Looking Awry笔记

How real is reality

1.1. from reality to the real: the paradoxes of objet petit a

1.1.1. looking awry at Zeno’s paradoxes

Zeno’s paradox:

Achilles and the tortoise: achilles is after hector/the tortoise yet can never attain him. The point is not that achilles cannot overtake hector — since he is faster than hector, he can easily leave him behind — but rather that ha cannot attain him: hector is always too fast or too slow. The object-cause of desire is always missed, all we can do is encircle it.

the one about the arrow that cannot move

It models a scene from the odyssey, in which heracles continually shoots his arrows form his bow.

The scene takes place in the infernal world, where the suffering figures are condemned to repeat the same act infinitely.

Tantalus: pays for his greed (his striving after ‘exchange value’)when every object he obtains loses his ‘use value’ and changes into a pure, useless embodiment of ‘exchange value’: the women he bites into food, it changes to gold.

Sisyphus: once he reaches his goal, he experiences the fact that the real sim of his activity is the way itself. The real purpose of the drive is not its goal (full satisfaction) but its aim: the drive’s ultimate aim is simply to reproduce itself as drive, to return to its circular path, to continue its path to and from the goal. The real source of enjoyment is the repetitive movement of this closed circuit.

It follows naturally the libidinal economy of the paradox that, the an increase in the libidinal impact of an object whenever attempts are made to diminish and destroy it. The nazi discourse: the less jews left, the more dangerous they become.

Conclusion:

Zeno’s paradoxes intends to exclude the real of the drive and the object around which it circulates to establish the philosophical One, yet paradoxically, what the paradoxes illustrate is precisely the subject’s impossible relation to the object-cause of its desire and drive that circulates endlessly around it.

This is why lacan says that the objet petit a ‘is what philosophical reflection lacks in order to be able to locate itself, i.e. to ascertain its nullity.’

In other words, what Zeno excludes is the very dimension fo fantasy, insofar as, in lacanian theory, fantasy designates the subject’s ‘impossible’ relation to a, to the object-cause of its desire.

1.1.2. goal and aim in fantasy

Fantasy is a scenario that realizes the subject’s desire. The desire is constitutes through fantasy. Through fantasy, the subject is constituted as desiring; through fantasy, we learn to desire.

Robert Scheckley ‘store of the worlds’

The story illustrates that the realization proper to desire does not consist in its being ‘fulfilled’, ‘fully satisfied’. It coincides rather with the reproduction of desire as such, with its circular movement.

Dashiell Hammett’s ‘maltese falcon’:

Ultimately, we always find ourselves in the same position from which we have tried to escape, which is way, instead of running after the impossible, we must learn to consent to our common lot and to find pleasure in the trivia of our everyday life,

The objet petit a is precisely that surplus, the elusive make-believe that drove the man to change his existence.

1.1.3. a black hole in reality: how nothing can beget something

Patricia highsmith ‘black house’

The ‘black house’ was forbidden to the men because it functioned as an empty space wherein they could project their nostalgic desires, their distorted memories; by publicly stating that the ‘black house’ was nothing but an old ruin, the round intruder reduced their fantasy space to everyday, common reality.

Shakespeare, Richard 2

Objet petit a can only be seen when looked awry, from an objective and distorting angle.

Because desire posits its own object retroactively.

The objet petit a is ‘objectively’ nothing; it is something begot by nothing.

1.1.4. the ‘thirteenth floor’ of the fantasy space

Robert Heinlein, ‘the unpleasant profession of Jonathan Hoag’.

The discontinuity between inside and outside.

The inside surpass the outside in scale because it consists of fantasy space.

Fritz Lang: ‘woman in the window’

The truth is the opposite of the semblance: the professor awakes in order to continue this dream (about being a normal person), that is, to escape the real of his desire.

The social reality, in which we are decent, kind-hearted people, is then nothing but a fragile, symbolic cobweb that can at any given moment be torn aside by an intrusion of the real.

John B. Priestley ‘the dangerous corner’

Issac Asimov ‘jokester’

The implication of an ‘Other of the Other’: a hidden subject who pulls the strings of the great Other (the symbolic order) precisely at the point sat which this Other starts to speak its autonomy, i.e.. where it produces an effect of eating by means of a senseless contingency, beyond the conscious intention of the speaking subject, as in jokes or dreams. (in this story, it is god. In ‘the unpleasant profession of Jonathan hoag’,it is the universe artists.)

