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The Plague of Fantasies
Slavoj Žižek is, without doubt, one of the most stimulating and vibrant thinkers of our time, and his idiosyncratic blend of Lacan and Hegel is always sparkling with insight and studded with amusing stories, anecdotes and jokes. In The Plague of Fantasies Žižek approaches another enormous subject with characteristic brio and provocativeness. The current epoch is plagued by fantasms: there is an ever intensifying antagonism between the process of ever greater abstraction of our lives—whether in the form of digitalization or market relations—and the deluge of pseudo-concrete images which surround us. Traditional critical thought would have sought to trace the roots of abstract notions in concrete social reality; but today, the correct procedure is the inverse—from pseudo-concrete imagery to the abstract process which structures our lives.
Ranging in his examples from national differences in toilet design to cybersex, and from intellectuals’ responses to the Bosnian war to Robert Schumann’s music, Žižek explores the relations between fantasy and ideology, the way in which fantasy animates enjoy-ment while protecting against its excesses, the associations of the notion of fetishism with fantasized seduction, and the ways in which digitalization and cyberspace affect the status of subjectivity. To the already initiated, The Plague of Fantasies will be a welcome reminder of why they enjoy Žižek’s writing so much. For new readers, it will be the beginning of a long and meaningful relationship.
Ranging in his examples from national differences in toilet design to cybersex, and from intellectuals’ responses to the Bosnian war to Robert Schumann’s music, Žižek explores the relations between fantasy and ideology, the way in which fantasy animates enjoy-ment while protecting against its excesses, the associations of the notion of fetishism with fantasized seduction, and the ways in which digitalization and cyberspace affect the status of subjectivity. To the already initiated, The Plague of Fantasies will be a welcome reminder of why they enjoy Žižek’s writing so much. For new readers, it will be the beginning of a long and meaningful relationship.
254 pages, Paperback
First published November 17, 1997
115 people are currently reading
2523 people want to read
About the author
Slavoj Žižek
638 books7,542 followersSlavoj Žižek is a Slovene sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic.
He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992).
Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist". In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist."
He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992).
Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist". In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews
July 12, 2015
Reading Žižek is a little bit like having mind sex. Every work of his I've encountered is a vast, exciting and rambling anthology of intellectual thought, though this book was far more coherent than some of his more recent stuff I read.
I felt this book contained something a bit more profound than a lot of things I've read, but then again, I've never read any psychoanalysis before this so it seemed quite groundbreaking. Thinking about so of the things in this book was kind of like delving into the depths of my own psyche which is kind of like going on a deep hallucinogenic trip for the first time in the fact that it seems scary initially because this is your brain and it's getting fucked with but once you learn to roll with it you can use it to your benefit.
The most important ideas in this book were, I think, the idea that we build up fantasies in our heads of what a person's character is like based on what we perceive from their actions, this is the essence of our relationships with other people. simultaneously we are also helping to construct these fantasies when we present ourselves to other people as we act and speak in a way that represents how we would like to be viewed, selectively choosing what information to give people about ourselves. This is something I'd never considered before but now it's very clear to me. I've found it useful in figuring out a few things especially with regards to my own relationships with people.
There is another dimension to these fantasies: the Internet.
Through the phenomenon known as hyper reality in social media these fantasies are magnified intensely (Žižek doesn't mention the term 'hyper reality' which leads me to think the book may be older than the word. The concept is still touched upon in the book regardless of the term). Social media allows us more potential to develop different personalities and ways of presenting fantastical images of who we are online, I would go so far to say it even encourages it with rewards for such behaviour, think of Facebook 'likes' etc. This particular bit about the reward factor isn't touched upon in this book although it was originally published in 1997 when social media wasn't so pervasive and developed throughout society. I think perhaps the most damaging thing about Facebook as opposed to more anonymous social media sites is that we are developing this personas alongside people we may also come into regular contact with which means they are able to see though the fantasy better than less well - known people, who are perhaps the intended targets, it's easier to lie to someone you don't know so well. But the online façade is quite easily broken down once real - life contact is initiated.
One of the key points I think is that it's not in the best interests of our relationships with the people we know to see these fantasies broken. It's best to go along and play the game without prying too far into the private areas of someone's character lest you should see something that shatters the fantasy and ruins the relationship. It's best also not to overreach with the version of yourself you present to people making it harder for people to break the fantasy.
One other thing is quite clear after reading this: I really need to read Lacan.
