齐泽克自述

来源：<The Zizek Dictionary> p273
How am I to write an entry on myself without appearing exceedingly stupid? The only way out I see is to turn to a confessional mode and admit to three guilty pleasures – guilty in the eyes of the theory with which my name is associated.
Let me begin with music. For a European classical music elitist educated in the tradition of Adorno, the name “Tchaikovsky” cannot but give rise to the Joseph Goebbels reaction of drawing a gun – Tchaikovsky stands for the lowest kitsch, comparable only to Sibelius or Rachmaninov. However, as Daniel Gregory Mason put it succinctly, Tchaikovsky “has the merits of his defects”: not only was he aware of his limitations and weak points; his (few) truly great moments paradoxically grew out of these defects. He admitted that he can “seldom sustain a whole movement at the height of its greatest passages” – a problem not only for him, but for most Romantics up to Elgar. Berlioz made a well-known vicious quip that Mendelssohn’s melodies usually begin well but finish badly, losing their drive and ending in a “mechanical” resolution (see his Fingal’s Cave overture, or the first movement of the Violin Concerto). Far from being a sign of Mendelssohn’s weakness as a composer, this failure of the melodic line rather bears witness to his sensitivity towards a historical change: those who were still able to write “beautiful melodies” were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky.
Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous “beautiful melodies”, but when a melodic line is thwarted. At the very beginning of Onegin, in the brief orchestral prelude, the short melodic motif (“Tatyana’s theme”) is not properly developed, but merely repeated in diff erent modes, fully retaining its isolated character of a melodic fragment, not even a full melodic line. Th ere is a genuinely melancholic fl avour in such a repetition, which registers and displays an underlying impotence, that of the failure of proper development. It is significant that this theme gets properly developed into a kind of organic texture only in the letter scene, in the utopian explosion of Tatyana’s desire – a kind of Tchaikovsky equivalent to the ballad of Senta in Th e Flying Dutchman (another opera that grew out of a central song). No wonder that Onegin withdraws from Tatyana’s embarrassingly open display of erotic passion.
In his first true masterpiece, the “Francesca da Rimini” symphonic poem (1876), Tchaikovsky goes even a step further. In the middle of the poem (about eleven minutes into it), a passage sounding very twentieth century, the portent of a diff used anxiety, almost like a Bernard Hermann score for Hitchcock, all of a sudden occurs, a kind of fl ight into the future; then the standard Romanticism gradually recuperates itself. It is as if Tchaikovsky provides here an example of what Walter Benjamin theorized as a message coming from the future, something for which the time in which it was written lacked the proper means to hear or understand it properly. (Th is is how modernism works: what were originally fragments of an organic Whole get autonomized – in painting, the whole of late Miró can be traced back to the details of his early figurative paintings.) No wonder “Francesca da Rimini” is the music used for the ballet sequence at the end of Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain. Th is is what is worth looking for in Tchaikovsky – such rare signs from the future, miracles in the midst of Romantic kitsch.
As for my second guilty pleasure, let me descend to an even lower level of musical taste. Th ere are pieces of classical music that, in our culture, become so deeply associated with their later use in some product of commercial popular culture that it is almost impossible to dissociate them from this use. Since the theme of the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 was used in Elvira Madigan, a popular Swedish melodrama, this piece is even now regularly characterized as the Elvira Madigan Concerto even in editions by serious classical music editions like DGG.
But what if, instead of exploding in an Adornian rage against such commercialized musical fetishism, one makes an exception and openly confesses the guilty pleasure of enjoying a piece of music that is in itself worthless and draws all of its interest from the way in which it is used as a product of popular culture? My favourite candidate is the Storm Clouds Cantata from both versions of Alfred Hitchcock’s Th e Man Who Knew Too Much.
When, in 1934, Hitchcock was preparing the first version, he hired Arthur Benjamin (1893–1960), an Australian composer, pianist and conductor, to write a piece of music especially for the climactic scene at Royal Albert Hall. (A curious anecdote: on 31 July 1918, Benjamin’s aircraft was shot down over Germany by the young Hermann Goering, and he spent the remainder of the war as a German prisoner of war.) Th e music, known as the Storm Clouds Cantata, based on words by D. B. Wyndham-Lewis (called by Auden “that lonely old volcano of the Right”), is also used in the 1956 remake, one of Hitchcock’s underrated masterpieces. Bernard Herrmann, who was given the option of composing a new cantata, found Benjamin’s piece to be so well suited to the film that he declined. Herrmann can be seen conducting it during the Royal Albert Hall scene – the sequence runs twelve minutes without any dialogue, from the beginning of Storm Clouds until the climax, when the Doris Day character screams.