This ‘Other of the Other’ is precisely the Other of paranoia: the one speaks through us without our knowing it, who controls our thoughts, who manipulates us through the apparent ‘spontaneity’ of jokes or the one who creates our world.

The paranoid construction enables us to escape theft that ‘the Other does not exists.’ It is the attempt to heal ourselves, separating the real from our reality (in the symbolic order).

Madness (psychosis) sets in when this barrier is torn down, when the real overflows reality.

The paintings of mark Rothko in the 60s

A set of color variation of the relationship between the real and reality

1.2. the real and its vicissitudes

1.2.1. how the real returns and answers: return of the living dead

A drive is a demand not caught up in the dialectic of desire, that resists dialecticization. Deman almost always implies a certain dialectical mediation: I demand this, but what do I really want by it? Drive persists in a certain demand: I demand something and I persist in it to the end.

Antigone: between her 2 deaths, an unconditional demand persists: a proper burial for her brother.

Hamlet’s father returns as a ghost.

The terminator: the cyborg comes from the future to kill the mother of a future leader. He is soulless yet still persists in his demand and pursues his victim with no trace of compromise and hesitation. The terminator is the embodiment of the drive, devoid of desire.

George romero ‘creepshow’ (screenplay by Stephen King)

The cult film Robocop

If there is a phenomenon that fully deserves to be called the fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture, it is the fantasy of the return of the living dead.

The return of the dead is a sign of a disturbance in the symbolic rite, in the process of symbolization; the dead return as collectors of some unpaid symbolic debt.

The funeral exemplifies symbolization at its purest, since symbolization is symbolic murder.

Just like the murder of the ‘primal father’ (re)constructed in totem and taboo by freud: the murder of the father is integrated into the symbolic universe insofar as the dead father begins to reign as the symbolic agency of the name-of-the-father. And the remainder is obscene and revengeful figure of the father-of-enjoyment.

1.2.2. the corpse that would not die

The oedipus myth and the myth of primal father of totem and taboo are, despite the apparent harmony, in fact asymmetry and even opposed. Because in the former it is the death of the father, as a removed obstacle, that permits the pleasure of incest, while in the latter the dead father is even more cruel than the living one. As a matter of fact, it may be said that the father has never been alive in the first place. He is dead all along.

Stephen king’s pet sematary

Hitchcock the trouble with harry

Hitchcock calls it the exercise of the art of understatement

Understatement thus is the way of isolating the ‘blot’, namely the death of the father. ‘viennese philosophy’: it is ‘catastrophic but not yet serious situation’. The split between the real knowledge and the symbolic belief. Current ecological crisis.

Understatement can also be understood by the Winston Churchill’s well-known paradox: ‘it is true that democracy is the worst of all possible systems; the problem is that no other system would do better.’

Freud also mentions once the same ‘not-all’ paradox with regard to women.

The ‘trouble with harry’ is thus catastrophic from the overall point of view, but if we take into account the dimension of the ‘not-all’, it is not even a serious difficulty.

It is fro this reason that lacan invites us ‘to bet on the worst’: there can be nothing better than what (within the overall framework) seems to be ‘the worst’, as soon as it is transposed to be the ‘not-all’ and its elements compared one by one.

Within the overall framework of the orthodox psychoanalytic tradition, lacandian psychoanalysis is without question ‘the worst’, a total catastrophe, but as soon as we compare it one by one with other theories, it appears that none is better.

1.2.3. the answer of the real

The role of the lacanian real is radically ambiguous.

On one hand, it erupts in the from of a traumatic return, derailing the balance of our daily lives;

but, on the other hand, it serves at the same time as a support of this very balance.

Steven Spielberg ‘empire of the sun’: example of the supporting aspect of the real

Far form being limited to so-called ‘pathological’ cases, this ‘answer of the real’ is necessary for intersubjective communication as such to take place. There is no symbolic communication without some ‘piece of the real’ to serve as a king of pawn guaranteeing its consistency.

Ruth Rendell, talking to strange men

The adolescent ‘network’ embodies the big Other, the sginifier’s mechanism, in its senseless, idiotic automatism. When the mechanism produces as a result of its blind functioning a body, the other side (the hero) reads this contingency as an ‘answer of the real’, as confirmation of successful communication.

