adheres to this formula. a couple of years ago, slovene feminists raised a hue and cry against a poster for sun lotion issued by a large cosmetics factory, depicting a number of suntanned female rears clad in clinging swimsuits and accompanied by the slogan, to each her own factor. of course, this ad was based on a tacky double entendre. the slogan ostensibly referred to the sun lotion, which was offered to customers with different sun factors so as to suit different skin types. however, its entire effect was based on its obvious male chauvinist reading. each woman can be had if only the man knows her factor. her a specific catalyst. what turns her on. the freudian viewpoint is that each subject, female or male, possesses such a factor. which regulates her or his desire. a woman viewed from behind on her hands and knees was the factor for wolf man freud's most famous patient a statuesque woman without pubic hair was john ruskin's factor. there is nothing uplifting about our awareness of this factor. it is uncanny. horrifying even. since it somehow dispossesses the subject. reducing her or him to a puppet-like level beyond dignity. and freedom. however, the thing to add at once is that the desire staged in fantasy is not the subject's own. but the others desire. the desire of those around me with whom i interact. fantasy. phantasmatic scene or scenario. is an answer to you're saying this, but what is it that you actually want by saying it? the original question of desire is not directly what do i want? but what do others want from me? what do they see in me? what am i for those others? a small child is embedded in a complex network of relations. he serves as a kind of catalyst and battlefield for the desires of those around him. his father, mother, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts fight their battles in his name. the mother sends a message to the father through her care for the son. while being well aware of this role, the child cannot fathom just what kind of object he is for these others. just what kind of games they are playing with him. fantasy provides an answer to this enigma. at its most fundamental. fantasy tells me what i am for my others. this intersubjective character of fantasy is discernible even in the most elementary cases. like the one, reported by freud, of his little daughter fantasizing about eating a strawberry cake. what we have here is by no means the simple case of the direct hallucinatory satisfaction of a desire. she wanted a cake, didn't get it, so she fantasized about it. the crucial feature is that while tucking into a strawberry cake, the little girl noticed how her parents were deeply satisfied by the sight of her enjoyment. what the fantasy of eating a strawberry cake was really about. was her attempt to form an identity of the one who fully enjoys eating a cake given by the parents. that would satisfy her parents and make her the object of their desire. since sexuality is the domain in which we get closest to the intimacy of another human being, totally exposing ourselves to him or her. sexual enjoyment is real for lacan. something traumatic in its breathtaking intensity. yet impossible in the sense that we cannot ever make sense of it. this is why a sexual relation in order to function. has to be screened through some fantasy recall the encounter between sarah miles. and her illicit lover the english officer in david lean's ryan's daughter. the depiction of the sexual act in the midst of the forest with waterfall sounds supposed to render their subdued passion cannot but strike us today as a mishmash of cliches. however, the role of the absurd sound accompaniment is profoundly ambiguous. by way of emphasizing the ecstasy of the sexual act. these sounds, in a way, dematerialize the act and rid us of the weight of its presence. a small mental experiment. makes this point clear. let us imagine that in the midst of such a pathetic rendering of the sexual act the music is suddenly muted and all that remains are quick snappy gestures their painful silence interrupted by the occasional rustle or groan compelling us to confront the inert presence of the sexual act. in short, the paradox of the scene from ryan's daughter is that the waterfall sound itself functions as the phantasmatic screen that filters out the real of the sexual act. the singing of the international in reds plays exactly the same role as the waterfall sound in ryan's daughter. the role of the phantasmatic screen that enables us to sustain the real of the sexual act. reds integrates the october revolution. for hollywood, the most traumatic historical event. into the hollywood universe by staging it as the metaphorical background for the sexual act between the movie's main characters. john reed played by warren beatty himself. and his lover, diane keaton. in the film. the october revolution takes place immediately after a crisis in their relationship. by delivering a fierce revolutionary oration to the turbulent crowd bt mesmerizes keaton. the two exchanged desirous glances. and the cries of the crowd serve as a metaphor for the rebirth of passion. the key mythical scenes of the revolution street demonstrations the storm of the winter palace alternate with the depiction of the couple's