Jacques Lacan Quotes

What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?

Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.

The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.

I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.

The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom

There is something in you I like more than yourself. Therefore I must destroy you

I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.

I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you - the object petit a - I mutilate you.

But what Freud showed us… was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia.

When one loves, it has nothing to do with sex.

I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.

Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.

I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.

All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.

Reading in no way obliges us to understand.

Even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological.

...Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.

The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.

Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel.

Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence - by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present - but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word 'quarters' the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we speak about color, form, shape, etc., as if they possessed self-sufficient being.

The madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king.

Anxiety, as we know, is always connected with a loss…with a two-sided relation on the point of fading away to be superseded by something else, something which the patient cannot face without vertigo

From an analytic point of view, the only thing one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one’s desire (Seminar 7, 319)

Cuz words

A secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and through which they have learned that it is in hiding that she offers herself to them most truly.

It is only true inasmuch as it is truly followed.

I am where I think not.

If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.

My thesis is that the moral law is articulated with relation to the real as such, to the real insofar as it can be the guarantee of the Thing.

by Baudelaire! things are pretty hot!

What is realised in my history is not the past definitive of what it was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.

The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society.

A secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and through which they have learned that it is in hiding that she offers to them most truly.

The time for comprehending can be reduced to the instant of the glance, but this glance can include in its instant all the time needed for comprehending.

Reality is for those who cannot face their dream.

In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.

A certificate tells me that I was born. I repudiate this certificate: I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject.

S'il n y a pas de rapport sexuel c'est que l'Autre est d'une autre race.

Amar es dar lo que no se tiene a quien no es

School of Resentment is a term coined by critic Harold Bloom to describe related schools of literary criticism which have gained prominence in academia since the 1970s and which Bloom contends are preoccupied with political and social activism at the expense of aesthetic values.[1] Broadly, Bloom terms "Schools of Resentment" approaches associated with Marxist critical theory, including African American studies, Marxist literary criticism, New Historicist criticism, feminist criticism, and poststructuralism—specifically as promoted by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. The School of Resentment is usually defined as all scholars who wish to enlarge the Western canon by adding to it more works by authors from minority groups without regard to aesthetic merit and/or influence over time, or those who argue that some works commonly thought canonical promote sexist, racist or otherwise biased values and should therefore be removed from the canon. Bloom contends that the School of Resentment threatens the nature of the canon itself and may lead to its eventual demise. Philosopher Richard Rorty[2] agreed that Bloom is at least partly accurate in describing the School of Resentment, writing that those identified by Bloom do in fact routinely use "subversive, oppositional discourse" to attack the canon specifically and Western culture in general.

What you’re referring to is what’s called “theory.” And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing–using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying. Jacques Lacan I actually knew. I kind of liked him. We had meetings every once in awhile. But quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential.

Todo arte se caracteriza por un cierto modo de organización alrededor de ese vacío

Man goes round in circles because the structure, the structure of man, is toric

Does art imitate what it represents? In offering the imitation of an object, artists make something different out of that object. Thus they only pretend to imitate.

The world is only a dream of each body.

I speak without knowing it. I speak with my body and I do so unbeknownst to myself. Thus I always say more than I know. This is where I arrive at the meaning of the word "subject" in analytic discourse. What speaks without knowing it makes me "I," subject of the verb. That doesn't suffice to bring me into being. That has nothing to do with what I am forced to put in — enough knowledge for it to hold up, but not one drop more.

The golden age of cultural theory is long past. The pioneering works of Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault are several decades behind us [ … ] Some of them have since been struck down. Fate pushed Roland Barthes under a Parisian laundry van, and afflicted Michel Foucault with Aids. It dispatched Lacan, Williams and Bourdieu, and banished Louis Althusser to a psychiatric hospital for the murder of his wife. It seemed that God was not a structuralist.

Many people talk about messages everywhere, inside the organism a hormone is a message, a beam of light to obtain teleguidance to a plane or from a satellite is a message, and so on; but the message in language is absolutely different. The message. Our message, in all cases comes from the Other by which I understand “from the place of the Other.

Je pense où je ne suis pas, donc je suis où je ne pense pas. Je ne suis pas, là où je suis le jouet de ma pensée. Je pense à ce que je suis, là où je ne pense pas penser.

It is only through the radical defile of speech that we fall into the illusion that language is a register of conscious construction

Gerçekten de insanların birbirine tahammül edebilmesi için belli bir eğitim şart.

All scoundrels are based on this, to want to be...someone's big Other.

Those words make me laugh. I never talk about freedom.

The hand that extends toward the fruit, the rose, or the log that suddenly bursts into flames – its gesture of reaching, drawing close, or stirring up is closely related to the ripening of the fruit, the beauty of the flower, and the blazing of the log. If, in the movement of reaching, drawing, or stirring, the hand goes far enough toward the object that another hand comes out of the fruit, flower, or log and extends toward your hand – and at that moment your hand freezes in the closed plenitude of the fruit, in the open plenitude of the flower, or in the explosion of a log which bursts into flames – then what is produced is love.

In valuing the image over the word, we fall victim to the image’s appearance of full revelation. Whereas the word prompts suspicion and questioning, the image produces belief and devotion. It is in this sense that Gilroy sees a latent fascism in the contemporary elevation of the image. The image today signifies the possibility of a completely successful process of manipulation.

Unless we define happiness in a rather sad way, namely that it is to be like everyone else, which is what the autonomous ego could be resolved into - nobody, it must be said, knows what it is.

Teaching has to deal not so much with lack of knowledge as with resistances to knowledge. Ignorance, suggests Jacques Lacan, is a “passion.” Inasmuch as traditional pedagogy postulated a desire for knowledge, an analytically informed pedagogy has to reckon with the passion for ignorance.22 Felman elaborates further on the productive nature of ignorance, arguing: “Ignorance is nothing other than a desire to ignore: its nature is less cognitive than performative … it is not a simple lack of information but the incapacity — or the refusal — to acknowledge one’s own implication in the information.

¿qué puede justificar la fidelidad, fuera de la palabra empeñada? Pero la palabra empeñada a menudo se empeña a la ligera. Sino se la empeñase así, es probable que se la empeñaría mucho más raramente.

Lacan define como ‘héroe’ al sujeto que (a diferencia de Caddell pero como Edipo, por ejemplo) asume plenamente las consecuencias de su acto, es decir, que no da un paso al costado cuando la flecha que dispara completa su círculo y vuela de regreso a él, a diferencia del resto de nosotros, que nos empeñamos en realizar nuestro deseo sin pagar su precio.

What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe? — Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge Vol. Book XX. (W. W. Norton & Company November 17, 1999) Originally published 1975.

Çünkü günah kanun olmadan yaşayamaz. Bir zamanlar kanun yoktu ve ben hayattaydım, ama sonra buyruk gelince günah dirildi ve ben öldüm. Ve gördüm ki hayat getirmesi gereken buyruk, ölüm getirdi. Çünkü buyruktan fırsat bulan günah beni kandırdı, ve böylece beni öldürdü. [Romans, 7:7-11]

The performative dimension at work here consists of the symbolic efficiency of the “mask”: wearing a mask actually makes us what we feign to be. In other words, the conclusion to be drawn from this dialectic is the exact opposite of the common wisdom by which every human act (achievement, deed) is ultimately just an act (posture, pretense): the only authenticity at our disposal is that of impersonation, of “taking our act (posture) seriously.

That the Sadian fantasy situates itself better in the bearers of Christian ethics than elsewhere is what our structural landmarks allow us to grasp easily. But that Sade, himself, refuses to be my neighbor, is what needs to be recalled, not in order to refuse it to him in return, but in order to recognize the meaning of this refusal. We believe that Sade is not close enough to his own wickedness to recognize his neighbor in it. A trait which he shares with many, and notably with Freud. For such is indeed the sole motive of the recoil of beings, sometimes forewarned, before the Christian commandment. For Sade, we see the test of this, crucial in our eyes, in his refusal of the death penalty, which history, if not logic, would suffice to show is one of the corollaries of Charity.

Man finds his home in a point situated in the Other beyond the image of which we are made and this place represents the absence where we are.

L'unica cosa di cui si possa essere colpevoli è di aver ceduto sul proprio desiderio

عشق! بخشیدن چیزیست که نداری، به کسی که آن را نمی‌خواهد

To know what your partner will do is not a proof of love.

Ne büyük zafer olurdu. İnsan sonunda herhangi bir başarı elde etmiş olurdu böylece; kendi yıkımını.

Mereu sfârșim prin a deveni un personaj în propria noastră poveste.

Nebun nu este acela care se rupe de real, ci acela pe care realul îl invadează și îl debordează.

[of the human body:] "It was once, though it no longer is, a divine form. It is the cloak of all possible phantasms of human desire. The flowers of desire are contained in this vase whose contours we attempt to define.

[There isl a certain link between the acephalous and the transmission of as such—in other words, the passage of the flame of one individual to another in a signified eternity of the species—namely, that Gelüst (craving) does not involve the head.

Pada bahasa terdapat unsur ketaksadaran. Dalam ketidaksadaran inilah terdapat hasrat, dan hasarat manusia adalah hasrat akan yang lain. Yang simbolik ini ditandai dengan adanya kekurangan. Oleh karena adanya kekurangan inilah, maka manusia menghasrati sesuatu.

I have long stressed the Hegelian procedure at work in this reversal of positions of the beautiful soul in relation to the reality he accuses. The point is not to adapt him to it, but to show him that he is only too well adapted to it, since he assists in its very fabrication.

Religious fundamentalism may prove to be the greatest threat to the planet’s survival. “If God is dead, then everything is permitted” is an idea famously attributed to Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, but the opposite could be more true—as retorted by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, “If there is a God, then everything is permitted!”2 The danger in fundamentalist surety is that when one believes their way is the only way, people will commit acts of violence or moral error, sure that they are doing their God’s work, or sure that their ends justify the means.

La ilusión es provocada por una especie de ‘cortocircuito’ entre un lugar en la red simbólica y el elemento simbólico que lo ocupa: quienquiera se encuentre en ese lugar es el destinatario, dado que éste no se define por sus cualidades positivas sino por el propio hecho contingente de encontrarse en este lugar.

Okurken eğitimin kökünde insanı yaratmaya dair belli bir fikrin yattığını görüyorsunuz; sanki insanı yaratan eğitimmiş gibi. Halbuki, işin doğrusu insanı eğitmek gereksizdir. Tüm eğitimini kendisi edinir. Öyle ya da böyle eğitir kendisini. Elbet bir şey öğrenmek zorunda kalacak ve bunun için dirsek çürütecektir.

İnsan kendi arzusuna ayak uydurmada giderek acizleşir. Hatta bu acizliği cinsel tetiklenmeyi kaybettirecek raddeye bile ulaşabilir. Bunu kaybetmese bile kişi arzu nesnesini nasıl bulacağını bilemez hale gelir, arayışında hüsran dışında hiçbir şey bulamaz ve kendini keşfetme şansını kademe kademe yok eden bir eziyet içinde yaşar.