For things to have meaning, this meaning must be confirmed by some contingent piece of the real that can be read as a ‘sign’. The sign, contrary to the arbitrary mark, pertains to be ‘answer of the real’: it indicate that at least at a certain point, the abyss separating the real from the symbolic network has been crossed, i.e., that the real itself has complied with the signifier’s appeal. At these points, the real functions as the symbolic’s last support.

Ruth Rendell, the tree of hands

While it is true that any object can occupy the empty place of the Thing, it can do so only by means of the illusion that it was already there, i.e.. that it was not placed there by us but found there as an ‘answer to real’.

The pascalian-marxian ‘fetishistic inversion’ in interpersonal relationships: the subjects think they treat a certain person as a king because he is already in himself a king, while in reality this person is king only insofar as the subjects treat him as one.

The question is that, why can the performative effect take place only on condition that it is overlooked? Because the symbolic filed is barred. Crippled, porous, structured around some extimate kernel, some impossibility. The function of the little piece of the real is precisely to fill out the place of this void that gapes in the very heart of the symbolic. The psychotic kernel, the answer of the real, serves as a support for symbolic reality, as a shock provoking the loss of reality.

1.2.4. ‘nature does not exist’

3 ways of reacting to the ecological crisis

‘i know very well, but just the same…’: a fetishistic disavowal of the real of the crisis

Obsessive activity: the neurotic transformation of the crisis into a traumatic kernel

Grasping it as a sign bearing some hidden meaning: a psychotic projection of meaning into the real itself.

All 3 reactions are ways of avoiding the encounter of the real.

The only proper attitude is that which full assumes this gap as something that defines our every condition humaine

Chernobyl: ‘the second death’: in radioactive death, it is as if matter itself, the foundation, the permanent support of the eternal circuit of generation and corruption, dissolves itself, vanishes.

Freud: the discord between reality and the drive potential of man cannot be accounted for by biology. It results rather from the fact that the ‘drive potential of man’ consists of drives that are already radically denaturalized, derailed by their traumatic attachment to a Thing, to an empty place, that excludes man forever from the circular movement of life and thus opens the immanent possibility of radical catastrophe, the ‘second death’.

Obsessive response to the ecology crisis: trying to save the nature that was derailed by the excess of human back to equilibrium. To get rid of this predominant obsessive economy, we have to realize: just as lacan said, woman does not exist, nor does nature. Nature itself is never a balanced, self-sufficient system.

The theory of chaos: ‘strange attractor’. A system can behave in a chaotic way and still be capable of formalization by means of an attractor that regulates it.

The strange attractor is the lacanian objet petit a: it is the form of an attractor drawing us into chaotic oscillation.

opposed to traditional science, which is centered on the notion of a uniform law, there theories (as the theory of chaos) offer first draft of a future ‘science of the real’, i.e.. the science elaborating rules that generate contingency as oppose to symbolic automaton.

1.2.5 how the real is rendered and knows: rendering the real

Opposed to his usual stress on the contingency and differential nature of the signifier, lacan proposes the concept of ‘sign’ in the seminar encore, as preserving the continuity with the real. The sign cannot be reduced to the dimension of the signifier, that is to say, which is prediscursive, still permeated with the substance of enjoyment.

Michel chion rendu: the third way, besides the imaginary and symbolic, of rendering reality in cinema, that is, by means of immediate ‘rendering’.

The contemporary sound technique enables us not only to reproduce exactly the original, natural sound but even to reinforce it and to render audible details that would be missed in reality.

It brings a ‘soft revolution’, with which the soundtrack functions as the elementary ‘frame of reference’, while the images are reduced to isolated fragments that float freely in the universal medium of the sound aquarium.

As in: in contrast of the ‘normal’ state in which the real is a lack, a hole in the midst of the symbolic order. We have here the aquarium of the real surrounding isolated islands of the symbolic. In other words, it is no longer enjoyment that drives the proliferation of the signifiers by functioning as a central ‘black hole’ around which the signifying network is interlaced; it is the symbolic order itself that is reduced to the status of floating islands of the signifier in the sea of enjoyment.

David Lynch elephant man

(2) 3 films noir

1.2.6. knowledge in the real

if, in every symbolic formation, there is a psychotic kernel at work by means of which the real is immediately rendered, and if this from is ultimately that of a signifying chain, i.e., of a chain of knowledge, then there must be, at least at a certain level, a kind of knowledge in the real itself.