loveaking. against the background of the crowd singing the international. the mass scenes function as vulgar metaphors for the sexual act. when the black mass approaches and encircles the phallic tramway is this not a metaphor for keaton who in the sexual act, plays the active role on top of b. here we have the exact opposite of that soviet socialist realism in which lovers would experience their love as a contribution to the struggle for socialism, making a vow to sacrifice all their private pleasures. for the cause of revolution and to drown themselves in the masses. in reds, on the contrary, revolution itself appears as a metaphor for the successful sexual encounter. the common wisdom, usually attributed to psychoanalysis, about sexuality as the universal hidden referent of every activity. whatever we do, we are thinking about that. is here inverted. it is real sex itself, which... in order to be palatable. must be filtered through the asexual screen of the october revolution. instead of the proverbial close your eyes and think of england we have here. close your eyes and think of the october revolution. the logic is the same as that of a native american tribe. whose members have discovered that all dreams have some hidden sexual meaning. all except the overtly sexual ones. these are just where one has to look for another meaning. in his recently discovered secret diaries, wittgenstein reports that while masturbating at the front during world war i, he was thinking about mathematical problems. and it is also the same in reality. with so-called real sex, it also needs some phantasmatic screen. any contact with the real flesh and blood other any sexual pleasure that we find in touching another human being. is not something evident. but something inherently traumatic. and can be sustained only insofar as this other enters the subject's fantasy frame. what, then, is fantasy at its most elementary? the ontological paradox, scandal even, of fantasy resides in the fact that it subverts the standard opposition of subjective and objective. of course, fantasy is by definition not objective. referring to something that exists independently. of the subject's perceptions. however, it is also not subjective. something that belongs to the subject's consciously experienced intuitions. product of his or her imagination. fantasy rather belongs to the bizarre category of the objectively subjective. the way things actually, objectively seem to you, even if they don't seem that way to you. daniel dennett, consciousness explained. when, for example, we claim that someone who is consciously well-disposed towards jews nonetheless harbors profound anti-semitic prejudices, he is not consciously aware of. do we not claim that, insofar as these prejudices do not render the way jews really are? but the way they appear to him. he is not aware how jews really seem to him. in march 2003, donald rumsfeld engaged in a brief bout of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown. there are known knowns. these are things we know that we know. there are known unknowns. that is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. but there are also unknown unknowns. there are things we don't know, we don't know. what he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term. the unknown knowns. things we don't know that we know, which is precisely the freudian unconscious. the knowledge that doesn't know itself. as lacan used to say. the core of which is fantasy. if rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with iraq are the unknown unknowns, the threats from saddam or his successors about which we do not even suspect what they may be what we should say in reply is that the main dangers are, on the contrary, the unknown knowns. the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to ourselves. but which nonetheless determine our acts and feelings. this is also one of the ways to specify the meaning of lein's claim that the subject is always d-centered. his point is not that my subjective experience is regulated by objective unconscious mechanisms that are de-centered with regard to my self-ex experience. and as such beyond my control. the 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 deprived of the fundamental fantasy that constitutes and guarantees the core of my being since i can never consciously experience it. and assume it. according to the standard view the dimension that is constitutive of subjectivity is that of 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 am seeing and feeling right now. say when i am passionately in love and a biochemist informs me that all my intense sentiments are just the result of biochemical processes in my body i can answer by holding on to the appearance all that you're saying may be true but nonetheless, nothing can take from me the intensity of the passion that i am experiencing now. lacan's point, however, is that the psychoanalyst is the one who, precisely can take this away from the subject. the analyst's ultimate aim is to deprive the subject of the very fundamental fantasy that regulates the universe of his self-experience. the freudian subject of the unconscious emerges only when a key aspect of the subject's self-experience his fundamental