This belief in the truth of the image leaves us especially vulnerable to ideological coercion (which is not to say, of course, that the image cannot be subversive as well). The image, much more than the word, inspires trust, and this trust is precisely what ideology hopes to engender. This is why fascists rely so heavily on imagery. In fact, cultural theorist Paul Gilroy links the rise of the image to the rise of fascism in the mid-twentieth century.

This is the transformation from a society founded on the prohibition of enjoyment (and thus the dissatisfaction of its subjects) to a society that commands enjoyment or jouissance (in which there seems to be no requisite dissatisfaction). Whereas formerly society has required subjects to renounce their private enjoyment in the name of social duty, today the only duty seems to consist in enjoying oneself as much as possible. The fundamental social duty in contemporary American society lies in committing oneself to enjoyment.

These conservative critics call for a return to “family values,” to a world in which prohibition kept us safe from outbreaks of enjoyment. This desire for a return to the past, however, is rarely genuine. Which is to say, such proclamations don’t really want the return to the past that they claim to want. Instead, they want the best of both worlds—the “benefits” of modernity (computers, cars, televisions) without their effects (isolation, enjoyment, narcissism)—and fail to grasp the interdependence of the benefits and the effects

It is only on the basis of the clinical facts that any discussion can be fruitful. These facts reveal a relation of the subject to the phallus that is established without regard to the anatomical difference of the sexes, and which, by this very fact, makes any interpretation of this relation especially difficult in the case of women. This problem may be treated under the following four headings: (1) from this 'why', the little girl considers herself, if only momentarily, as castrated, in the sense of deprived of the phallus, by someone, in the first instance by her mother, an important point, and then by her father, but in such a way that one must recognize in it a transference in the analytic sense of the term;

will respond by reciprocating this desire. The difference between romance and love is that the former never leaves the terrain of desire. The subject seeking romance sees in the other the possibility of the realization of its desire and thereby reduces the love object to an object of desire. This is why romance inevitably produces disappointment. Love, though it disturbs the subject, does not disappoint. In love, one can find satisfaction with the love object. But love also removes the subject from the terrain of desire. Though love necessarily begins with desire, it doesn’t end there. When one falls in love, one falls for the other’s way of enjoying itself, for the other’s satisfaction with its own form of failure, its satisfaction with the absence of the object that would realize desire. Love targets the point at which the subject exceeds itself and is not self-identical. According to Joan Copjec, “when one loves something, one loves something in it that is more than itself, its nonidentity to itself.” 5 We seek love to escape the constraints of our symbolic identity and to enjoy our nonidentity. In the act of love, one abandons oneself. When one falls in love, one loses all sense of oneself and one’s symbolic coordinates. Love is never a good investment for the subject, and this separates it definitively from romance. This is why capitalism necessitates the transformation of love into romance. This transformation allows us to love on the cheap. Many theorists of love, like Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou, have remarked on love’s inherent disruptiveness. But this is apparent as early as Plato’s approach to the question of love.

The 'fool' is an innocent, a simpleton, but truths issue from his mouth that are not simply tolerated but adopted, by virtue of the fact that this 'fool' is sometimes clothed in the insignia of the jester. And in my view it is a similar happy shadow, a similar fundamental 'foolery,' that accounts for the importance of the left-wing intellectual. And I contrast this with the designation for that which the same tradition furnishes a strictly contemporary term, a term that is used in conjunction with the former, namely, 'knave.' Everyone knows that a certain way of presenting himself, which constitutes part of the ideology of the right-wing intellectual, is precisely to play the role of what he is in fact, namely, a 'knave.' In other words, he doesn't retreat from the consequences of what is called realism; that is, when required, he admits he's a crook.

MT: Mimetic desire can only produce evil? RG: No, it can become bad if it stirs up rivalries but it isn't bad in itself, in fact it's very good, and, fortunately, people can no more give it up than they can give up food or sleep. It is to imitation that we owe not only our traditions, without which we would be helpless, but also, paradoxically, all the innovations about which so much is made today. Modern technology and science show this admirably. Study the history of the world economy and you'll see that since the nineteenth century all the countries that, at a given moment, seemed destined never to play anything but a subordinate role, for lack of “creativity,” because of their imitative or, as Montaigne would have said, their “apish” nature, always turned out later on to be more creative than their models. It began with Germany, which, in the nineteenth century, was thought to be at most capable of imitating the English, and this at the precise moment it surpassed them. It continued with the Americans in whom, for a long time, the Europeans saw mediocre gadget-makers who weren't theoretical or cerebral enough to take on a world leadership role. And it happened once more with the Japanese who, after World War II, were still seen as pathetic imitators of Western superiority. It's starting up again, it seems, with Korea, and soon, perhaps, it'll be the Chinese. All of these consecutive mistakes about the creative potential of imitation cannot be due to chance. To make an effective imitator, you have to openly admire the model you're imitating, you have to acknowledge your imitation. You have to explicitly recognize the superiority of those who succeed better than you and set about learning from them. If a businessman sees his competitor making money while he's losing money, he doesn't have time to reinvent his whole production process. He imitates his more fortunate rivals. In business, imitation remains possible today because mimetic vanity is less involved than in the arts, in literature, and in philosophy. In the most spiritual domains, the modern world rejects imitation in favor of originality at all costs. You should never say what others are saying, never paint what others are painting, never think what others are thinking, and so on. Since this is absolutely impossible, there soon emerges a negative imitation that sterilizes everything. Mimetic rivalry cannot flare up without becoming destructive in a great many ways. We can see it today in the so-called soft sciences (which fully deserve the name). More and more often they're obliged to turn their coats inside out and, with great fanfare, announce some new “epistemological rupture” that is supposed to revolutionize the field from top to bottom. This rage for originality has produced a few rare masterpieces and quite a few rather bizarre things in the style of Jacques Lacan's Écrits. Just a few years ago the mimetic escalation had become so insane that it drove everyone to make himself more incomprehensible than his peers. In American universities the imitation of those models has since produced some pretty comical results. But today that lemon has been squeezed completely dry. The principle of originality at all costs leads to paralysis. The more we celebrate “creative and enriching” innovations, the fewer of them there are. So-called postmodernism is even more sterile than modernism, and, as its name suggests, also totally dependent on it. For two thousand years the arts have been imitative, and it's only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that people started refusing to be mimetic. Why? Because we're more mimetic than ever. Rivalry plays a role such that we strive vainly to exorcise imitation. MT

Era del signo de Aries, y la descripción de los que han nacido bajo ese signo, tal como aparece en obras de astrología, le va como un guante. Conseguí, al otro lado del semáforo, que

It is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term.

The French psychologist Jacques Lacan argued that the sense of an ‘I’ closely corresponded to the mass manufacture of glass mirrors.3 All roads in the late seventeenth century, writes historian Christopher Hill, led to individualism: ‘More rooms in better-off houses, use of glass in windows . . . replacement of benches by chairs –

unpublished manuscript on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear culture, Lacklein, the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival.

A madman who believes himself to be a king is no more mad than a king who believes himself to be a king

Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said that a person desires the desire of others...However, if we only desire what other desire or try to meet their expectations, we lose track of our own desires. This is why the feeling "just because" is important. Since it's not others' desire but wholly ours, we need to listen attentively to our "just because" and try to do what we want to do "just because.

Parrhassios contradicts this notion by revealing that deception is the truth, and vice versa. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was particularly fond of this story, and quoted it in his seminars during the 1960s and 70s. Aristotle’s Poetics The Poetics (c.

Le premier symbole où nous reconnaissons l'humanité dans ses vestiges est la sépulture, et le truchement de la mort se reconnaît en toute relation où l'homme vient à la vie de son histoire.

Se no passado fingimos publicamente acreditar enquanto permanecíamos céticos na vida privada, ou ainda envolvidos na troça obscena de nossas crenças públicas, hoje tendemos publicamente a professar nossa atitude cética, hedonista e relaxada, enquanto na vida privada continuamos acossados pelas crenças e proibições severas. Nisso consiste, para Jacques Lacan, a consequência paradoxal da experiência de que “Deus está morto”. (...) O ateu moderno pensa que sabe que Deus está morto; o que ele não sabe é que, inconscientemente, ele continua acreditando em Deus. O que caracteriza a modernidade não é mais a figura-padrão do crente que nutre em segredo dúvidas íntimas sobre sua crença e se envolve em fantasias transgressoras. O que temos hoje é um sujeito que se apresenta como hedonista tolerante dedicado à busca da felicidade, mas cujo inconsciente é o lugar das proibições – o que está reprimido não são desejos ou prazeres ilícitos, mas as próprias proibições.

[...] la historia del deseo se organiza como un discurso que se desarrolla en lo insensato. Esto es el inconsciente. Los desplazamientos y condensaciones en el discurso del inconsciente son sin duda alguna lo que en el discurso en general constituyen desplazamientos y condensaciones, o sea, metonimias y metáforas. Pero aquí son metáforas que no engendran sentido alguno, y desplazamientos que no transportan ningún ser y en los cuales el sujeto no reconoce algo que se desplace.

La carta llega a su destino cuando ya no somos los ‘ocupantes’ de los lugares vacíos de la estructura fantasmática de otro, esto es, cuando el otro finalmente ‘abre sus ojos’ y compren- de que la carta real no es el mensaje que supuestamente traemos sino nuestro ser en sí mismo, el objeto que en nosotros se resiste a la simbolización.

La atracción por la utilidad es tan irresistible, que vemos personas dispuestas a todo por el placer de dar sus comodidades a quienes se les metió en la cabeza que no podrían vivir sin su auxilio.

¿Cómo justificar esa palabra tan imprudentemente comprometida y, hablando con propiedad – de esto, jamás dudó espíritu serio alguno-, insostenible?

Greed is not, of course, an invention of modernity, but the onset of modernity allows for a change in its ethical status. Only within the modern world would it be possible to proclaim, with Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, that “greed is good”; to ancient societies, greed is always sinful (that is to say, always dangerous to the stability of the social order). In other words, the very thing that threatens to destroy ancient societies becomes the very lifeblood of the modern one. Because it involves such a complete upheaval, no other change in Western history, for the Marxist, approaches this one in importance. This type of valuation of the historical shift to capitalism, however, is not confined to doctrinaire Marxists. Even avowedly non-Marxist historians, though they might not emphasize the changing status of money, nonetheless tend to see the onset of modernity—the nascent moments of capitalism—as a time of epochal change, as a shift from a static society to a progressive one. This is what leads Fredric Jameson to claim that “the emergence of the modern world or capitalism, the miraculous birth of modernity or of a secular market system, the end of ‘traditional’ society in all its forms [. . .] remains for us (in the collective unconscious) the only true Event of history.” In whatever language we discuss the changes in society occasioned by modernity, few would dispute Jameson’s claim that it marks the historical shift in the West, leaving, as it does, a gulf between the structure of traditional society (a closed world) and modern capitalist society (an open universe).