The ego is a series of imaginary identifications upon which the consistency of a subject’s being depends, but as soon as the subject ‘knows too much’ (about the unconscious truth), the ego dissolve.

That is to say, the unconscious is not that which is repressed because we do not (want to) know; it is rather a positive entity that retains its consistency only on the basis of a certain nonknowledge.

Isaac asimov, nine billion names of god.

Reality is always symptom, i.e., is based on the foreclosure of a certain ket signifier. For reality to exist, something must be left unspoken.

(1)Contemporary science lies in wait with an unpleasant surprise: subatomic particle physics, i.e., the scientific discipline supposed to be ‘exact’, free from ‘psychological’ overtones, has in recent decades been beset by the problem of ‘knowledge in the real’.

(2)Einstein-podolsky-rosen effect: we must presuppose a kind of ‘knowledge of the real’, as if a spin somehow knows what happens in another place and acts accordingly.

subatomic particles physics: a particle does not exist, but has properties and produces a series of effects, etc. it is like the lacanian ‘logic of the signifier’, defined only by differentiation.

Stephen hawking: the hypothesis of ‘imaginary time’: an alternative to the big bang theory according to which, to explain the evolution of the universe, we must presuppose as a starting point a moment of ‘singularity’ at which universal laws of physics are suspended.

Conclusion: contrary to the jungian obscurantism that the opposition between male and female is the structure of the universe, ‘yin and yang’, it is the symbolization that we impose on the real. Symbolization is by definition structured around a certain central impossibility, a deadlock that is nothing but a structuring of this impossibility.

1.3. two ways to avoid the real of desire

1.3.1. the sherlcok Holmes way

1.3.1.1. the detective and the analyst

In the 1920s the predominance of the modernism over realism in literature coincides with the replacement of detective novel for detective story. They are both facing the same formal problem: its impossibility of telling a story in a linear, consistent way, of rendering the realistic continuity of events.

Why can the heroes of detective novels solve mysteries that nobody else can? The strategies are to portrait him as either a bourgeois scientific rationalism personified, or a successor to the romantic clairvoyant, that man possessing irrational, quasi-supernatural power to penetrate the mystery of another person’s mind.

The images of psychoanalytic analysts follow the same pattern.

1.3.1.2. the clue

Freud: when interpreting dreams, we must not seek for the ‘hidden meaning’, symbolism in every object or the whole picture. We should rather translate the objects back into words, i.e., translate the ‘dream content’ tp ‘dream thought’ and then understand it on the level of wordplay, of nonsensical signifying material. Because the dream is already structured like language.

But the dream has undergone a ‘secondary revision’ which lends the dream at least a superficial unity and consistency.

In every dream, there is always a ‘place holder for the lack’. It is there to fill the hole of the lack. It seems to fit in the consistent dream content perfectly at the first sight yet it always in a way ‘in excess’ and ‘sticks out’. The interpretation of the dream needs to track this place holder first, just as the detective needs a clue, which is mostly a minor detail that ‘sticks out’.

1.3.1.3. why is the false solution necessary

The detectives are different from natural scientists because the ‘false appearance’ that the detective faces has a dimension of deception.

1.3.1.4. the detective as the ‘subject supposed to know’

The ‘subject supposed to know’ the true meaning of our acts, the meaning visible in the very falseness of the appearance. The detective’s domain, as well as that of psychoanalysis, is thus thoroughly the domain of meaning, not of ‘facts’. The crime scene, like the unconscious, is structured like language, that is to say, is structured as a system of difference. It is thus why sometimes the absence of a certain factor can be precisely the clue to solve the mystery.

The role of the detectives is to integrate the traumatic event/a piece of the real (the murder) back into the symbolic, that is to say, to narrate.

The difference between detectives and psychoanalysts is thus clear. The former is to exonerate the people from the guilt of murder in reality while also exonerating them of the desire of murder. The latter, however, precisely aims at our desire, our inner reality.

1.3.2. the Philip Marlowe way

1.3.2.1. the classical versus hard-boiled detective

The classical detectives are external to the cases he interrogates; yet the hard-boiled one is involved in the corrupted world where crimes grow.

The classical detective accepting money for solving problems is precisely for the purpose of staying out of the libidinal economy of his clients. It is the same for the psychoanalysts.