fantasy becomes inaccessible to him. primordially repressed. at its most radical, the young conscious is the inaccessible phenomenon, not the objective mechanisms that regulate my phenomenal experience. so in contrast to the commonplace that we are dealing with a subject, the moment an entity displays signs of inner life. of a phantasmatic experience that cannot be reduced to external behaviour one should claim that what characterizes human subjectivity proper is rather the gap that separates the two. namely the fact that fantasy at its most elementary. becomes inaccessible to the subject. it is this inaccessibility that makes the subject empty. as lacan put it. we thus obtain a relationship that totally subverts the standard notion of the subject who directly experiences himself via his inner state. a strange relationship between the empty, non-phenomenal subject and the phenomena that remain inaccessible to the subject. in other words, psychoanalysis allows us to formulate a paradoxical phenomenology. without a subject. phenomena arise that are not phenomena of a subject. appearing to a subject. this does not mean that the subject is not involved here. it is, but precisely in the mode of exclusion. as divided. as the agency that is not able to assume the very core of his or her inner experience. this paradoxical status of fantasy. brings us to the ultimate point of the irreconcilable difference between psychoanalysis and feminism. that's a rate. and the masochistic fantasy sustaining it. for standard feminism at least. it is an axiom that rap is of violence imposed from without even if a woman fantasizes about being raped or brutally mistreated this is either a male fantasy about women. or a woman does it insofar as she has internalized the patriarchal libidinal economy and endorsed her victimization the underlying idea is that the moment we recognize this fact of daydreaming about rape we open the door to male chauvinist platitudes about how in being raped women only get what they secretly wanted, and had their shock and fear only expressed the fact that they were not honest enough to acknowledge their desire. so the moment one mentions that a woman may fantasize about being raped, one hears it objected that this is like saying that jews fantasize about being gassed in the camps or that african americans fantasize about being lynched. from this perspective the split hysterical position of the woman complaining about being sexually misused and exploited. while simultaneously desiring it and provoking the man to seduce her. is secondary. while for freud this split is primary. conststitutive of subjectivity. the practical conclusion from this is that while some women really may indeed dream about being raped, this fact not only in no way legitimises the actual rape. but renders it all the more violent. let us take two women. the first is liberated and assertive, active. the other daydreams in secret about being brutalized. even raped by her partner. the crucial point is that if both of them are raped, the rape will be much more traumatic for the second woman on account of the very fact that it will realize in external social reality the stuff of her dreams. there is a gap that forever separates the phantasmatic kernel of the subject's being from the more superficial modes of his or her symbolic or imaginary identifications it is never possible for me to fully assume in the sense of symbolic integration the phantasmatic kernel of my being. when i venture too close. what occurs is what lacan calls the aphanasus. the self-obliteration. of the subject. the subject loses his or her symbolic consistency. it disintegrates. and perhaps the forest actualization in social reality itself. of the phantasmatic kernel of my being is the worst, most humiliating kind of violence, a violence that undermines the very basis of my identity. of my self-image. consequently, the problem with rape, in freud's view, is that it has such a traumatic impact, not simply because it is a case of brutal external violence, but also because it touches on something disavowed in the victim herself. so, when freud writes, if what subjects long for most intensely, in their fantasies is presented to them in reality. they nonetheless flee from it. his point is that this occurs not merely because of censorship. but rather because the core of our fantasy. is unbearable to us. a couple of years ago, a charming commercial for a beer was shown on british tv. it started with the familiar fairy tale encounter. a girl is walking by a stream, sees a frog. takes it gently onto her lap, kisses it, and of course the ugly frog is transformed into a beautiful young man. however, the story isn't over. the young man casts a hungry glance at the girl, draws her towards him, kisses her, and she turns into a bottle of beer that the man holds triumphantly in his hand.
Voice Actor (TV ad clip)
they frank? i bet that if i were to give you a kiss, you'd turn into a handsome sheep shearer.
they frank? i bet that if i were to give you a kiss, you'd turn into a handsome sheep shearer.
Voice Actor (TV ad clip)
castlemaine is made with golden cluster hops.
castlemaine is made with golden cluster hops.
Narrator
got got a sister, have you?
got got a sister, have you?