This marks a dramatic change in the way the social order is constituted: rather than being tied together through a shared sacrifice, subjects exist side by side in their isolated enclaves of enjoyment.

A society of prohibition requires all its members to sacrifice their individual, private ways of obtaining enjoyment for the sake of the social order as a whole. That is to say, one receives an identity from society in exchange for one’s immediate access to enjoyment, which one must give up. This is, traditionally, the way in which society as such functions. This type of society operates in the manner of a sports team: the team demands individual sacrifices in order to ensure the team’s success. In order for the team to win, the individual must give up her or his dreams of wholly individual achievement and fit her or his abilities into the structure of the team. In a society of commanded enjoyment, this dynamic changes dramatically. Rather than demanding that its members give up their individual enjoyment for the sake of the whole, the society of enjoyment commands their enjoyment—private enjoyment becomes of paramount importance—and the importance of the social order as a whole seems to recede. Contemporary complaints about sports stars who are more concerned about individual statistics and money than about their team’s fortunes are indicative of this transformation. These sports stars are not simply anomalous narcissists. In the society of enjoyment, individual, private accomplishments and rewards are more important than the success of the team. In such a society, it is no longer requisite that subjects accept a constant dissatisfaction as the price for existing within a social order. To return to the example of the sports team, one can remain a member of the team without having to subordinate one’s own individual agenda to the larger plans of the team. Dissatisfaction now appears as something that one need not experience, in contrast to life in the society of prohibition, where dissatisfaction inheres in the very fabric of social existence itself. In the society of enjoyment, the private enjoyment that threatened the stability of the society of prohibition becomes a stabilizing force and even acquires the status of a duty.

But if Marx errs, his error does not lie, as his critics often allege, in underestimating “innate human selfishness.” Instead, his error—and, again, it is the common error today—lies in the other direction, in underestimating the capacity of subjects to act against their self-interest.

The fundamental thing to recognize about the society of enjoyment is that in it the pursuit of enjoyment has misfired: the society of enjoyment has not provided the enjoyment that it promises. It has, instead, made enjoyment all the more inaccessible. The contemporary imperative to enjoy—the elevation of enjoyment to a social obligation—deprives enjoyment of its marginal status vis-à-vis the social order, bringing it within confines of that order, where we can experience it directly and fully. What the society of enjoyment thus makes manifest is the impossibility of any direct experience of enjoyment: if we try to experience it directly, we necessarily miss it; enjoyment can only be experienced indirectly, through the act of aiming at something else— as a by-product. This is because the barrier to enjoyment is essential to the experience of it. In fact, what we enjoy is the barrier itself. For instance, children’s enjoyment of Christmas morning derives from the barrier to enjoyment represented by the wrapping paper over their gifts and the prohibition against opening gifts prior to Christmas day. Without the wrapping paper—with direct access to the gifts—Christmas would be just another day. When we experience enjoyment directly, when we have gifts without wrapping paper and on any (or every) day of the year, enjoyment (and the gift) loses its value, a value produced by inaccessibility. Kierkegaard makes a similar observation relative to religion when he insists that our relationship with the greatness of God can never become a direct one but must occur through the mediation of the lowly figure of Christ. He suggests that God sent Christ to us because he understood the importance of what Kierkegaard calls “indirect communication.” If we were to see God as he really is rather than through the humiliated image of Christ on the cross, God would be degraded in our eyes; we couldn’t properly see his greatness. The same is true for enjoyment: when we experience it directly, it loses all value and becomes commonplace, and as a result we don’t actually experience it. Hence, the problem with the society of enjoyment is not that we suffer from too much enjoyment, but that we don’t have enough. Far from finding new ways of restraining enjoyment, as many contemporary cultural critics suggest, we must find new ways of making it possible. This entails a move from inhabiting a society of commanded enjoyment to engaging in a politics of enjoyment.

If a society were based on only a common positive characteristic (the same language, for instance), this characteristic would not in any way act as a control on people’s behavior. It would not stop them, as Lévi-Strauss puts it, from doing just what they please, in the way that prohibition, and specifically the incest prohibition, does.

The incest prohibition creates societal coherence through directing people’s interest away from what is closest to them (the family) and toward the social organization itself. As a result, for instance, rather than continuing to desire the mother, the subject must desire someone from another family, from the social order at large. This directing of interest away from the family and to the society at large is the most important function of the incest prohibition. Without this redirection of interest, nothing would propel the child out of the family, out of a concern for only her/his immediate environment. As psychoanalysis makes clear, there is no want of passion on the part of the child for her/his fellow family members, no initial revulsion at the familial (or familiar) love object. The incest prohibition, then, not only creates a desire for something beyond the immediate scope of the child, but it also produces a feeling of disgust with the idea of taking someone immediately present (a family member) as a love object. In this way, the prohibition opens us up to the social world, freeing us from the narrow focus of our initial interest through a complete redirection of it.

Because of all these inherently antisocial features, enjoyment represents a danger to the very logic upon which every social order constitutes itself, and the social order must try to ward off this danger. However, even though enjoyment represents a threat to the social order and its stability, every social order must use enjoyment in order to perpetuate itself. In fact, Lacan even goes so far as to say that the founding signifier of the social order (what he calls “the One”)—and, by extension, the social order itself—“far from arising out of the universe, arises out of enjoyment.” Consequently, despite the prohibition against enjoyment, enjoyment still makes itself felt within society. Religions, for instance, often promise an afterlife of unrestrained enjoyment in exchange for the sacrifice of enjoyment in the here and now

Though the social order always seems to hold out the promise of its own compensatory enjoyment to its initiates, this is a promise that it cannot but break. The social order can’t keep its promise of compensatory enjoyment—enjoyment that might come close to the enjoyment that the incest prohibition bars—because such unrestrained enjoyment necessarily threatens the self-perpetuation of the social order itself. Whereas the self-perpetuation of the social order depends on conservation of resources, calculation of possibilities, and allowances for the future, enjoyment occurs without any consideration of how it will be sustained, without any fear of using itself up. Enjoyment also shatters barriers; it overcomes differences, distinctions, and hierarchies (including those of social class). Most importantly, however, those who are enjoying themselves are not, at the moment of enjoyment at least, “productive members of society.

Here we see the unequaled role that the prohibition of enjoyment plays in the construction of a social order. It provides the foundation on which all the structures of society necessarily rest. Prohibition performs this function because it eliminates the threat that unrestrained enjoyment poses to society as a whole. Without prohibition, enjoyment would constantly threaten the stability and security of the social order. The antisocial danger represented by enjoyment finds perhaps its most poetic expression in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), in the figure of Hannibal Lecter. The film demonstrates, quite clearly, that Lecter derives his enjoyment from eating people: he doesn’t eat people because he bears them ill-will, but simply because he enjoys it. Rather than facilitating harmonious intersubjective contact, as the example of Lecter indicates, enjoyment threatens the big Other, insofar as it disregards the desire of the Other altogether. Though Lecter’s mode of procuring enjoyment is undoubtedly extreme, it is nonetheless exemplary, because all enjoyment involves seeing the Other as nothing more than a tool and not showing “consideration” for the Other. As Serge André points out, to enjoy something “is to be able to use it to the point of abusing it—the abuse being precisely that which the law seeks to delimit.” In the act of barring this unrestrained enjoyment from the social order, prohibition produces habitable space in which we can coexist without directly confronting the horror of the Other’s enjoyment, which is why Lévi-Strauss sees prohibition at the root of everything social.

It is this that Lacan grasps when he rewrites Dostoyevsky’s “without God, everything is permitted” to “without God, nothing is permitted.” That is, without God, without some Law that demands renunciation, one cannot have any enjoyment. This is why the introduction of the Law is an obscene act, an act producing the possibility of the enjoyment it prohibits. Enjoyment requires the barrier to it that the Law provides. This means that we must qualify the idea that entrance into society requires the renunciation of enjoyment: one must indeed renounce one’s enjoyment, but this enjoyment is something that does not exist prior to its renunciation.

This object is what Lacan calls the objet petit a. The objet a constitutes the subject as desiring; it provides the lure that acts as an engine for the desire of the subject and also directs that desire in its circuit. In fact, Lacan notes repeatedly that “the petit a is the cause of the subject.” It causes the subject to emerge as a desiring subject, as the subject of desire. Desire is, in this sense, part of what one gets in exchange for the sacrifice of one’s enjoyment.

In fact, desire is sustained dissatisfaction. This state of sustained dissatisfaction is the normal state for subjects within a society of prohibition. Prohibition produces dissatisfied, desiring subjects, subjects who remain securely within the confines of the social order.

INTERVENTION: People speak about a New Society. Will psychoanalysis have a function in that society nd what will it be? A society is not something that can be defined just like that. What I am trying to spell out, because psychoanalysis gives me the evidence for it, is what dominates it, namely, the practice of language. Aphasia means that there is something that has broken down in this respect . Just think that there are people who happen to have things in their brain who no longer have any idea how to manage with language. That makes them somewhat crippled. INTERVERNTION: One could say that Lenin almost became aphasic . If you had a bit of patience, and if you really wanted our impromptus to continue, I would tell you that, always, the revolutionary aspiration has only a single possible outcome-of ending up as the master 's discourse. This is what experience has proved. What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.

INTERVENTION: People speak about a New Society. Will psychoanalysis have a function in that society and what will it be? A society is not something that can be defined just like that. What I am trying to spell out, because psychoanalysis gives me the evidence for it, is what dominates it, namely, the practice of language. Aphasia means that there is something that has broken down in this respect . Just think that there are people who happen to have things in their brain who no longer have any idea how to manage with language. That makes them somewhat crippled. INTERVERNTION: One could say that Lenin almost became aphasic . If you had a bit of patience, and if you really wanted our impromptus to continue, I would tell you that, always, the revolutionary aspiration has only a single possible outcome-of ending up as the master 's discourse. This is what experience has proved. What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.

INTERVENTION: People speak about a New Society. Will psychoanalysis have a function in that society and what will it be? A society is not something that can be defined just like that. What I am trying to spell out, because psychoanalysis gives me the evidence for it, is what dominates it, namely, the practice of language. Aphasia means that there is something that has broken down in this respect . Just think that there are people who happen to have things in their brain who no longer have any idea how to manage with language. That makes them somewhat crippled. INTERVERNTION: One could say that Lenin almost became aphasic . If you had a bit of patience, and if you really wanted our impromptus to continue, I would tell you that, always, the revolutionary aspiration has only a single possible outcome-of ending up as the master 's discourse. This is what experience has proved. What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.