The eccentric classical detective cannot be the narrator of the novel and his thoughts and even emotions had better stay concealed. The hard-boiled novels are generally narrated in first person.

In the hard-boiled novels, it is the detective that undergoes ‘the loss of reality’. And the figure that embodies the deception is usually a femme fatale.

1.3.2.2. the woman who ‘does not cede her desire’

Carmon and Antigone: (For the lacanian perspective, ‘subjectification’ is strictly correlative to experiencing oneself as an object, a ‘helpless victim’: it is the name for the gaze by means of which we confront the utter nullity of our narcissist pretensions.)

Femme fatale in hard-boiled novels and film noir: she ruins the lives of men and is at the same time victim of her own lust for enjoyment, obsessed by a desire for power, who endlessly manipulates her partners and is at the same time slave to some third, ambiguous person, sometimes even an impotent or sexually ambivalent man.

The stories end with the break-down of the femme fatale, which is also the triumph of the hard-boiled detective.

The femme fatale exemplifies the lacanian proposition that ‘woman does not exist’. Through the final breakdown, she assumes her nonexistence, she constitutes herself as ‘subject’: what is waiting fro her beyond hysterization is the death drive in its purest.

One can never know too much about Hitchcock

2.1. how the duped err

2.1.1. the unconscious is outside

2.1.1.1. forward, backward

Point de capiton: the contingency of narrative. The sense of consistency is constructed retroactively.

When stories are told from the end to the beginning, they are bestowed with a horrifying effect: because it reveals the horror of contingency, which causes anxiety in audience.

2.1.1.2. ‘the other must know all’

The ‘nonexistence of the Other’: the big Other is just a retroactive illusion masking the radical contingency of the real, yet its disintegration will leads to a ‘loss of reality.’

Hitchcock saboteur

The gaze donates at the same time power and impotence: the perfect embodiment of the ‘impotent Master’

‘the purloined letter’

The ‘impotence gaze’ is not dual between subject and adversary, always involving a third element

3 elements: 1. The innocent big Other who sees all but fails to grasp the real significance. 2. The agent acting under the guise of social rules. 3. The adversary who is the impotent observer who perfectly understands the real significance yet cannot do anything because he cannot alert the big Other.

This is to say, the social rule is necessary for our society to function, for us to sneak some secret moves under the disguise of social etiquette. Once the social rule as the big Other disintegrates, catastrophe ensues.

2.1.1.3. the transference of guilt

Human deceit: human say things, making people think they are lies while they are actually truths.

The fact that ‘outside’ (how we act) is never simply a ‘mask’ we wear in public but is rather the symbolic order itself.

Double deceive: the first deceive is to believe that the social role assumed is but a mask; the second deceive is that social appearance is deceitful, for in the social-symbolic reality things are ultimately percisely what they pretend to be.

‘transference of guilt’:murder always implies a third party, whose repressed desire is fulfilled by the murder.

The transference of guilt is not psychical/internal, but rather exist in the intersubjective symbolic dimension. Not because some iniquitous violence erupts form under the surface of social rules, but because all of a sudden — as a result of unexpected changes in the symbolic texture of intersubjective relations — what was a moment ago permitted by the rules becomes an abhorrent vice, although the cat in its immediate, physical reality remains the same. (mr. and ms. smith)

Le trait unaire (the unitary feature): a point of symbolic identification to which the real of the subject clings.

If tragedy is ultimately a matter of character, there is always soothing comical in the way the subject is attached to the signify that determines his place in the symbolic structure.

2.1.1.4. how to hystericize christianity

lacan: ‘the unconscious is outside’: the Other is not simply a universal formal structure filled out with contingent, imaginary contents (levi-strauss), it is already at work where we encounter the eruption what seems to be the purest subjective contingency.

Jon Elster ‘the states that are essentially by-product’: although they are what that matters most, they elude us as soon as we make them the immediate aim of our activity. love, dignity, respect…

The lacanian name of the ‘by-product’ is objet petit a.

Its through the objet a that we can grasp the workings the of ultimate ‘by-product’ state, the matrix of all the others: the transference.

Hegelian Reason of History/adam smith ‘invisible hand of the market’: figurations of lacanian ‘big Other’: the murder of caesar — that is why lacan says, the Other does not exist.

Hitchcock I confess

Jesus Christ is hysterical in that he recognizes the sinners’ desire as his own.

