The Sublime Object Of Ideology Quotes

Money is precisely an object whose status depends on how we 'think' about it: if people no longer treat this piece of metal as money, if they no longer 'believe' in it as money, it no longer is money.

(...) even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.

Σε ένα σύμπαν όπου όλοι αναζητάμε το αληθινό πρόσωπο κάτω από το προσωπείο, ο καλύτερος τρόπος να παραπλανήσουμε είναι να φορέσουμε το προσωπείο της ίδιας της αλήθειας

To articulate more precisely the way in which the Lacanian phallic signifier entails the impossibility of metalanguage, let us return to the poststructuralist understanding of the idea that 'there is no metalanguage'. Its starting point is the fact that the zero level of all metalanguages - natural, ordinary language - is simultaneously the last interpretative framework of all of them: it is the ultimate metalanguage. Ordinary language is its own metalanguage. It is self-referential; the place of an incessant auto-reflexive movement. In this conceptualization one does not mention the object too much. Usually, one gets rid of it simply by pointing out how 'reality' is already structured through the medium of language. In this way post-structuralists can calmly abandon themselves to the infinite self-interpretative play of language. 'There is no metalanguange' is actually taken to mean its exact opposite: that there is no pure object-language, any language that would function as a purely transparent medium for the designation of pre-given reality. Every 'objective' statement about things includes some kind of self-distance, a rebounding of the signifier from its 'literal meaning'. In short, language is always saying, more or less, something other than what it means to say.

Art playing on its own disappearance and the disappearance of its object was still an art of great works. But art playing at re-cycling itself indefinitely by helping itself to reality? Most contemporary art is engaged in just this: appropriating banality, the throwaway, mediocrity as value and as ideology. In these innumerable installations and performances, what is going on is merely a compromise with the state of things - and simultaneously with all the past forms of the history of art. An admission of unoriginality, banality and worthlessness, elevated into a perverse aesthetic value, if not indeed a perverse aesthetic pleasure. Admittedly, it is claimed that all this mediocrity is sublimated in the transition to the level of art, which is distanced and ironic. But it is just as worthless and insignificant at that level as before. Transition to the aesthetic level rescues nothing. In fact the opposite is true: it is mediocrity raised to the second power. It claims to be worthless: 'I'm worthless, I'm worthless!' and it really is worthless!

The very scale of the efforts made to exterminate the Other is testimony to the Other's indestructibility, and by extension to the indestructible totality of Otherness. Such is the power of this idea, and such is the power of the facts. Radical otherness survives everything: conquest, racism, extermination, the virus of difference, the psychodrama of alienation. On the one hand, the Other is always-already dead; on the other hand, the Other is indestructible. This is the Great Game. The ultimate inscrutability of beings, as of peoples. Segalen: 'The inscrutability of races, which is merely the extension to races of the inscrutability of individuals.' The survival of exoticism depends entirely on the impossibility of encounter, fusion and the exchange of differences. Fortunately, all this is an illusion - the illusion of subjectivity itself. All that endures is the foreignness of the foreigner, the irredeemability of the object. No psychology: psychology is always the worst way to go. Avoid all psychological, ideological and moral forms of the Other - eschew the metaphor of the Other, the Other as metaphor. Seek the Other's 'cruelty', the Other's unintelligibility, the Other as spectre: constrain the Other to foreignness, violate the Other in his foreignness. Running to ground of metaphor: sublime form of metaphorical violation. Radical anti-ethnology, anti-universalism, anti-differentialism. Radical exoticism versus the pimping of differences.