INTERVENTION: People speak about a New Society. Will psychoanalysis have a function in that society and what will it be? A society is not something that can be defined just like that. What I am trying to spell out, because psychoanalysis gives me the evidence for it, is what dominates it, namely, the practice of language. Aphasia means that there is something that has broken down in this respect . Just think that there are people who happen to have things in their brain who no longer have any idea how to manage with language. That makes them somewhat crippled. INTERVERNTION: One could say that Lenin almost became aphasic . If you had a bit of patience, and if you really wanted our impromptus to continue, I would tell you that, always, the revolutionary aspiration has only a single possible outcome-of ending up as the master 's discourse. This is what experience has proved. What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.

Les souffrances de la névrose et de la psychose sont pour nous l'école des passions de l'âme, comme le fléau de la balance psychanalytique, quand nous calculons l'inclinaison de sa menace sur des communautés entières nous donne l'indice d'amortissement des passions de la cité. A ce point de jonction de la nature à la culture que l'anthropologie de nos jours scrute obstinément, la psychanalyse seule reconnaît ce nœud de servitude imaginaire que l'amour doit toujours redéfaire ou trancher. Pour une telle œuvre, le sentiment altruiste est sans promesse pour nous, qui perçons à jour l'agressivité qui sous-tend l'action du philanthrope, de l'idéaliste, du pédagogue, voire du réformateur. Dans le recours que nous préservons du sujet au sujet, la psychanalyse peut accompagner le patient jusqu'à la limite extatique du "Tu es cela", où se révèle à lui le chiffre de sa destinée mortelle, mais il n'est pas en notre seul pouvoir de praticien de l'amener à ce moment où commence le véritable voyage.

Psychoanalysis, however, calls into question the idea that we primarily act on behalf of our own interest. It allows us to see another power operating beneath the apparent predominance of self-interest. Of course, the commonsensical understanding of psychoanalysis is exactly the opposite of this, contending that psychoanalysis reduces everything to self-interest.

Marxism allows us to understand the role of economic and social contradictions in driving the movement of history, but it often provides an inadequate explanation of the actual politics of historical transformation—why change does or does not occur at a given time. It is on this question that psychoanalysis proves indispensable.

Any return to the past, to traditional values, will necessarily be mediated by the present.

The other alternative common today is the cynical embrace of the society of enjoyment—an attitude that proclaims that things simply are as they are, that there is no changing the structure of the social order. The cynic knows well enough the problems with the way things are but acts as if she/he doesn’t know, conducting her/his daily life certain that the social order, despite its problems, cannot be changed. This attitude resigns the subject to the private realm: for the cynic, change is possible on a personal level (i.e., I can change my weight, my degree of happiness, my lover, etc.), so that’s where I should keep my focus. As Paul Gilroy puts it, “A language of revolution may persist, but these days it is more like to turn away from the complexities of wholescale societal transformation and promote an ‘inward,’ New Age turn.

. In proclaiming the inevitability of this type of world, we help to make it inevitable, to make the status quo all the more unassailable. In this way, the strategy of cynical embrace of the society of enjoyment is every bit as flawed as the nostalgic attempt to return to a previous epoch. Both positions share a fundamental refusal to recognize their own complicity with the society of enjoyment.

Desire is consonant with the social order because of its reliance on absence rather than presence. When I desire an object, its absence is often helpful in building up my desire: the longer the desired object remains away, the stronger the hold of desire over me. All of our clichés about desire—like “absence makes the heart grow fonder”—affirm this fundamental truth of desire. By the same token, when the object becomes a constant presence, my desire tends to wane. And if I gain too much proximity to the object of desire, the object suddenly disappears or loses its desirability. This aspect of desire is correlative to the functioning of the social order, which is itself a symbolic entity. It allows subjects to relate to each other through the mediation of a symbolic order, which means through absence rather than presence. The symbolic order is, as Lacan puts it, the absence of things, and this absence is crucial for the possibility of mediation, because it serves to eliminate rivalry. If one subject doesn’t have a thing, at least another doesn’t have it either, which provides some degree of consolation for lost enjoyment. This is why prohibition is so important for holding society together: if I see that no one else is able to enjoy, I feel as if we are partners in loss rather than rivals in enjoyment.

The symbolic order thrives on the deprivation of the subjects belonging to it: it creates a bond of lack. In this way, prohibition works to create coherence within society. The prohibition of enjoyment holds the social order together through the shared dissatisfaction it produces.

Because of our ability to imagine an enjoyment that the symbolic order prohibits, the imaginary offers us a separate register of experience, distinct from the symbolic order.

In Lacan’s triadic division of experience, the symbolic order constitutes our social reality, the imaginary provides an avenue for the illusory transgression of that reality, and the Real marks the point at which the symbolic order fails—the gap that always haunts it. Though the imaginary assists prohibition by providing a safe outlet for enjoyment, it also represents a danger to the society of prohibition. The imaginary thus has an ambiguous status within the society of prohibition, and we must examine both its role in supplementing the power of prohibition and the threat that it poses.

This is why one cannot think the society of prohibition without the imaginary housing the image of the denied enjoyment. This image is what allows subjects in the society of prohibition to sustain themselves in the midst of their dissatisfaction.

The imaginary, however, does not exist outside of or prior to the symbolic. It is the Real that marks the limit point—the failure—of the symbolic order, not the imaginary. The imaginary is simply a perspective within the symbolic, a way of seeing that fails to grasp its own symbolic determination. In other words, when I engage with images (the imaginary), the symbolic order always determines the form of that engagement; the symbolic order determines the place from which I see the image.

Imaginary experience never actually breaks from the structure of the symbolic order. Our imaginary enjoyment remains a confined and policed enjoyment, an enjoyment relatively amenable to symbolic authority.

In the imaginary, the subject seems isolated and independent of the symbolic order—self-sufficient. It is for this reason that imaginary experience represents a danger to the social order even though it is integral to it and remains firmly within it: subjects lodged in the imaginary believe themselves to be independent and fail to see their symbolic bond with other subjects. Thus, they see other subjects purely as rivals, rather than as partners in sacrifice. The lack of distance in the imaginary further exacerbates this sense of rivalry. Images, unlike symbolic structures, seem directly present to us.

It is as if our psychic lives were the sum total of our bad habits in the sense that what we unconsciously assume to be the limits of our lives ends up curtailing the range of our existential scenarios for the simple reason that it consistently directs us to certain situations, behaviors, and interpersonal relations while steering us away from others. Or, to express the matter slightly differently, it dictates how we seek and obtain pleasure in the world, thereby determining the very shape of our enjoyment. This is a perfect manifestation of what Roberto Harari, following Jacques Lacan, calls “a destiny compulsion.

This complacency with the social order, however, is not experienced as complacency, but as defiance. Our complacency—our conformism—feels as if it is radical activity: today, we think we are challenging authority at precisely the moment we are most wholly following its dictates. This is why political conservatives increasingly see themselves—and paint their conservatism—as rebellious. For them, conservatism represents a willingness to defy the ruling structure of contemporary society. FOX News represents its conservativism as an “alternative” to the dominant ideology. And even someone like Rush Limbaugh can imagine himself (like the Leftist of old) “telling truth to power.” Most of its practitioners today define conservatism as a radical program—thus the “Republican Revolution” of 1994—despite how this contradicts the very definition of the term “conservative.” Whereas within the society of prohibition it is relatively easy to distinguish between conformity and defiance, this becomes increasingly difficult within a society structured around the command to enjoy. This is because, in a society of enjoyment, we no longer experience the explicit prohibition from the social order, which lets us know that the symbolic order is structuring and determining our behavior. We don’t experience the symbolic law in its prohibitory form, and so we imagine that, when we act, we are acting without reference to the symbolic law, that it does not shape our actions. Our failure to experience the impinging of the symbolic law, however, doesn’t mean that it does not exist.

Unlike all the other signifiers, the Master Signifier does not fluctuate, providing a ground for the system of signification. Whereas all other signifiers acquire meaning through their relationship to other signifiers - we can identify a table because it isn't a chair, which isn't a couch, and so on - the Master Signifier refers only to itself.

Here is perhaps the chief indication that we are in the midst of a society of enjoyment: even the attempt to restore prohibition follows the logic of the demand for enjoyment, albeit in the guise of opposing it. When we resurrect the father today, he doesn’t appear in the form of the symbolic father, the barrier to enjoyment. Instead, he appears in a form consonant with the society of enjoyment.

Though the anal father represents a leveling of paternal authority, he also represents an increase in its power. In this sense, we should view this new father in radically ambivalent terms: he is more democratic and yet more powerful than the traditional father (because the authority that we can’t recognize as authority is always more powerful than the openly authoritative authority). One thus cannot say that the anal father represents “progress.” But it isn’t a question of judging the anal father or choosing between the traditional father and the anal father. It is instead a question of grasping the effects of the change in the status of authority.

The authority that we can't recognize as authority is always more powerful than the openly authoritative authority.

As Dead Poets Society demonstrates, the anal father himself always seems less than authoritative. Unlike traditional symbolic authority, the anal father appears in the guise of one of us; he’s on our side, not on the side of authority. But as one of us, he exerts his authority in ways that traditional symbolic authority could never imagine. We aren’t suspicious of an authority who doesn’t appear to be an authority. Hence, Mr. Perry and the headmaster can only look on in envy at the authority Keating wields. When they stand on their desks in the film’s final scene, the students express their willingness to bow down to the new authority and eschew the old, thereby clearly demonstrating the power of the new.

This resistance of the anal father to critique becomes especially apparent in the case of Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society. While the film’s final scene shows the students successfully transgressing the demands of the headmaster (the representative of the symbolic father), no such transgression occurs with Keating. Earlier in the film, Keating commands three students to walk around the school courtyard, and when they begin to walk uniformly with the other students clapping in unison, Keating stops them and upbraids them (kindly of course) for their conformity. He urges each student to discover his own individual way of walking—i.e., to find his own private enjoyment. When Charlie Dalton (Gale Hansen) refuses to walk at Keating’s command, this moment of disobedience does not in any way subvert Keating’s authority. On the contrary, Keating points out that Dalton proves his point: his subversive display fits right into Keating’s “lesson plan.” In the face of the anal father’s demand for each student to find his private enjoyment, there is no clear path to subversion. In refusing to play along, one plays along all the more. Unlike the symbolic father, the anal father invites our subversion and thereby quells its subversive sting.

Nonetheless, the path that the command to enjoy lays down for us remains enticing. What makes this path so attractive is that it seems to allow us to bypass the demands of castration, to access the enjoyment that the old father had hitherto prohibited. But the enjoyment that the anal father allows us always remains imaginary: we are permitted to lose ourselves in a world of images. Whereas the symbolic father’s prohibition of enjoyment had the effect of reminding us of our position within the symbolic order (as subjects of castration), the anal father’s command to enjoy forestalls this kind of recognition. It prompts us to view ourselves and the other on the imaginary plane—to miss our situatedness within the symbolic order. Thus, the world of the anal father is at once a world of the image.