2.1.2. ladies who vanish: ‘the woman does not exist’

The only way not to be deceived is to maintain a distance form the symbolic order. A psychotic is precisely a subject who is not duped b the symbolic order.

Hitchcock the lady vanishes: ‘disappearance that everybody denies’ theme

The psychological convincingness: the ladylike woman configures the fundamental lack in man, the ideal partner with whom the sexual relationship would finally be possible, in short, the woman who does not exist.

Robert Heinlein ‘they’

There the deception of the big Other is located in an agent, another subject (‘they’) who is not deceived. This subject is what lacan calls ‘the Other of the Other’. It emerges in paranoia. The Other of the Other is something in the psychotics’ mind that is consistent and without gaps beyond the symbolic order.

2.1.3. sublimation and the fall of the object

Hitchcock vertigo

Sublimation is about death: the power of fascination exerted by a sublime image always announces a lethal dimension.

The sublime object is an object elevated to the dignity of the impossible Thing, as materialized Nothingness

2.2. the hitchcockian blot

2.2.1. the phallic anamorphosis: oral anal phallic

The oral stage is the zero degree of filmmaking

In the anal stage montage enters: parallel montage

The phallic stage: transpose this horizontal doubling of the cation onto a vertical level: the managing horror should not be placed outside, but well within it, more precisely: under it, as its repressed underside. The inversion by means of which silence begins to function as the most horrifying menace.

It is phallic because phallic is precisely the detail that does not fit, that sticks out from the idyllic surface scene and denatures it, renders it uncanny. The phallic signifier is a signifier without signified because the phallic element of a picture is a meaningless stain that denatures it, rendering all its constituents suspicious, and thus opens up the abyss of the search for a meaning.

2.2.2. the blot as the gaze of the other

2.2.3. the tracking shot

2.2.4. the maternal superego

The bird

In the film, the birds are like the plague in oedipus’s Thebes: they are the incarnation of a fundamental disorder in family relationships — the father is absent, the paternal function is suspended and that vacuum is filled by the irrational maternal superego, arbitrary, wicked, blocking ‘normal’ sexual relationship.

2.2.5. from the oedipal journey to the pathological narcissist

The 3 main stages of Hitchcock’s career can be conceived as 3 variations on the theme of the impossibility of the sexual relationship.

The 3 stages exhibits 3 successive forms of the libidinal structure of the subject in capitalist society during the past centruy: the autonomous individual of the protestant ethic, the heteronomous organization man, and the pathological narcissist.

The decline of the protestant ethic and the appearance of the organization man, i.e., the replacement of the ethic of individual responsibility by the ethic of the heteronomous individual. Leaves intact the underlying frame of the ego-ideal.

The 2 stage breaks the ego-ideal. Instead of the integration of a symbolic law, we have a multitude of rules to follow — rules of accommodation telling us ‘how to succeed.’ This disintegration entails the installation of a maternal superego that does not prohibit enjoyment but imposes it and punishes social failure in a far more cruel and severe way, through an unbearable and self-destructive anxiety.

Saul kripke: the theory of description” for the pathological narcissist, the meaning of words is reduced to the positive features of the denoted object, above all those that concern his narcissist interest.

2.2.6. a mental experiment: the birds without birds

In the film the birds, the birds are not just a symbol of the superficial psychological drama, they rather play a direct part in the story as something inexplicable, as something outside the rational chain of events, as a lawless impossible real.

2.3. pornography, nostalgia, montage: a triad of the gaze

2.3.1. the perverse short circuit: sadist as object

Michael mann ‘manhunter’

The detective’s gaze coincided with the murderer’s gaze.

The coincidence of gazes defines the position of the pervert. The coincidence of the subject’s view with the gaze of the big Other. The gaze by means of which the subject contemplates god is the same as god contemplates himself. Stalinist communism: the gaze by means of which the party looks at history is the same as that of which history looks itself.

The sadean subject tries to elude his constitutive split, his division, by transferring it onto his other (the victim) and by occupying the position the object-instrument of the will-to-enjoy — which is not his own will but that of the big Other, who assumes the form of the ‘supreme evil being’.

The Stalinism: he torments his victim (the masses) infinitely, but he does this as an instrument of the big Other (‘the objective law of history’, ‘the necessity of history progress’) behind which it is not difficult to discern the sadean figure of the supreme evil being.

