Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek
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by the call of “irrational” belief—and this is the most elementary formula of how ideology functions today. (Note how, by merely “believing in himself,” Po becomes the superior warrior after just a couple of training sessions, leaving behind his co-warriors who have been training for years—the magic of belief really works . . .)
This, however, is not the lesson of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is firmly entrenched in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition, not only against Oriental spirituality but also against Islam, one of the religions of the Book, which, like Oriental spirituality, endorses the thesis of the ultimate vanity, the illusory nature, of every object of desire. In the Thousand and One Nights, on the 614th night, Judar, following the orders of a Moroccan magician, had to penetrate seven doors that would lead him to a treasure. When he came to the seventh door,
there issued forth to him his mother, saying, “I salute thee, O my son!” He asked, “What art thou?” and she answered, “O my son, I am thy mother who bore thee nine months and suckled thee and reared thee.” Quoth he, “Put off thy clothes.” Quoth she, “Thou art my son, how wouldst thou strip me naked?” But he said “Strip, or I will strike off thy head with this sword”; and he stretched out his hand to the brand and drew it upon her saying, “Except thou strip, I will slay thee.” Then the strife became long between them and as often as he redoubled on her his threats, she put off somewhat of her clothes and he said to her, “Doff the rest,” with many menaces; while she removed each article slowly and kept saying, “O my son, thou hast disappointed my fosterage of thee,” till she had nothing left but her petticoat trousers. Then said she, “O my son, is thy heart stone? Wilt thou dishonor me by discovering my shame? Indeed, this is unlawful, O my son!” And he answered, “Thou sayest sooth; put not off thy trousers.” At once, as he uttered these words, she cried out, “He hath made default; beat him!” Whereupon there fell upon him blows like raindrops and the servants of the treasure flocked to him and dealt him a funding which he forgot not in all his days.11
On the 615th night, we learn that Judar was given another chance and tried again; when he came to the seventh door,
the semblance of his mother appeared before him, saying, “Welcome, O my son!” But he said to her, “How am I thy son, O accursed? Strip!” And she began to wheedle him and put off garment after garment, till only her trousers remained; and he said to her, “Strip, O accursed!” So she put off her trousers and became a body without a soul. Then he entered the hall of the treasures, where he saw gold lying in heaps . . .
Fethi Benslama points out how this passage indicates that Islam knows what our Western universe denies: the fact that incest is not forbidden, but is inherently impossible (when one finally gets to the naked mother, she disintegrates as a bad specter).12 Benslama refers here to Jean-Joseph Goux’s Œdipe philosophe,13 where he demonstrates how the Oedipus myth, far from being universal, the underlying arche-myth, is an exception with regard to other myths, a Western myth, its basic feature being precisely that “behind the prohibition, the impossible withdraws itself”:14 the very prohibition is read as an indication that incest is possible. From the standard position of commonsensical wisdom, Oedipus is a Western aberration, a confusion of the ontic object with the ontological void; it is a blinding short circuit, the elevation of an ontic object into the ontological Absolute, where the goal should be to distance them, to see the vanity of all objects. Here, however, one should remain faithful to the Western “Oedipal” tradition: of course every object of desire is an illusory lure; of course the full jouissance of incest is not only prohibited, but is in itself impossible; however, it is here that one should fully assert Lacan’s claim that les non-dupes errent. Even if the object of desire is an illusory lure, there is a real in this illusion: the object of desire in its positive nature is vain, but not the place it occupies, the place of the Real, which is why there is more truth in unconditional fidelity to one’s desire than in a resigned insight into the vanity of one’s striving.
There is a parallax shift at work here: from illusion as mere illusion to the real in illusion, from the object which is a metonym/mask of the Void to the object which stands in for the void. This parallax shift is, in Lacanese, the shift from desire to drive. The key distinction to be maintained here can be exemplified with reference to the (apparent) opposite of religion: intense sexual experience. Eroticization relies on the inversion-into-itself of movement directed at an external goal: the movement itself becomes its own goal. (When, instead of simply gently shaking the hand offered to me by the beloved person, I hold onto it and squeeze repeatedly, my activity will be automatically experienced as—welcome or, perhaps, intrusively unwelcome—eroticization: what I do is change the goal-oriented activity into an end-in-itself.) Therein resides the difference between the goal and the aim of a drive: say, with regard to the oral drive, its goal may be to eliminate hunger, but its aim is the satisfaction provided by the activity of eating itself (sucking, swallowing). One can imagine the two satisfactions entirely separated: when, in hospital, I am fed intravenously, my hunger is satisfied, but not my oral drive; when, on the contrary, a small child sucks rhythmically on the comforter, the only satisfaction he gets is that of the drive. This gap that separates the aim from the goal “eternalizes” the drive, transforming the simple instinctual movement which finds peace and calm when it reaches its goal (a full stomach, say) into a process which gets caught in its own loop and insists on endlessly repeating itself.
The crucial feature to take note of here is that this inversion cannot be formulated in terms of a primordial lack and a series of metonymic objects trying (and ultimately failing) to fill the void. When the eroticized body of my partner starts to function as the object around which the drive circulates, this does not mean that his or her ordinary (“pathological,” in the Kantian sense of the term) flesh-and-blood body is “transubstantiated” into a contingent embodiment of the sublime impossible Thing, holding (filling out) its empty place. Let us take a direct and “vulgar” example: when a (heterosexual male) lover is fascinated by his partner’s vagina, “can never get enough of it,” is obsessed not only with penetrating it, but with exploring and caressing it in all possible ways, the point is not that, in a kind of deceptive short-circuit, he mistakes this bit of skin, hair and muscle for the Thing itself—his lover’s vagina is, in all its bodily materiality, “the thing itself,” not the spectral appearance of another dimension. What makes it an “infinitely” desirable object whose “mystery” cannot ever be fully penetrated is its non-identity with itself, that is, the way it is never directly “itself.” The gap which “eternalizes” the drive, turning it into the endlessly repetitive circular movement around the object, is not the gap that separates the void of the Thing from its contingent embodiments, but the gap that separates the very “pathological” object from itself, in the same way that Christ is not the contingent material (“pathological”) embodiment of the suprasensible God: his “divine” dimension is reduced to the aura of a pure Schein. It is this self-separation of the object that makes it sublime: wisdom cannot grasp sublimation proper.
Lacan’s les non-dupes errent should thus be read at two levels: against the cynic who dismisses symbolic fiction on account of the real of jouissance being the only thing that counts; and against the sage who dismisses the real of jouissance as itself transient and illusory. How, then, does psychoanalysis stand with regard to enjoyment? Its great task is to break the hold over us of the superego injunction to enjoy, that is, to help us include in the freedom to enjoy also the freedom not to enjoy, the freedom from enjoyment.
The opposition between the Pelagians and Augustine with regard to (sexual) lust is instructive here. For the Pelagians, lust was in itself a good thing which might be put to bad use, while, for Augustine, lust was a bad thing which might, in marriage, be put to good use.15 Did the Communist movement not face exactly the same dilemma in how to deal with “sexual liberation,” oscillating between the two extremes: on the one side, the Wilhelm-Reichian “Pelagians” who emphasized the liberating potential of free sexuality; on the other, the ascetic “Augustinians” who castigated “free sexuality” as the exemplary phenomenon of bourgeois decadence, destined to confound people and divert their energy away from revolutionary objectives? Although the Pelagian view may appear