Just as the word and its absence of enjoyment are central in the society of prohibition, the image and its illusion of present enjoyment are central in the society of enjoyment. This shift in primacy from the word to the image corresponds, in the terms of psychoanalysis, to a change in emphasis from the symbolic order to the imaginary. This means, most obviously, that images have more of an effect on us today than words, that we are increasingly dealing with images rather than words.

If the Other is lacking, this means that not only doesn’t the subject know what the Other wants from it but the Other itself doesn’t know. That is to say, an Other that lacks is an Other that doesn’t know what it wants from its subjects. This is why the subject so often retreats to the illusory security of the ego: it is bad enough if I don’t know what I must do to comply with the Other’s desire, but it becomes unbearable when the Other itself doesn’t know. If, for instance, the secret of popularity eludes me, I can at least take consolation in the fact that someone knows this secret, that someone has grasped the essence of popularity, because I can then hope to one day acquire this knowledge as well. But if no one knows the secret of popularity, my search for it becomes ipso facto interminable. I’ve lost this object before I have even begun to search for it. Faced with the lacking Other, then, a subject’s desire is perpetual—and perpetually dissatisfied—because it seeks after this desire of the Other, this objet petit a, that remains obscure. The lack or hole in the big Other proves an objective barrier to the subject’s desire, a barrier that is ontological rather than epistemological. No matter how diligently the subject seeks, its desire will remain dissatisfied because the Other’s desire is itself inconsistent. Symbolic authority doesn’t know what it wants from the subject when it utters its commands—even the most popular people don’t know the secret of popularity because the secret does not exist—and this is the rock against which desire always crashes.

Because Real enjoyment poses such a threat to the social order, the contemporary command to enjoy cannot find an outlet in this kind of enjoyment. Only imaginary enjoyment—enjoyment of the television, the computer screen, the ego—offers an acceptable path through which to obey this command. In this sense, the predominance of the image today indicates most emphatically the presence of the command to enjoy. The image provides a way—the only way—for us to respond. All of the images that surround us offer the allure of a complete enjoyment—a jouissance unperturbed by any lack. And yet, this avoidance of lack is purely imaginary: because the image has its foundation in the symbolic order, because it is projected from the symbolic order, the image does not escape lack and provide the completeness (and the complete jouissance) that it promises. The image is beset by an incompleteness that its form denies. Imaginary enjoyment represents a failure to enjoy, which is why the images that predominate the society of enjoyment provide an outlet for a kind of enjoyment that stabilizes rather than threatens the social order. When someone decides to “enjoy Coca-Cola”—embracing the image from the advertisement, she/he provides support for the system of exchange. This imaginary enjoyment doesn’t interfere with the functioning of the social order but rather keeps it going and furthers it. Whereas enjoyment in the Real provides a fundamental threat to the social order and has the potential to transform that order, imaginary enjoyment keeps things going as they are.

Because Real enjoyment poses such a threat to the social order, the contemporary command to enjoy cannot find an outlet in this kind of enjoyment. Only imaginary enjoyment—enjoyment of the television, the computer screen, the ego—offers an acceptable path through which to obey this command. In this sense, the predominance of the image today indicates most emphatically the presence of the command to enjoy. The image provides a way—the only way—for us to respond. All of the images that surround us offer the allure of a complete enjoyment—a jouissance unperturbed by any lack. And yet, this avoidance of lack is purely imaginary: because the image has its foundation in the symbolic order, because it is projected from the symbolic order, the image does not escape lack and provide the completeness (and the complete jouissance) that it promises. The image is beset by an incompleteness that its form denies. Imaginary enjoyment represents a failure to enjoy, which is why the images that predominate the society of enjoyment provide an outlet for a kind of enjoyment that stabilizes rather than threatens the social order. When someone decides to “enjoy Coca-Cola”—embracing the image from the advertisement, she/he provides support for the system of exchange. This imaginary enjoyment doesn’t interfere with the functioning of the social order but rather keeps it going and furthers it. Whereas enjoyment in the Real provides a fundamental threat to the social order and has the potential to transform that order, imaginary enjoyment keeps things going as they are.

Imaginary enjoyment seems to occur in open disdain of symbolic authority, thumbing its nose at that authority. But symbolic authority depends on this imaginary enjoyment that would “subvert” it because this enjoyment renders subjects docile. For symbolic authority, the danger of the imaginary is only an imaginary danger.

Entrapped by the image, contemporary subjects come to inhabit a world without distance.

However, in giving up the idea of transcendence, Foucault also gives up the hope of ever uncovering the roots of power. This is why Joan Copjec sees Foucault’s refusal of transcendence as the fundamental stumbling block within his thought. Foucault aims at conceiving how power arises, but his studies consistently stop short of arriving at this. Copjec claims, “despite the fact that [Foucault] realizes the necessity of conceiving the mode of a regime of power’s institution, he cannot avail himself of the means of doing so and thus, by default, ends up limiting that regime to the relations that obtain within it.” This limitation stems from his refusal of any notion of transcendence, “his disallowance of any reference to a principle or a subject that ‘transcends’ the regime of power he analyzes.” Without the moment of transcendence, one cannot grasp the regime of power in its incipience, and hence Foucault necessarily posits the regime of power as always already existing, which makes any attempt to counter it fundamentally impossible. The result of this rejection of transcendence is Foucault’s historicism—a mode of analysis that eschews the search for truth in favor of uncovering the presuppositions of regimes of truth, in favor of “pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.” This type of uncovering of historical presuppositions is one of Foucault’s chief legacies today, and it indicates the extent to which any idea of transcendence has become an anathema. In the wake of Foucault, contemporary cultural criticism has largely taken up this contextualizing mode. Today, the predominant response to any articulation of truth claims is a demand for the historicization of these claims: one must reveal the cultural context out of which they emerge. This has become the fundamental operation of contemporary cultural studies. In The Ticklish Subject, Slavoj Zizek describes this intellectual situation: “the basic feature of cultural studies is that they are no longer able or ready to confront religious, scientific or philosophical works in terms of their own inherent Truth, but reduce them to a product of historical circumstances, to an object of anthropologico-psychoanalytic interpretation.” This reduction of every truth claim to the circumstances of its enunciation represents the ultimate rejection of transcendence: nothing escapes the immanence of history itself. According to this prevailing historicism, no truth claim ever touches the Real; instead, the very pretension to truth is itself imaginary. The popularity of this kind of historicism today indicates the extent to which transcendence has become theoretically untenable. It also highlights the link between contemporary theory and the command to enjoy: the operations of both work to reduce what appears as transcendence to conditions of immanence.

The subject’s relationship to death undergoes a substantive transformation in the turn from a society of prohibition to a society of enjoyment. Despite the latter’s reduction of everything to immanence, the one transcendent moment that no amount of communication would seem to be able to eliminate is that of death. Death is a moment that transcends the immanence of life, indicating a radically inaccessible beyond (even if this beyond is nothingness itself ). It acts as a barrier that every subject must endure, and it is the necessity of this barrier that, for Heidegger, confirms our being-in-the-world. In Being and Time, Heidegger sees the inevitability of death as the one nonrelational moment within existence. That is to say, unlike every other moment of life, universal communication cannot reduce death to the level of the ordinary; it proves an insurmountable barrier. As Heidegger famously puts it, “The non- relational character of death understood in anticipation individualizes Dasein down to itself. This individualizing is a way in which the ‘there’ is disclosed for existence. It reveals the fact that any being-together-with what is taken care of and any being-with the others fails when one’s ownmost potentiality-of-being is at stake.” Death provides the subject with an experience of necessity—a necessary barrier—that constitutes the subject as such and that cannot be communicated or relativized. As such, it represents the moment of transcendence in the midst of immanence, a moment that universal immanence cannot include. Subjects experience their own death as a fundamental limit. However, at a time, as Baudrillard says, “when everything is available” and all distance evaporates, even the necessity of death disappears. Death becomes something contingent, not constitutive. One might encounter it—and then again one might not. The controlling idea in a world without distance is not that death doesn’t exist—one is confronted with it all the time in undeniable forms—but that it is avoidable. In Being and Time, Heidegger describes at length this attitude toward death (an attitude he of course labels “inauthentic”). According to Heidegger, “characteristic talk speaks about death as a constantly occurring ‘case.’ It treats it as something always already ‘real,’ and veils its character of possibility and concomitantly the two factors belonging to it, that it is nonrelational and cannot-be-bypassed.” We experience death as the result of “errors” in human calculation or behavior, rather than a moment constitutive for human existence proper. When death is just a “case” or the result of certain “behavior patterns,” I can focus entirely on my behavior that might prevent it—diet, exercise, “healthy living” in general—and not on the possibility that “cannot-be-bypassed,” the necessity that cannot be evaded. In this way, the idea of an insurmountable barrier disappears.

Today, often when someone dies, we tend to look for the analogue to the fatal illness in their behavior: lung cancer results from smoking, heart disease from a lack of exercise, colon cancer from not eating enough fiber, etc. By linking death to a specific behavior, we deontologize it; we make it seem as if death is only one possibility for life, a possibility that we ourselves—or someone, someday—might manage to escape. The same thinking applies to aging as well: all the formulas for the conquest of aging (skin creme, the baldness pill, plastic surgery, low fat diets) implicitly view aging itself as just one option among many. When we view death as a “case” or an “option,” we reject its necessity as a limit. Death no longer indicates a moment of transcendence that we must encounter. According to Baudrillard, “We are dealing with an attempt to construct an entirely positive world, a perfect world, expurgated of every illusion, of every sort of evil and negativity, exempt from death itself.” In the society of enjoyment, death becomes an increasingly horrific—and at the same time, an increasingly hidden—event. Not only does death imply the cessation of one’s being, but it also indicates a failure of enjoyment. Death is above all a limit to one’s enjoyment: to accept one’s mortality means simultaneously to accept a limit on enjoyment. This is why it is not at all coincidental that with the turn from the prohibition of enjoyment to the command to enjoy we would see an increase in efforts to eliminate the necessity of death. Today, human cell researchers are working toward the day when death will exist only as an “accident,” through the modification of the way in which cells regulate their division and creating cells that can divide limitlessly. As Gregg Easterbrook points out, the introduction of such cells into the human body would not create eternal life, but it would make death something no longer necessary: “Therapeutic use of ‘immortal’ cells would not confer unending life (even people who don’t age could die in accidents, by violence and so on) but might dramatically extend the life-span.” The point isn’t that death would be entirely eliminated, but that we might eliminate its necessary status as a barrier to or a limit on enjoyment. This potential elimination of death as a necessary limit to enjoyment follows directly from the logic of the society of enjoyment. As long as death remains necessary, it stands, as Heidegger recognizes, as a fundamental barrier to the proliferation of enjoyment. If subjects know that they must die, they also know that they lack—and lack becomes intolerable in face of a command to enjoy oneself. But without the idea of a necessary death, every experience of lack loses the quality of necessity. Subjects view lack not as something to be endured for the sake of a future enjoyment, but as an intolerable burden. In the society of enjoyment, subjects refuse to tolerate lack precisely because lack, like death, has now lost its veneer of necessity.