I felt this book contained something a bit more profound than a lot of things I've read, but then again, I've never read any psychoanalysis before this so it seemed quite groundbreaking. Thinking about so of the things in this book was kind of like delving into the depths of my own psyche which is kind of like going on a deep hallucinogenic trip for the first time in the fact that it seems scary initially because this is your brain and it's getting fucked with but once you learn to roll with it you can use it to your benefit.
The most important ideas in this book were, I think, the idea that we build up fantasies in our heads of what a person's character is like based on what we perceive from their actions, this is the essence of our relationships with other people. simultaneously we are also helping to construct these fantasies when we present ourselves to other people as we act and speak in a way that represents how we would like to be viewed, selectively choosing what information to give people about ourselves. This is something I'd never considered before but now it's very clear to me. I've found it useful in figuring out a few things especially with regards to my own relationships with people.
There is another dimension to these fantasies: the Internet.
Through the phenomenon known as hyper reality in social media these fantasies are magnified intensely (Žižek doesn't mention the term 'hyper reality' which leads me to think the book may be older than the word. The concept is still touched upon in the book regardless of the term). Social media allows us more potential to develop different personalities and ways of presenting fantastical images of who we are online, I would go so far to say it even encourages it with rewards for such behaviour, think of Facebook 'likes' etc. This particular bit about the reward factor isn't touched upon in this book although it was originally published in 1997 when social media wasn't so pervasive and developed throughout society. I think perhaps the most damaging thing about Facebook as opposed to more anonymous social media sites is that we are developing this personas alongside people we may also come into regular contact with which means they are able to see though the fantasy better than less well - known people, who are perhaps the intended targets, it's easier to lie to someone you don't know so well. But the online façade is quite easily broken down once real - life contact is initiated.
One of the key points I think is that it's not in the best interests of our relationships with the people we know to see these fantasies broken. It's best to go along and play the game without prying too far into the private areas of someone's character lest you should see something that shatters the fantasy and ruins the relationship. It's best also not to overreach with the version of yourself you present to people making it harder for people to break the fantasy.
One other thing is quite clear after reading this: I really need to read Lacan.
December 13, 2013
The Plague of Fantasies never abandoned its grip. Even while it flogged me and mocked my struggles. "Its too theoretical", it chortled as I would stumble. A generous pause and hefty lift would return me to my feet --just so it could spit again in my face. If it were not for the appendices at the book's conclusion, I would wager that I had gathered little from the experience. The these three addendum (three uneasy pieces) made the difference: the first on film discussed our willful shame as cinema viewers, the second dwells on classical music and notes the arrival of the failing melody which distinguishes the distance between romanticism and classicism, especially in the work of Robert Schuman. The final piece was on Kant and his forsaken notion of Diabolical Evil. This leads to haunting exposition on the Shoah.
Only for hard-core theorists.
Only for hard-core theorists.
May 2, 2007
Only gets three stars because so much of it is virtually unreadable but this guy is a post-modern superstar. Check out this passage. The ontology of shit.
In a famous scene from Buñuel's Phantom of Liberty, the roles of eating and excreting are inverted: people sit at toilets around a table, chatting pleasantly, and when they want to eat, sneak away to a small room. So, as a supplement to Lévi-Strauss, one is tempted to propose that shit can also serve as a matière-à-penser: the three basic types of toilet form an excremental correlative-counterpoint to the Lévi-Straussian triangle of cooking (the raw, the cooked and the rotten). In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. No wonder that in the famous discussion of European toilets at the beginning of her half-forgotten Fear of Flying, Erica Jong mockingly claims that 'German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything.' It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement.
Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. In terms of the predominance of one sphere of social life, it is German metaphysics and poetry versus French politics and English economics. The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology.
In a famous scene from Buñuel's Phantom of Liberty, the roles of eating and excreting are inverted: people sit at toilets around a table, chatting pleasantly, and when they want to eat, sneak away to a small room. So, as a supplement to Lévi-Strauss, one is tempted to propose that shit can also serve as a matière-à-penser: the three basic types of toilet form an excremental correlative-counterpoint to the Lévi-Straussian triangle of cooking (the raw, the cooked and the rotten). In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. No wonder that in the famous discussion of European toilets at the beginning of her half-forgotten Fear of Flying, Erica Jong mockingly claims that 'German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything.' It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement.
Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. In terms of the predominance of one sphere of social life, it is German metaphysics and poetry versus French politics and English economics. The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology.