Voice Actor (TV ad clip)
the experienced
the experienced
Narrator
experienced hobos wouldn't give up castlemaine 4x for any other lager. for the woman, the point is that her love and affection, signaled by the kiss, turn a frog into a beautiful man. a full phallic presence. for the man. it is to reduce the woman to a partial object, the cause of his desire. on account of this asymmetry, there is no sexual relationship. we have either a woman with a frog or a man with a bottle of beer. what we can never obtain is the natural couple of the beautiful woman and man. the phantasmatic counterpart of this ideal couple would have been the figure of a frog embracing a bottle of beer. an incongruous image which instead of guaranteeing the harmony of the sexual relationship. highlights its ridiculous discord. this opens up the possibility of undermining the hold a fantasy exerts over us through our very over-identification with it. by way of embracing simultaneously. within the same space. the multitude of inconsistent phantasmatic elements that is to say, each of the two subjects is involved in his or her own subjective fantasizing. the girl fantasizes about the frog who is really a young man the man about the girl who is really a bottle of beer. what modern art and writing oppose to this is not objective reality, but the objectively subjective, underlying fantasy, which the two subjects can never enact. a magritte-esque painting of a frog astride a bottle of beer. with the title a man and a woman, or the ideal couple. the association with the famous surrealist dead donkey on a piano is here fully justified. since the surrealists also practice such over-identification with incongruous fantasies. and is this not the ethical duty of today's artist to confront us with the frog embracing the bottle of beer when we daydream of embracing our beloved. in other words, to stage fantasies that are radically desubjectivized. that cannot ever be enacted by the subject. this brings us to a further crucial complication. if what we experience is reality. is structured by fantasy. and if fantasy serves as a screen that protects us from being directly overwhelmed by the raw real, then reality itself can function as an escape from encountering the real. in the opposition between dream and reality. fantasy is on the side of reality. and it is in dreams that we encounter the traumatic reality. it is not that dreams are for those who cannot endure reality. reality itself. is for those who cannot endure. the real that announces itself in their dream. this is the lesson laccan draws from the famous dream reported by freud in his interpretation of dreams. dreamt by the father who falls asleep while keeping watch over his son's coffin. in this dream, his dead son appears to him, pronouncing the terrible appeal. father, you cannot see that i am burning. when the father wakes up, he discovers that the cloth on his son's coffin has caught fire, ignited by a falling candle. so why did the father wake up? was it because the smell of the smoke got too strong? so that it was no longer possible to prolong his sleep by containing the event in an improvised dream the count proposes a much more interesting reading. if the function of the dream is to prolong sleep, if the dream, after all, may come so near to the reality that causes it, can we not say that it might correspond to this reality without emerging from sleep? after all, there is such a thing as somnambulistic activity. the question that arises. and which indeed all freud's previous indications allow us here to produce is what is it that wakes the sleeper? is it not in the dream? another reality. the reality that freud describes thus. that the child is near his bed. takes him by the arm and whispers to him reproachfully father can't you see? the time burning. is there not more reality in this message than in the noise by which the father also identifies the strange reality of what is happening in the room next door? is not the mist reality that caused the death of the child expressed in these words? the cat. the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. so it was not the intrusion from external reality that awakened the unfortunate father, but the unbearably traumatic character of what he encountered in the dream. insofar as dreaming means fantasizing in order to avoid confronting the real. the father literally woke up so that he could go on dreaming. the scenario was as follows. when the smoke disturbed his sleep, the the quickly constructed a dream that incorporated the disturbing element, smoke fire, in order to prolong his sleep. however, what he confronted in the dream was a trauma. of his responsibility for the son's death. much stronger than reality, so he awakened into reality in order to avoid the real. in contemporary art, we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the real. to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction. to awaken him from the sweet dream. this gesture has two main forms that, although opposed, amount to the same effect. in literature or cinema, there are, especially in postmodern texts, self-reflexive reminders that what we are watching is a mere fiction. as when the actors on screen