Nonstop motion becomes our way of trying to assure ourselves that we are not lacking—that is, nonenjoying—subjects.

The problem with the fundamentalist attempt to re-create a world of distance is that it itself emerges as a way of enjoying in the guise of its opposite. That is to say, contemporary fundamentalism is not so much an alternative to the command for enjoyment as an attempt to comply with it. The fundamentalist recognizes that the lack of enjoyment that plagues this society of enjoyment; he or she recognizes that the command to enjoy bars enjoyment much more effectively than the prohibition of enjoyment. Hence, one turns to fundamentalism in an effort to rediscover the enjoyment that the society of enjoyment commands and yet militates against. Fundamentalism is thus not the enemy of enjoyment but a desperate attempt to unleash it. This is why the stories about the September 11th suicide bombers’ activities the night before the attacks should not surprise us. If these fundamentalists indulged in the very decadence of the society of enjoyment that they were going to attack the next day (drinking, going to strip clubs, etc.), this testifies to the kinship between fundamentalism and the society of enjoyment. Both are structured around maximizing one’s jouissance. In this sense, the fundamentalist alternative is no alternative at all. It evinces an underlying fealty to the society of enjoyment against which it supposedly constitutes itself.

This reduction of the Real to the imaginary and the symbolic makes it increasingly difficult to make sense of our experience. We can discover meaning only through reference to some foundational point at which the sliding of signification stops—a point where the Real seems to make itself felt within the symbolic order. Without a sense of this point of exception within our system of signification, we lose the ability to universalize, which is the key to discovering meaning. Thus, the society of enjoyment is a society in which one must labor to find meaning.

A sense of immediacy prevails in the society of enjoyment to such an extent that events seem meaningless—as if they occur outside of any context that might allow us to decipher them. What is lacking is a sense of universality that would mediate particular events and render them comprehensible.

In his account of postmodernity, Fredric Jameson describes the widespread failure of interpretation symptomatic of the society of enjoyment, a failure he links to the contemporary collapse of distance. This means, first of all, that we lack the ability not only to interpret events but even to locate ourselves in the world. According to Jameson, “this latest mutation in space—postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.” Unable to discover how our spatial world is organized—to perform what Jameson calls cognitive mapping—we experience events as random and disconnected. Cognitive mapping relies on the universalizing, seeing the necessity at work within the seeming randomness of events. But the ability to universalize is precisely what the society of enjoyment militates against. As a result, interpretation appears only in disguised forms. Jameson sees conspiracy theory as one of these forms. The conspiracy theorist attempts to interpret events, to plot their connection to the whole, and this act involves universalizing. Jameson says, “conspiracy theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded attempt—through the figuration of advanced technology—to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system.” 2 Grasping the totality is impossible today because, paradoxically, global capitalism is authentically total: we can’t access the point beyond it that would allow us to see it as a totality. However, conspiracy theory makes an effort at universalizing, even if this effort involves a fallacious belief in its own transcendence. That is, the conspiracy theorist believes that she/he can attain the (impossible) perspective of an outsider, one looking at the contemporary world system from a point beyond it. But despite this fundamental error, the very prevalence of conspiracy theory indicates the extent to which the society of enjoyment resists the act of interpretation. Today, interpretation finds itself denigrated to such an extent that it appears only in the form of paranoia.

Without the universal, we lose the ability to interpret the events occurring in our everyday lives—we lose the ability to find meaning—because it is only the universal that makes interpretation possible.

Whatever words we use to describe the particular that we are trying to describe will be universals—words that describe other particularities as well. Hence, we cannot speak that particular that we are trying to speak. As Hegel puts it, “the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e., to that which is inherently universal.” Rather than speaking about particulars, we are always involved with the universal while we inhabit the world of language, the symbolic order. The point, then—and this is what the fundamentalist misses—is that we haven’t lost the universal, that the universal continues to persist despite the current difficulties we have in discerning it. Though our experience seems bereft of the universal, it is nonetheless there, providing the frame through which we encounter the particulars of our everyday lives. The key to interpretation today is the ability to grasp this silent functioning of the universal. We can continue to interpret—we can continue to move from the particular to the universal—because the universal persists. Interpretation becomes, however, more difficult and, at the same time, more exigent. In the face of the seeming absence of the universal, we must interpret all the more, because without interpretation our experience is simply a series of randomly arranged events, wholly without significance.

Baudrillard’s image of a mass resistance to meaning correctly apprehends the contemporary situation, but he wrongly sees it as resistance to power. To resist meaning, to refuse interpretation, is to succumb a priori to power, not to defy it, because meaning is the only way we have of grasping how it is that power functions, which is why Jameson champions cognitive mapping as a form of class consciousness. Thus, even Baudrillard’s analysis of resistance to meaning as a mode of resistance to power relies upon the very ability to interpret and make meaning that he ostensibly eschews. Without interpretation and meaning, we have no way to understand the social order, let alone a means of contesting its inequities. The difficulty that students have in interpretation is only an impoverishment of their ability to resist, not a sign of it.

From the standpoint of the society of prohibition, enjoyment is embodied in the external Other—those we ostracize from the social order. Hence, though we feel anxiety about it, we know where enjoyment is located; it has a context in which it exists. When we encounter an outbreak of enjoyment, we can’t understand it, but we can interpret it, make clear its symbolic context. It seems to occur within a universal frame. However, in a society that commands, rather than prohibits, enjoyment, this context seems to evaporate. The imperative to enjoy has the effect of masking the presence of the universal, making it seem as if there is no longer a functioning universal. This is why interpretation is so difficult within the society of enjoyment. Enjoyment is no longer confined to an external position, but confronts us at every turn—within the social order rather than just outside it. In this way, the society of enjoyment produces paranoia: paranoia results from constant confrontations with the enjoying other and the belief that this other is enjoying in our stead. We receive an imperative to enjoy, but rather than feeling as if we are actually enjoying ourselves, we impute enjoyment to the other, a enjoyment that is “rightfully” ours. The problem is that this appearance of the other’s enjoyment does not simply appear in its “proper” context, as external to the social order, at a distance. Instead, it appears directly in front of us, exposing our failure to enjoy and flaunting its success. Because of the seeming proximity of this enjoyment, it is impossible to locate it in a proper symbolic context. This impossibility shapes our response: we can’t interpret the other’s enjoyment, so we feel as if we must destroy it. This is precisely the dynamic at work in the attack on the Convent that opens Paradise.

Through an insistence on interpretation even at those times when interpretation seems impossible, we can recognize that this horrifying enjoyment we would reject is not simply the other’s enjoyment, but also our own. The very thing that attracts us to the other is its relationship to enjoyment. Enjoyment itself, of course, cannot be made meaningful; it cannot be interpreted. In this sense, the characters’ encounter with enjoyment in the novel is parallel with the reader’s encounter with the violent event that opens the novel. Something in both encounters resists being made meaningful. But this does not sink the entire project of interpretation. Interpretation involves seeing the symbolic context within which enjoyment makes its appearance, seeing the meaning that surrounds it. In doing so, we see that the universal does persist, despite its seeming abeyance. To insist upon meaning is not to do unwarranted violence to the particular or to elide meaning’s inevitable failure but rather the only possible way to preserve the singularity of the particular. It is only through interpretation that we come to realize our failure of knowledge and thus the Real dimension of the other that constitutes its singularity. Without the attempt to interpret, we remain confident that we know all there is to know. We rest secure in our cynicism.

For a determinateness, a limit, is determined as a limitation only in opposition to its other in general, that is, in opposition to that which is free from limitation; the other of a limitation is precisely the being beyond it.” One cannot recognize a limit and, at the same time, be bound by it, because the act of recognition itself implies that one has broken the hold that the limit had. The phenomenon of cynicism, however, calls this conception radically into question. Cynics recognize the functioning of ideology—they are not duped—and yet ideology still serves as a limit that they cannot transgress; ideology continues to control the behavior of cynics, despite this knowledge. For the cynical subject in the society of enjoyment, unlike for the subject in the society of prohibition, knowledge does not lead to freedom.

In order to answer these questions, we must first examine more carefully the relationship between cynicism and knowledge. The cynic tells her/himself that she/he is not invested in the ruling ideology, that she/he sees through all of its strictures and manipulations. The symbolic order no longer represents, in the case of the cynic, a barrier to the Real; on the contrary, the cynic believes that she/he sees directly through the symbolic mediation of the Real into the Real itself.5 The knowledge of cynicism, however, is not what Lacan calls “knowledge in the Real.” This is because, in pulling away the veil of the symbolic fiction, we do not find ourselves with an unmediated access to the Real. Instead, we encounter a specular image that we take for the Real. We believe, in other words, that what we see, beyond the constraints of the symbolic fiction, is the Real, that it is not an image. While we are skeptical about the symbolic fiction, we are not at all suspicious about what we see; we are wholly taken in by the image.

The cynic knows very well that the symbolic fiction is just a fiction and also “knows” that the imaginary field beneath this symbolic fiction is a reservoir of truth. For the cynic, the status of the imaginary does not come into question. This represents a radical change in the status of belief—this insistence upon the authority of one’s own eyes and the rejection of symbolic authority. In (Per)versions of Love and Hate, Renata Salecl explains this transition through a reference to Groucho Marx: “When Groucho Marx was caught in an obvious lie, his response was: ‘Whom do you believe—my words or your eyes?’ The belief in the big Other is the belief in words, even when they contradict one’s own eyes. What we have today is therefore precisely a mistrust in mere words (that is, in the symbolic fiction). People want to see what is behind the fiction.” This turn away from belief in the symbolic fiction and toward the image beneath it reaches its apotheosis in the postmodern cynic.

In the act of seeing through the symbolic fiction and thereby failing to recognize its efficacy, the cynic does not escape its influence. In fact, this influence is all the more powerful for its having become wholly inconspicuous, which is precisely what befalls the subject in the society of enjoyment.