The case of stalinism exemplifies why in perversion the other (the victim) is split: the stalinist torments people but he does so as their own faithful servant, in their own name, as an executor of their own will (their own ‘true, objective interests’).

2.3.2. pornography

The subject view, the object gaze back.

The antinomy of gaze and view is lost is pornography because it presupposes a perverse position: instead of being on the side of the view object, the gaze falls into the spectators, which is why the image we see on the screen contains no spot, no sublime-mysterious point form which it gazes at us. It is not actors/actress that is objectified; it is on the contrary: the actors are the real subjects and the spectators are reduced to a paralyzed object-gaze.

Pornography is thus another variation of the Achilles and tortoise paradox: achilles can never attain the tortoise because he is always either too fast or too slow. In regular movies, the love scene is concealed; in the pornography, it is shown without any concealment. Either way the object petit a/ the Thing remains unattainable.

2.3.3. nostalgia

In nostalgic, retro-films, the real object of fascination is not the displayed scene but the gaze of the naive ‘other’ absorbed, enchanted by it.

The function of the nostalgic object is to conceal the antinomy between eye and gaze — the traumatic gaze qua object — by means of fascination. In nostalgia, the gaze of the other is in a way domesticated, gentrified; instead of the gaze erupting like a traumatic disharmonious blot, we have the illusion of seeing ourselves seeing, of seeing the gaze itself. In a way, the function of fascination is precisely to blind us to the fact that the other is already gazing at us.

2.3.4. the hitchcockian cut: montage

Montage, when transforming the fragments of the real into cinematic reality, produces a certain left over. This surplus is the gaze qua object.

2.3.5. the death drive

Fantasy, bureaucracy, democracy

3.1. the ideological sinthome

3.1.1. gaze and voice as objects: the dimension of acousmatique

gaze/voice and destruction

Hitchcock: subjective view of the object + objective view of the subject approaching the object = uncanny effect

Michel chion: the notion go la voix acousmatique, the voice without bearer.

3.1.2. enjoy-meant in ideology

Le sinthome: it is not the symptom, the coded message to be deciphered by interpretation, but the meaningless letter that immediately procures joui-sense, ‘enjoyment-in-menaing’, ‘enjoy-meant’.

From the perspective of sinthome, it is no longer enough to say ideology is but a discursive construction. What we must do is to isolate the sinthome form the context by virtue of which it exerts its power of fascination in order to expose the sinthome’s better stupidity. In other words, we must carry out the operation of changing the precious gift into a gift of shit, of experiencing the fascinating, mesmerizing voice as a disgusting, meaningless fragment of the real.

3.1.3. love thy sinthome as thyself: a letter beyond discourse

4 discourses:

Master: a certain signifier represents the subject for another signifier or, more precisely, for all other signifiers. But the operation of signifying representation always produces some disturbing surplus. The other discourses are simply 3 different attempt to come to terms with his remnant.

University: takes the leftover for its object, its other, and tries to transform it into a subject by applying to it the network of knowledge. (education)

Hysteric: from the opposite side. Its a question addressed to the master: why ma I what you’re saying that I am? The hysteric question articulates the experience of a fissure, an irreducible gap between the signifier that represents me and the non symbolized surplus pf my being-there

Analyst: the inverse of the master. The analyst occupies the place of the surplus object; he identifies with the leftover of the discursive network.

3.1.4. there are objects and objects

Sinthome: object of drive. the kernel of enjoyment that simultaneously attracts and replies us.

Objet petit a: object of desire. a quite ordinary, everyday object that, as soon as it is elevated to the states of the Thing, starts to function as a kind of screen, an empty space on which the subject projects the fantasies that supports his desire, a surplus of the real the peoples us to narrate again and again our first traumatic encounters with jouissance.

The third kind

3.1.5. identification with the symptom

The 2-folded meaning of the term Existence for lacan

First, existence=symbolization. As in ‘woman does not exist’/ ‘there is no such thing as sexual relation.’

second, ex-sistence: the impossible-real kernel resisting symbolization. In this sense, it is precisely woman that exists, i.e., that persists as a leftover of enjoyment beyond meaning, resisting symbolization, which is why, as lacan puts it, woman is ‘the sinthome of man’.

Sinthome is not something to be interpreted (as symptom) or traversed (as fantasy); it is or be identified with. The identification with the sinthome marks the termination of psychoanalytic process.