Although the Cantata is a rather ridiculous piece of late-Romantic kitsch, it is not as devoid of interest as one may think. Th e words are worth quoting:
Th ere came a whispered terror on the breeze
And the dark forest shook
And on the trembling trees
Came the nameless fear
And panic overtook each fl ying creature of the wild
And when they all had fl ed
Yet stood the trees
Around whose heads
Screaming
Th e night birds wheeled and shot away
Finding release
From that which drove them onward like their prey
Th e storm clouds broke and drowned the dying moon
Th e storm clouds broke
Finding release.
Is this not a minimal scenario of what Gilles Deleuze called an “abstract” emotion-event: a peace full of tension, which gradually grows unbearable and is finally released in a violent explosion? One should recall here Hitchcock’s dream of bypassing the narrative audio-visual medium altogether and provoking emotions in the spectator directly, manipulating through a complex mechanism their emotional neuronal centres. To put it in Platonic terms: Psycho is not really a film about pathological or terrorized people, but about an “abstract” Idea of Terror, which is instantiated in concrete individuals and their misfortunes. In the same way, the music of the Storm Could Cantata does not illustrate its words, and even less does it refer to the cinema narrative; on the contrary, it directly renders the emotion-event.
But what about literature? Are my tastes any better there? Unfortunately, it is here that one encounters the very bottom of my bad taste: I sincerely think that Daphne du Maurier is a much better writer than Virginia Woolf, that pretentious cold bitch. A year or so ago, while waiting in line to pay in a London Waterstones bookstore, I overheard a young man asking a cashier: “I just finished Mrs de Winter – is it true that this is a sequel to another book?” Th is was for me a depressing encounter with the illiteracy of the younger generation – how can anyone not know about Rebecca?
Or is this oblivion perhaps deserved? Th ere eff ectively is something radically untimely about du Maurier: her prose seems marked by a melodramatic excess, which often comes dangerously close to the ridiculous – after reading a book by her, it is difficult to avoid the vague sentiment of “it is no longer possible to write like that today”. She tells stories without truly being a writer – in what, then, resides the secret of the undisputed tremendous power of fascination exerted by her stories? What if the two features are somehow connected? What if her lack of style, her pathetic directness, is the formal eff ect of the fact that du Maurier’s narratives directly, all too directly, stage the fantasies that sustain our lives? The notion of fantasy here has to be taken in all of its fundamental ambiguity: far from being opposed to reality, fantasy is that which provides the basic coordinates of what we experience as “reality” (or, as Lacan put it, “everything we are allowed to approach by way of reality remains rooted in fantasy” [SXX:95]) – however, in order to fulfil this function, it has to remain hidden, to exert its efficiency in the background, or, to quote Freud: “If what [subjects] long for the most intensely in their phantasies is presented to them in reality, they none the less fl ee from it” (SE VII: 110). And it is this properly shameless, often embarrassing, direct staging of fantasies that makes du Maurier’s writing so compelling – especially when compared with the aseptic politically correct feminism.
According to Jewish tradition, Lilith is the woman a man makes love to while he masturbates alone in his bed during the night – far from standing in for the feminine identity liberated from the patriarchal hold, her status is purely phallic: she is what Lacan calls La femme, the Woman, the fantasmatic supplement of the male masturbatory phallic jouissance. Significantly, while there is only one man (Adam), femininity is from the very beginning split between Eve and Lilith, between the “ordinary” hysterical feminine subject and the fantasmatic spectre of Woman: when a man is having sex with a “real” woman, he is using her as a masturbatory prop to support his fantasizing about the non-existent Woman … And in Rebecca, her most famous novel, du Maurier adds another turn of the screw to the myth of Lilith: the fantasy of Woman is (re)appropriated by a woman – what if Lilith is not so much man’s fantasy as the fantasy of a woman, the model of her fantasmatic competitor?
So where does Maurier belong? In the era limited, on the one side, by Romanticism and its notion of radical Evil (“pleasure in pain”) and, on the other side, by Freud, by the direct impact of psychoanalysis on the arts – why? Lacan located the starting point of the chain of ideas that finally gave birth to psychoanalysis in Kantian ethics (his Critique of Practical Reason) and the Romantic notion of “pleasure in pain”. It is this epoch that provides the only proper ground for what is incorrectly called “applied psychoanalysis”. Prior to it, we were in a universe where the Unconscious was not yet operative, where the subject was the Light of Reason as opposed to the impersonal Night of drives, and not, in the very kernel of its being, this Night itself; afterwards, the very impact of psychoanalysis transformed artistic literary practice (Eugene O’Neill’s plays, for example, already presuppose psychoanalysis, whereas Henry James, Katherine Mansfield and even Kafka do not). And this is also the horizon within which du Maurier moves – this space of the heroic innocence of the Unconscious in which irresistible passions freely roam around. How can one not enjoy this space?