address us directly as spectators, thus ruining the illusion of the autonomous space of the narrative fiction. or the writer directly intervenes in the narrative through ironic comments. in theatre, there are occasional brutal events that awaken us to the reality of the stage. like slaughtering a chicken on set. instead of conferring on these gestures a kind of brechtian dignity perceiving them as versions of alienation, one should rather denounce them for what they are, the exact opposite of what they claim to be. escapes from the real. desperate attempts to avoid the real of the illusion itself. the real that emerges in the guise of an illusory spectacle. what we confront here is the fundamental ambiguity of the notion of fantasy. while fantasy is the screen that protects us from the encounter with the real. fantasy itself at its most fundamental. what freud called the fundamental fantasy which provides the most elementary coordinates of the subject's capacity to desire. cannot ever be subjectivized. and has to remain repressed. in order to function. in stanley kubrick's eyes wide shut. recall the apparently vulgar conclusion of the film. after tom cruise confesses his night's adventure to nicole kidman and they are both confronted with the excess of their fantasizing kidman upon ascertaining that now they are fully awake back into the day and that if not for ever at least for a long time they will stay there. keeping the fantasy at bay. tells him that they must do something as soon as possible. what? he asks. and her answer is, fuck. end of the film. the final credits roll. the nature of the passage à l'acte, passage to the act, as the false exit. the way to avoid confronting the horror of the phantasmatic netherworld. was never so bluntly stated in a film. far from providing them with a real life bodily satisfaction that will supersede empty fantasizing. the passage to the act is presented as a stopgap, as a desperate preventative measure. aimed at keeping at bay the spectral netherworld of fantasies. it is as if her message is let's fuck right now. and then we can stifle our teeming fantasies before they overwhelm us again lacan's quip about awakening into reality as an escape from the real encountered in the dream. holds true more aptly than anywhere else of the sexual act itself. we do not dream about fucking when we are not able to do it. rather we fuck in order to escape and quell the exorbitant power of the dream that would otherwise overwhelm us. for lacan. the ultimate ethical task is that of the true awakening. not only from sleep. but from the spell of fantasy. that controls us even more. when we are awake.
experienced hobos wouldn't give up castlemaine 4x for any other lager. for the woman, the point is that her love and affection, signaled by the kiss, turn a frog into a beautiful man. a full phallic presence. for the man. it is to reduce the woman to a partial object, the cause of his desire. on account of this asymmetry, there is no sexual relationship. we have either a woman with a frog or a man with a bottle of beer. what we can never obtain is the natural couple of the beautiful woman and man. the phantasmatic counterpart of this ideal couple would have been the figure of a frog embracing a bottle of beer. an incongruous image which instead of guaranteeing the harmony of the sexual relationship. highlights its ridiculous discord. this opens up the possibility of undermining the hold a fantasy exerts over us through our very over-identification with it. by way of embracing simultaneously. within the same space. the multitude of inconsistent phantasmatic elements that is to say, each of the two subjects is involved in his or her own subjective fantasizing. the girl fantasizes about the frog who is really a young man the man about the girl who is really a bottle of beer. what modern art and writing oppose to this is not objective reality, but the objectively subjective, underlying fantasy, which the two subjects can never enact. a magritte-esque painting of a frog astride a bottle of beer. with the title a man and a woman, or the ideal couple. the association with the famous surrealist dead donkey on a piano is here fully justified. since the surrealists also practice such over-identification with incongruous fantasies. and is this not the ethical duty of today's artist to confront us with the frog embracing the bottle of beer when we daydream of embracing our beloved. in other words, to stage fantasies that are radically desubjectivized. that cannot ever be enacted by the subject. this brings us to a further crucial complication. if what we experience is reality. is structured by fantasy. and if fantasy serves as a screen that protects us from being directly overwhelmed by the raw real, then reality itself can function as an escape from encountering the real. in the opposition between dream and reality. fantasy is on the side of reality. and it is in dreams that we encounter the traumatic reality. it is not that dreams are for those who cannot endure reality. reality itself. is for those who cannot endure. the real that announces itself in their dream. this is the lesson laccan draws from the famous dream reported by freud in his interpretation of