April 1, 2022
LOVE THIS BOOK. Someone once asked me, what's the point of reading Zizek? Why don't you just read Lacan, Marx and Hegel? And when someone first said this, it was like yes, obviously you could read those authors... however, a lot of the Lacanian conclusions, Hegelian conclusions and Marxist conclusions are already done by Zizek. So what I find to be a very enjoyable task intellectually is reading Lacan regularly, and Hegel, and a bit of Marx and then going to readers like McGowan or Zizek who have already done some "heavy lifting" of the academic theory in a sense. Having a good understanding of Lacan and Hegel makes reading Zizek much more enjoyable. Sometimes Zizek's style is very difficult to follow, and he is always making references to a million movies, books and such, and as a result, he is always leaving the reader and his works to be reread... which ultimately, is a good thing. If you could attain Zizek's thought, then you will be a real heavy hitter when it comes to theory, and the theory of culture.
With regards to this book per se, the Seven Veils of Fantasy is something I am going to go over and over most likely. Unlike McGowan who reads to be understood, Zizek has a lot of thoughts and I just am really intrigued by this chapter I really want to be able to speak to it. And then the version I read had three appendices too... they were all quite good, I need to listen to more classical music, because I am very interested in Zizek's theories in classical music, and I really enjoyed his essay about Law and Ethics...
Great great book.... if I don't refer to this in my upcoming thesis I will be missing something essential!
With regards to this book per se, the Seven Veils of Fantasy is something I am going to go over and over most likely. Unlike McGowan who reads to be understood, Zizek has a lot of thoughts and I just am really intrigued by this chapter I really want to be able to speak to it. And then the version I read had three appendices too... they were all quite good, I need to listen to more classical music, because I am very interested in Zizek's theories in classical music, and I really enjoyed his essay about Law and Ethics...
Great great book.... if I don't refer to this in my upcoming thesis I will be missing something essential!
August 26, 2013
i'm so excited. i've never read zizek before. it's very dense, so only like 20 pages into it, but each of those pages has been a delight. great great food for thought. ha ha, the review on the cover says it's "the best intellectual high since anti-oedipus." intellectual high is a great way to put it (and a great term in general, no?).
June 11, 2021
Skip it. A couple good things in here but mostly unfinished thoughts. Parallax view is the one
February 24, 2010
kicks me in the c-u-n-t.
August 13, 2010
Oh, Zizek, you wonderfully nutty Slovenian! It's hard not to love Zizek with his playful, pop culture centered philosophy. At times I think he has a tendency to be a little disorienting, "What is the truth about human sexuality...? Hegel reference, Lacan reference, Hitchcok reference, Soviet-era joke..." But beyond the mere seductive charm of his play, there is a real glimmer of truth or a challenge to us.
Maybe not the best summation of Plague of Fantasies I could come up with, but there is some notion that our frequent "escapes" from the established order of things often fall short. Zizek goes after the failures present in such things as "liberal" multiculturalism, New Age belief, cyberspace, and so forth. Showing how the attempts to emancipate ones self through such means is more a fantasy than a liberation.
Maybe not the best summation of Plague of Fantasies I could come up with, but there is some notion that our frequent "escapes" from the established order of things often fall short. Zizek goes after the failures present in such things as "liberal" multiculturalism, New Age belief, cyberspace, and so forth. Showing how the attempts to emancipate ones self through such means is more a fantasy than a liberation.
to-keep-reference
September 6, 2017Para el concepto de «sujeto-supuesto-saber», véase el capítulo 3.
Sobre la Violencia Pág.121
Sobre la Violencia Pág.121
December 5, 2008
best for intro to his psychoanalytic perspective
April 17, 2019
Þetta er það sem ég myndi kalla þykkur texti. Ég týndist oft í hugtakaflaumnum en svo birtist allt í einu uppljómandi málsgrein og mér leið eins og við Slavoj værum á leið eitthvert saman. Gaman að kljást við þetta á íslensku líka, þrekvirki að þýða hana. Þarf að lesa aftur.
May 20, 2018
Ég þegar Žižek segir að Freud og Lacan eru eftirmenn Kants og Hegels
image:
image:
March 28, 2022
Perhaps more theorerically exciting than *Sublime Object*. Some parts are better than others, but Appendices are the best part.
June 25, 2024
every topic that was on my head, things that i tried to remember came up to me immediately by turning the next page. fuck, even my therapist quoted the page i was reading on my way to therapy. brilliant
November 19, 2025
Book Review: Plague of Fantasies / Zizek
Breakdown included.
Have you ever thought that fantasy was a thing of fiction? A soft cushion to the challenges of ordinary life? What if fantasy was the superstructure that sustained all spheres of ordinary life--political, economic, and psychic? This book argues that fantasy isn't exceptional, rather it is a necessary lubricant of survival in all of experience.