In response to the command to enjoy, contemporary cynicism is an effort to gain distance from the functioning of power, to resist the hold that power has over us. Hence, the cynic turns inward and displays an indifference to external authorities, with the aim of self-sufficient independence. Symbolic authority—which would force the subject into a particular symbolic identity, an identity not freely chosen by the subject herself—is the explicit enemy of cynicism. To acknowledge the power of symbolic authority over one’s own subjectivity would be, in the eyes of the cynic, to acknowledge one’s failure to enjoy fully, making such an acknowledgment unacceptable. In the effort to refuse the power of this authority, one must eschew all the trappings of conformity. This is why the great Cynical philosopher Diogenes made a show of masturbating in public, a gesture that made clear to everyone that he had moved beyond the constraints of the symbolic law and that he would brook no barrier to his jouissance. Byfreely doing in public what others feared to do, Diogenes acted out his refusal to submit to the prohibition that others accepted. He attempted to demonstrate that the symbolic law had no absolute hold over him and that he had no investment in it. However, seeming to be beyond the symbolic law and actually being beyond it are two different—and, in fact, opposed—things, and this difference becomes especially important to recognize in the contemporary society of enjoyment. In the act of making a show of one’s indifference to the public law (in the manner of Diogenes and today’s cynical subject), one does not gain distance from that law, but unwittingly reveals one’s investment in it. Such a show is done for the look of the symbolic authority. The cynic stages her/his act publicly in order that symbolic authority will see it. Because it is staged in this way, we know that the cynic’s act—such as the public masturbation of Diogenes—represents a case of acting-out, rather than an authentic act, an act that suspends the functioning of symbolic authority. Acting-out always occurs on a stage, while the authentic act and authentic enjoyment—the radical break from the constraints of symbolic authority—occur unstaged, without reference to the Other’s look. 9 In the History of Philosophy, Hegel makes clear the cynic’s investment in symbolic authority through his discussion of Plato’s interactions with Diogenes: In Plato’s house [Diogenes] once walked on the beautiful carpets with muddy feet, saying, “I tread on the pride of Plato.” “Yes, but with another pride,” replied Plato, as pointedly. When Diogenes stood wet through with rain, and the bystanders pitied him, Plato said, “If you wish to compassionate him, just go away. His vanity is in showing himself off and exciting surprise; it is what made him act in this way, and the reason would not exist if he were left alone. Though Diogenes attempts to act in a way that demonstrates his self-sufficiency, his distance from every external authority, what he attains, however, is far from self-sufficiency. As Plato’s ripostes demonstrate, everything that the cynic does to distance himself from symbolic authority plays directly into the hands of that authority. Here we see how cynicism functions symptomatically in the society of enjoyment, providing the illusion of enjoyment beyond social constraints while leaving these constraints completely intact.

The cynic rejects authority at the same time she/he devotes all of her/his energies to helping it along. The contemporary cynic’s rebellion is, in this way, not a brake upon the functioning of late capitalism, but its engine. The cynicism among subjects today thus indicates the extent to which the society of enjoyment leaves subjects bereft of the actual enjoyment that would break from the prevailing symbolic authority.

Because of their rejection of the public law, cynical subjects feel as if they have no investment in the big Other, as if they have distanced themselves from its power, but this is belied by their investment in the fantasmatic underside of that law.

Let us look at the example of racism to make this clear. The contemporary white cynic will readily admit that the American public ideology of a colorblind society serves to mask the continuing presence of racism. Despite claims that the society has become colorblind, the cynic recognizes that some whites still harbor prejudice toward African Americans and that this prejudice has an adverse effect on the life chances of African Americans (as evinced by the number of African American men in jail, the disparity in income between white and African American, etc.). This recognition, however, coexists in the thinking of the cynic with a seemingly contradictory idea—that African Americans have it easier than whites today, that society has entered an era of reverse discrimination. This is why so many whites feel a visceral objection to affirmative action: it provides even more privilege to a group that already has a privileged status, a privileged relationship to enjoyment. In the racist’s view, the African American enjoys more because she/he gets more for less, has to work less for more benefits (as the policy of affirmative action seems to attest to). How can we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory attitudes? The cynic’s ability to sustain both attitudes stems from the split between her/his relationship to public ideology and to the fantasmatic underside of power. She/he doubts the official proclamations of authority, which claim to have eradicated racism, but invests her/himself in the underside of that authority, which relies on a racist fear of the Other’s enjoyment in order to function. In sustaining the investment in the underlying racist fantasy, the cynic finds support for her/his being in the big Other. But the cynic’s suspicion of public ideology allows her/him to feel as if she/he is transgressing the norms of the big Other. Thus, the cynic is able to have it both ways, attaining the security that stems from obedience and the enjoyment that transgression produces, without having to risk actually losing the support of her/his identity within the big Other. The white cynic can both feel her/himself to be righteously antiracist in her/his ability to analyze the hidden racism in American society while at the same time feeling her/himself to be a victim of reverse discrimination. Suspicion of the public law and investment in its obscene underside offers such a subject the best of both worlds.

It is doubly difficult to break the hold of ideology over the cynic because the cynic believes that she/he has already broken its hold, so that there is nothing further to be known. In addition, the cynic, unlike the traditional naïve subject, derives not only identity from ideology, but also the enjoyment stemming from ideology’s obscene underside. When we simply obey the law, we feel certain about ourselves and our place in the social order. But when we obey while feeling that we are not, we obtain enjoyment in the act of obedience. This constitutes the great power of cynicism as an ideological formation: it provides for us the best of both worlds—obedience and transgression. Cynicism offers the subject a sense of radicality; the cynical subject feels as if she/he is heeding the imperative to enjoy. In this way, cynicism functions as a symptom of the society of enjoyment.

America “is no country for the infirm” because infirmity indicates a failure of enjoyment. To be sick is thus to be guilty. The sick illustrate the persistence of dissatisfaction and distance within the society of enjoyment. In acknowledging the sick, one acknowledges lack as well. Hence, like Roy Cohn, we opt instead for nonstop motion, for trying to eliminate the distance that the sick would introduce into the contemporary world.

Though the society of enjoyment works to eliminate distance, it also spawns an opposite movement—an attempt to restore distance and transcendence. This accounts for the contemporary rise in fundamentalism, which emerges in response to the absence of distance. Fundamentalism seeks to restore the central role of prohibition in society and thereby restore a sense of distance and of a transcendent beyond. Both religious and nationalist versions of fundamentalism raise their central value (e.g., ethnic identity, religious practices) to a transcendent level: it cannot be captured through universal communication. In order to sustain this kind of elevation, fundamentalism attacks the nonstop motion such as we see in Angels in America. Nonstop motion has the effect of breaking down every barrier, and fundamentalism needs at least one barrier.

Art becomes an experience rather than a text that one interprets, and an experience resists universalization.

Interpretation operates by relating the particular to the universal, by taking a seemingly isolated event and seeing its larger importance. The universal provides the framework of meaning through which the particular acquires whatever sense it will acquire. Without the possibility of a reference to the universal, particular events lose their connection to the whole and thus take on the appearance of contingency. We can see this phenomenon at its most egregious in the contemporary attitude toward crime. People fear crime today in large part because it always threatens to take them by surprise. Rather than being the product of definite sociohistorical conditions, the criminal seems to emerge out of nowhere, strike, and then return to anonymity. As the victim (or potential victim) of the crime, I experience it as a wholly random act, disconnected with the functioning of the social order as a whole. What I experience most forcefully is the fact that the crime could have happened to anyone—that it could have happened to someone else just as easily as it happened to me. Certainly it is never anything that I did that triggered the crime—or at least such is my experience. Crimes appear, in other words, in almost every instance as particular acts without any link to the universal, without any connection to the social order in which they exist. One might have a theory about crime—blaming it on “liberal judges,” for instance—but when crime actually strikes, it seems random and irreducibly singular. Hence, it becomes impossible to interpret crime, to grasp particular crimes within their universal significance. 9 But nonetheless crime does have a universal significance, and it does emerge from localizable conditions, despite its appearance of isolation and particularity. In fact, one could convincingly argue that crime should be easier to understand within the current context of global capitalism than ever before in human history, simply because never before have those who live in squalor been bombarded on a daily basis with nonstop images of opulence. Making connections like this is increasingly difficult today, however, because subjects increasingly view their experience as an isolated, essentially private experience.

The salient feature of Paradise is that, as a reader, I experience events long before I can make sense of them.35 Events initially seem to exist outside of any frame of meaning, and it is only afterward that the frame through which the event is comprehensible becomes visible. The event itself initially appears as a violent irruption of the Real, occurring outside of any symbolic context. What Morrison is tapping into here is one of the key aspects of contemporary experience. Rather than experiencing the events in our lives as a part of a whole, within the context of the universal, we tend to experience events in isolation, as if each event exists in its own sphere, untouched by any other. The lack of an evident universal is what makes interpretation so difficult today. This appearance, however, is misleading, and it is through the act of interpretation that we can see the connection between events, the way in which they are all situated within a universality. On the level of its form, the novel illustrates both the illusion of nonuniversality and the hidden universality that makes interpretation possible.

Reducing the Real event to a meaning and refusing interpretation altogether, however, are not the only possibilities. There is a third way—that of situating the Real event within a symbolic context. This path allows us to attain comprehension without becoming comprehensive and thereby foreclosing the Real. According to this line of thought, the collision of the meteor with the earth would remain a nonsensical event, but we could nonetheless understand why this event seems to have such a powerful hold over us today. At the moment when the hegemony of late capitalism as a world system has become secure, the meteor serves to remind us that no social structure is immune to the return of the Real. In this sense, the meteor (as represented in the film) indicates the presence of a desire for something beyond late capitalism, a yearning for what cannot be reduced to a commodity. That a beyond to late capitalism can only be envisioned as a world-ending catastrophe indicates most vividly the degree of late capitalism’s hegemony today. The only way to escape the commodification of everything seems to be the destruction of everything. Such an interpretation of the potential meteor collision does not render the collision itself meaningful (or any less traumatic); instead, it discovers meaning around the collision, in the investment in and responses to the event. The difficulty of this kind of interpretation lies in the prevailing absence of any universalizing efforts today. In the absence of this universalizing, we gaze speechless upon every irruption of the Real, unable to embark upon the interpretation that the event demands.

Every hysterical refusal of mastership is always in reality the equally hysterical demand for a new and more absolute master, as Jacques Lacan famously saw.

O que quer dizer metalíngua senão tradução? Não se pode falar de uma língua senão em outra língua.” Jacques Lacan, L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre

He proposed that, apart from and even surpassing the rule that we are governed in our actions by pleasure, there is a parallel urge to dispel life energy and thus tension—and that this drive can be found at the root of war neuroses and the neurotic’s compulsion to repeat unpleasant situations. Specifically, he called this a “death drive,” or thanatos. Thus, beyond pleasure lay the even more extreme reward of oblivion.13 Although intriguing, Freud’s idea of an instinctive urge toward negation or annihilation seemed paradoxical, and never really caught on … except as it was reformulated by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the late 1950s. Lacan’s French had an advantage that Freud’s German lacked, specifically the word jouissance, meaning painful pleasure or pleasurable pain—literally something “beyond pleasure” that takes over and drives a neurotic or someone who has been traumatized. The simplistic examples commonly given of jouissance include an orgasm so extreme that it causes agony, or the erotic pleasures of sadomasochistic acts. But a better analogy would be addiction, the compulsion to repeat an act (taking a drug, for instance) that cannot be resisted yet no longer gives much pleasure because it is more about the temporary dissipation or release of unpleasure.14 There is no equivalent word in English either. In reference to Lacan, jouissance is usually translated as “enjoyment,” but it needs to be understood that there may be something deeply ambivalent or even repellent about this particular kind of enjoyment. It is an enjoyment we do not want, a weird mix of excitement and pain, reward and regret. The concept of jouissance, as the underlying energy driving human compulsions, including pathological compulsions and obsessions treated in psychotherapy, became so central for Lacan that late in his career he made the provocative statement that jouissance is the “only substance” psychoanalysis deals with.15 Lacan might better have said “force” and not substance. Later Lacanian thinkers have likened jouissance to the warping of space in a gravitational field. The contradiction between conscious aversion and unconscious reward bends our symbolic-imaginary spacetime, causing the strange tail-chasing, repetitive “orbiting” behavior of all neuroses and obsessional behavior, and on some level all behavior.