By acting out, we identify ourselves with the symptom of lacan in the 50s (the ciphered message addressed to the Other), whereas by passage to act, we identify with sinthome as the pathological ‘tic’ structuring the real kernel of our enjoyment.

3.2. the obscene object of postmodernity

3.2.1. The postmodernist break: modernism versus postmodernism

Hebermas

The break between the fist and second generation of the Frankfurt school corresponds to the break between modernism and postmodernism: in Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic of enlightenment, in Marcuse’s one-dimensional man, in their unmasking of the repressive potential of instrument reason, aiming at a radical revolution in the historical totality of the contemporary world and at the utopian abolition of the difference between alienated life spheres, between art and reality, the modernist project reaches its zenith of self-critical fulfillment. habermas, on the other hand, is postmodern precisely because he recognizes a positive condition of freedom and emancipation in was appeared to modernism as the very form of alienation: the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere, the functional division of different social domains, etc.

In this sense, deconstruction/poststructuralism falls within the domain of modernism, for it presents perhaps the most radical version of the logic of ‘unmasking’ whereby the very unity of the experience of meaning is conceived as the effect of signifying mechanisms, an effect that can take place only insofar as it ignores the textual movement that produced it.

It is only with lacan that the postmodernist break occurs, insofar as he thematizes a certain real, traumatic kernel whose status remains deeply ambiguous: the real resists symbolization, but it is at the same time its own retroactive product.

3.2.2. Hitchcock as postmodernist

Antonioni blow up: perhaps the last great modernist film

Postmodernism is the reverse of the logic of the film: it consists not in demonstrating that the game works without an object, that the play is set in motion by a central absence, but rather in displaying the object directly, allowing it to make visible its own indifferent and arbitrary character.

The lesson of modernism is the structure, the intersubjective machine, works as well if the Thing is lacking, if the machine revolves around an emptiness; the postmodernist reversal shows the Thing itself as the incarnated, materialized emptiness.

In this sense, while joyce is modernist par excellence, kafaka is already postmodernist. The court in the trail is not simply absent, it is indeed present under the figures of the obscene judges. The castle is indeed present under the figure of subservient, lascivious, and corrupt civil servants.

3.2.3. bureaucracy and enjoyment: 2 doors of the law

3.2.4. the obscene law

3.2.5. the superego knows too much

The unconscious not only stocks wild, illicit drives (id), it also is (one is tempted to say, above all) fragments of traumatic, cruel, capricious, unintelligible and irrational law text, a set of prohibitions and injunctions.

That is to say, we are both more immoral and more moral than we (ego) consciously believe and know.

Id is a kind of belief (of the subjects’ immorality). Superego is a kind of knowledge (of the traumatic laws).

Superego makes us feel guilty about the unconscious desire. The ego does not consciously know what is he feels guilty for, but he feels guilty. Paranoia is when this knowledge acquires a material, external existence. In paranoia, the agency who sees all and knows all is embodied in the real, in the person of the all-knowing persecutor, able to read our thoughts.

For the id, on the other hand: in the Christian culture, everybody believes in his immorality, that belief is precisely the belief in god. That is why lacan says the true atheist formula is ‘god is unconscious.’

3.3. formal democracy and its discontents

3.3.1. Toward an ethic of fantasy: violations of the fantasy space

Patricia highsmith the stuff of madness

Max ophuls letter from an unknown woman

Sydney pollack yakuza

The psychoanalytic ethic: avoid as much as possible any violation of the fantasy of the other.

What confers on the other the dignity of a ‘person’ is not any universal—symbolic feature but precisely what is absolutely particular about him, his fantasy, that part of him that we can be sure we can never share.

3.3.2. the impasse of liberalism

Richard rorty: ‘contingency, irony and solidarity’: proposes an ethic/solidarity not of intrinsic qualities, but of the common struggle in the society.

His liberalism presuppose a split between the public and private.

Traditional marxist would argue that such a split is constructed by a certain social structure.

The real impasse, however, runs in opposite direction: the very social law that, as a kind of neutral set of rules, should limit our aesthetic self-creation and deprive us of a part of our enjoyment on behalf of solidarity, is always already penetrated by an obscene, pathological, surplus enjoyment. This obscene law is called superego.

3.3.3. kant with mccullough

3.3.4. the nation-thing: the democratic abstraction

3.3.5. …and its leftover