dreams. dreamt by the father who falls asleep while keeping watch over his son's coffin. in this dream, his dead son appears to him, pronouncing the terrible appeal. father, you cannot see that i am burning. when the father wakes up, he discovers that the cloth on his son's coffin has caught fire, ignited by a falling candle. so why did the father wake up? was it because the smell of the smoke got too strong? so that it was no longer possible to prolong his sleep by containing the event in an improvised dream the count proposes a much more interesting reading. if the function of the dream is to prolong sleep, if the dream, after all, may come so near to the reality that causes it, can we not say that it might correspond to this reality without emerging from sleep? after all, there is such a thing as somnambulistic activity. the question that arises. and which indeed all freud's previous indications allow us here to produce is what is it that wakes the sleeper? is it not in the dream? another reality. the reality that freud describes thus. that the child is near his bed. takes him by the arm and whispers to him reproachfully father can't you see? the time burning. is there not more reality in this message than in the noise by which the father also identifies the strange reality of what is happening in the room next door? is not the mist reality that caused the death of the child expressed in these words? the cat. the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. so it was not the intrusion from external reality that awakened the unfortunate father, but the unbearably traumatic character of what he encountered in the dream. insofar as dreaming means fantasizing in order to avoid confronting the real. the father literally woke up so that he could go on dreaming. the scenario was as follows. when the smoke disturbed his sleep, the the quickly constructed a dream that incorporated the disturbing element, smoke fire, in order to prolong his sleep. however, what he confronted in the dream was a trauma. of his responsibility for the son's death. much stronger than reality, so he awakened into reality in order to avoid the real. in contemporary art, we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the real. to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction. to awaken him from the sweet dream. this gesture has two main forms that, although opposed, amount to the same effect. in literature or cinema, there are, especially in postmodern texts, self-reflexive reminders that what we are watching is a mere fiction. as when the actors on screen address us directly as spectators, thus ruining the illusion of the autonomous space of the narrative fiction. or the writer directly intervenes in the narrative through ironic comments. in theatre, there are occasional brutal events that awaken us to the reality of the stage. like slaughtering a chicken on set. instead of conferring on these gestures a kind of brechtian dignity perceiving them as versions of alienation, one should rather denounce them for what they are, the exact opposite of what they claim to be. escapes from the real. desperate attempts to avoid the real of the illusion itself. the real that emerges in the guise of an illusory spectacle. what we confront here is the fundamental ambiguity of the notion of fantasy. while fantasy is the screen that protects us from the encounter with the real. fantasy itself at its most fundamental. what freud called the fundamental fantasy which provides the most elementary coordinates of the subject's capacity to desire. cannot ever be subjectivized. and has to remain repressed. in order to function. in stanley kubrick's eyes wide shut. recall the apparently vulgar conclusion of the film. after tom cruise confesses his night's adventure to nicole kidman and they are both confronted with the excess of their fantasizing kidman upon ascertaining that now they are fully awake back into the day and that if not for ever at least for a long time they will stay there. keeping the fantasy at bay. tells him that they must do something as soon as possible. what? he asks. and her answer is, fuck. end of the film. the final credits roll. the nature of the passage à l'acte, passage to the act, as the false exit. the way to avoid confronting the horror of the phantasmatic netherworld. was never so bluntly stated in a film. far from providing them with a real life bodily satisfaction that will supersede empty fantasizing. the passage to the act is presented as a stopgap, as a desperate preventative measure. aimed at keeping at bay the spectral netherworld of fantasies. it is as if her message is let's fuck right now. and then we can stifle our teeming fantasies before they overwhelm us again lacan's quip about awakening into reality as an escape from the real encountered in the dream. holds true more aptly than anywhere else of the sexual act itself. we do not dream about fucking when we are not able to do it. rather we fuck in order to escape and quell the exorbitant power of the dream that would otherwise overwhelm us. for lacan. the ultimate ethical task is that of the true awakening. not only from sleep. but from the spell of fantasy. that controls us even more. when we are awake.