In the second half of the twentieth century, however, such seemingly self-evident or logical claims to identity have been problematised radically on a number of fronts by such theorists as Louis Althusser, Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. Collectively, their work has made possible certain advances in social theory and the human sciences which, in the words of Stuart Hall (1994:120), have effected 'the final de-centring of the Cartesian subject' (cf. Chris Weedon, 1987; Diana Fuss, 1989; Barbara Creed, 1994). Consequendy, identity has been reconceptualised as a sustaining and persistent cultural fantasy or myth. To think of identity as a 'mythological' construction is not to say that categories of identity have no material effect. Rather it is to realise—as Roland Barthes does in his Mythologies (1978)—that our understanding of ourselves as coherent, unified, and self-determining subjects is an effect of those representational codes commonly used to describe the self and through which, consequendy, identity comes to be understood.

Quel est donc cet autre à qui je suis plus attaché qu’à moi, puisqu’au sein le plus assenti de mon identité à moi-même, c’est lui qui m’agite ?

Je suis à la place d'où se vocifèe que "l'univers est un défaut dans la pureté du Non-Être". Et ceci non pas sans raison, car à se garder, cette place fait languir l'Être lui-même. Elle s'appelle la Jouissance, et c'est elle dont le défaut rendrait vain l'univers. En ai-je donc la charge? -- Oui sans doute. Cette jouissance dont le manque fait l'Autre inconsistant, est-elle donc la mienne? L'expérience prouve qu'elle m'est ordinairement interdite, et ceci non pas seulement, comme le croiraient les imbéciles, par un mauvais arrangement de la société, mais je dirais par la faute de l'Autre s'il existait: l'Autre n'existant pas, il ne me reste qu'à prendre la faute sur Je, c'est-à-dire à croire à ce à quoi l'expérience nous conduit tous, Freud en tête: au péché originel.

Mejor pues que renuncie quien no pueda unir a su horizonte la subjetividad de su época. Pues ¿cómo podría hacer de su ser el eje de tantas vidas aquel que no supiese nada de la dialéctica que lo lanza con esas vidas en un movimiento simbólico? Que conozca bien la espiral a la que su época lo arrastra en la obra continuada de Babel, y que sepa su función de intérprete en la discordia de los lenguajes. Para las tinieblas del mundus alrededor de las cuales se enrolla la torre inmensa, que deje a la visión mística el cuidado de ver elevarse sobre un bosque eterno la serpiente podrida de la vida.

... cuanto más se acerca el hombre, cuanto más rodea, acaricia lo que cree que es el objeto de su deseo, de hecho más alejado se encuentra, extraviado

Despite their many solidarities, the two public intellectuals—already close friends by the early 1970s—held opposing views on key aspects of language. The setting for the conflict arose a year earlier in Said’s elaborate treatment of Chomsky’s linguistic revolution in an essay Said titled “Linguistics and the Archeology of Mind” (1971), in which he provocatively pitted him against a thinker Chomsky considered a charlatan, the post-Freudian analyst and quintessential French theorist Jacques Lacan.76 For his part, Chomsky recalled being “utterly astonished that Ed could even begin to take this stuff seriously”—“this stuff” referring to language as pure creative expression or, in Lacan’s case, as the mirror of the unconscious and the structure of social and libidinal desire.77 Said respectfully held his ground.

The “postmodernist” label has been attached to a wide variety of writers, including the philosopher Gilles Deleuze; his frequent collaborator the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari; sociologist Jean Baudrillard; psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan; and Luce Irigaray, whose writings deal with topics in many fields. So multifarious are these various manifestations of the postmodernist spirit that I can give only a very broad and impressionistic characterization of the attitudes and outlooks that tie them together.

Hence, you are infinitely more than you imagine, subjects [or underlings] of gadgets and instruments of all kinds - ranging from the microscope, to radio and television - that will become elements of your being.

The positive fruit of the revelation of ignorance is nonknowledge, which is not a negation of knowledge but rather its most elaborate form.

Na festa do capitalismo avançado em que vivemos, encontramos basicamente duas categorias de sujeitos: aqueles que aproveitam a festa até a última gota, se deixam consumir e seguem as prescrições do excesso em práticas hedonistas em que o prazer só pode ser obtido na ultrapassagem de medidas; e os que não se acham merecedores do convite ou não sabem como consegui-lo, os barrados no baile. Poderíamos dizer que essa dupla e extrema forma de expressão, em crescimento na contemporaneidade, seria, em grande parte, fomentada pelo pano de fundo do capitalismo avançado e, de formas diferentes, contribui para ampliar o distanciamento do sujeito em relação ao registro do desejo, ilustrando o crescimento da dimensão do gozo. O conceito de gozo teve suas primeiras formulações em Freud, no início de seu percurso, referido ao gozo sexual, e mais adiante em sua obra, embora não com esse termo. Depois de 1920, Freud faz referência a determinadas condições em que o sujeito obtém satisfação com o próprio sofrimento. Com a segunda teoria pulsional e o advento da pulsão de morte, avança nesse terreno intermediário entre o prazer e a dor que se enlaçam e se confundem. Coube a Jacques Lacan, em sua releitura do texto freudiano, nomear e definir o gozo como um dos conceitos de maior fertilidade para a abordagem das condições de vida contemporâneas. Para uma pesquisa mais ampla das depressões, é importante mencioná-lo, na medida em que as depressões podem ser consideradas, hoje, uma modalidade narcísica de gozo.

Digamos que a poesia moderna e a escola surrealista fizeram-nos dar um grande passo […] ao demonstrar que qualquer conjunção de dois significantes seria equivalente para construir uma metáfora , caso não se exigisse a condição da máxima disparidade entre as imagens significadas para a produção da centelha poética, ou, em outras palavras, para que tenha lugar a criação metafórica.

Se ele é com toda certeza um escritor, não é um poeta. Schreber não nos introduz numa dimensão nova da experiência. Há poesia toda vez que um escrito nos introduz num mundo diferente do nosso, e, ao nos dar a presença de um ser, de uma certa relação fundamental, faz com que ela se torne também nossa. A poesia faz com que não possamos duvidar da autenticidade da experiência de San Juan de la Cruz, nem da de Proust ou da de Gérard de Nerval. A poesia é criação de um sujeito assumindo uma nova ordem de relação simbólica com o mundo. Não há absolutamente nada disso nas Memórias de Schreber.

یا گناه نکنید یا اگر گناه کردید پشیمان نشوید. به میل آن لحظهٔ خود وفادار بمانید

Repetition resembles even the foundations of all reality, the productivity of the Holy Trinity, which St. John Damascene describes in the language of imaging: “The Son is the Father's image, and the Spirit the Son's, through which Christ dwelling in man makes him after his own image.” To despise this facet of reality echoes the Lacanian “solid hatred addressed to being,” and depicts even God as subject to ennui before a kenotic descent.

Çünkü gerçeğin ayırt edici özelliği hayal edilemez olmasıdır. (...) Eğer gerçek diye bir kavram varsa, son derece komplekstir ve bir bütün oluşturacak şekilde kavranması imkansızdır.

Joyce the Symptom... cancelled his subscription to the unconscious.

Diferentemente, Schopenhauer arma sua teoria sobre o homem, trazendo uma nota de desacordo em relação ao que era dominante na filosofia de seu tempo (a Natureza para ele seria má), mas trazendo também muitas notas de concordância, na medida em que subordina o amor e o desejo sexual a uma norma (da Natureza): fazer o Mal. O Bem, para Schopenhauer estaria no aniquilamento, na ex-tinção da própria espécie. Schopenhauer irá abalar os ter-mos considerados harmônicos (dever/razão/felicidade do homem no mundo). Mas irá também, por outro lado, apoiar aqueles que defendiam a relação sexualidade/natu-reza/propagação da espécie, tão bem acolhida à época. Jacques Lacan, no Seminário 7 — A ética da psicanálise, vai mostrar que o desejo do homem, “longamente apalpado, anestesiado, adormecido pelos moralistas, domesticado pe-los educadores, traído pelas academias” , será abordado por Freud numa perspectiva totalmente distinta. E a diferença maior está no fato de Freud colocar um ponto de interro-gação no campo do desejo. É por isso que dizemos que o sujeito para a psicanálise é dividido: porque é acossado a todo instante por forças nunca completamente dominadas, as pulsões; e porque a pulsão sexual, que o afeta, tem por objetivo sempre tão-somente aquilo que pode proporcionar satisfação. Ou seja: só o que é único na pulsão é o alvo (satisfação), nunca o objeto.

Freud não via nada de bom no idealismo. Para ele, com um ideal o homem ilude a si mesmo e aos outros. Todo ideal é enganoso e enganador. Isso quer dizer que a proposta freudiana é não crer em nada? Claro que não. É, pelo contrário, desconfiar daqueles que prometem tudo. Por exemplo: quando dizemos que devemos desconfiar do amor enquanto ideal, isso significa que o amor não existe? Não. Significa apenas que não devemos esperar tudo do amor, que o amor — assim como todas as coisas da vida — é finito e tem limites. Quando, a partir de Freud, dizemos que devemos desconfiar do Mandamento “ama ao próximo como a ti mesmo” , isso significa que estamos pregando o egoísmo e a violência? Também não. Apenas estamos lembrando o que é puro ideal: que ninguém é capaz de amar alguém só porque esse alguém é seu semelhante. Para Freud, o amor é uma moeda muito preciosa, que não deve ser distribuída assim, sem se olhar a quem. (Aliás, normalmente não é amor o que o homem dá sem olhar a quem.) Pelo contrário, sob o manto da caridade e da compaixão, o que o homem faz é satisfazer no próximo sua agressividade, é explorar seu trabalho sem compensação, utilizá-lo sexualmente sem o seu consenti-mento, apropriar-se de suas posses, humilhá-lo, causar-lhe sofrimento, torturá-lo e matá-lo. Ao nos lembrar desse trecho da obra de Freud, que está em O mal-estar na cultura, Jacques Lacan completa: “Aqueles que preferem os contos de fadas fazem ouvidos moucos.

El proceso analítico es cuando el yo decide si quiere aquello que desea.