Applying Lacanian Psychoanalysis, this book interrogates the seven veils of fantasy and furthermore enables us to disentangle its grasp on the (un)conscious to free us from painful values and beliefs.
--
The First Veil: The initial illusion is that a hidden truth exists behind the veil. This conceals the more radical fact that the presumed secret is itself a fantasy, and lifting the veil reveals only the void our desire created to fill.
Imagine the fantasy of the lover, we believe that through traversal we might find a kernel of wholeness, something profound that might relieve us of the unbearable possibility that we might forever be alone. But rather, we're left with the realization that love was more about endurance, a chaotic confusion filled with childhood wounds, complex contingencies and illusions of completeness. It was almost as if the the failures of the Other to manifest the fantasy of love, make up the object of admiration that we initially desired. That it was also never the destination and more about the fantasy of its idea, yet still worth investigating to realize our own humanity embedded in this understanding.
--
The Second Veil: This veil represents the paradoxical notion that the act of concealing is what supposedly creates the concealed secret. The true function is not to hide reality but to provide a phantasmatic structure that makes our reality coherent and bearable in the first place
Think about the personal enemy, how they seem to embody everything that's wrong with people and their seemingly natural toxicity. When in reality, they represent the unknown chaotic unconscious of our very actions, revealing the truth of our own cruel desires tendencies, our inclinations toward misunderstanding and fear that those impulses could manifest from our deepest thoughts--and the truth that they often do in reactive ways that we are always catching up to.
--
The Third Veil: This is the fantasy that organizes our desire itself. It is the subjective lens through which we perceive the world as desirable. It doesn't hide what we want; it constructs the coordinates of our wanting, making objects appear desirable to us.
Psychoanalysis argues that desire is an ontological and phenomenological structure of the subject. Desire is the inverse of lack--a condition of being cut of the void. We attach to objects (lovers, objects, dreams, opportunities) in the world, and desire is structured to maintain positive aspiration toward them. Yet even as we strive toward any object-attachment, we realize that the object of our desire is never exactly the same as the fantasy of which we invested. This might result in disappointment, surprise, confusion or humility. Yet desire reveals its phantasmatic nature through action.
--
The Fourth Veil: This veil is the illusion of a central, macabre object (the objet a) that we believe others possess and desire. It's the fantasmatic "thing" we believe we have lost and seek in others, driving our envy and social interactions.
Think about the beautiful influencer. With such a conventionally attractive appearance aligned with a justified quantity of admiration, here appears before us an image of the perfect life. Yes, they might navigate the social world with a certain conditional fluidity, but hiding behind the fantasy of completeness lies the void--the realization that they are haunted by the same fantasy creates them. Underneath such beauty is not perfection, but the void--a realization that even the beautiful do not know what they truly desire.
--
The Fifth Veil: This is the fantasy of a harmonious, pre-symbolic state before the "fall" into society or language. It creates the nostalgic idea of a lost fullness or jouissance, which the veils of culture are then perceived as having corrupted or covered.
Imagine the desire to return to a time before they came. A return to a world that wasn't poisoned by the horrifying unknown of the present. Often under confusing global flows and changes, people become attached to fantasies of a once 'good life' that was stolen by an Other. Reality is complex and chaotic, but there was no better world prior to the one now. It was always chaotic, and contingent to powers beyond our control. And that Other was rather a cluster of our own unconscious fears of mortality and vulnerability projected onto a common target of the historical present.
--
The Sixth Veil: This refers to the fantasy of "objective reality" itself. What we perceive as neutral reality is always already framed by a subjective, fantasmatic perspective. The ultimate illusion is that we can see the world without the filter of our own desire.
In the west, people love to exalt that they are at the precedent of innovation as a superior civilization of science, above the spiritual mysticism haunting the present ordinary of the east. But even science cannot account for the void or gap that constitutes existence for the subject. Quantum physics even argues that analysis is rested upon the volatile location of the subject, always in relation to a proximity rather than an absolute. Therefore the spiritual mends the gap of the unknown and allows space for speculation and possibility where science assumes is already complete.
--
The Seventh Veil: The final veil is the realization that the series of veils is a Moebius strip with no ultimate core. The very process of unveiling generates what it seeks to find. Fantasy is the irreducible screen; there is no "real" reality waiting behind it.
An infinite loops without a clear destination full of inverse opposites that provide no absolute destinations or tidy resolutions to the ongoingness of the historical present. But we can move through it, building awareness of its violence and hold compassion and sympathy to support each other through these challenges.
--
Fascinating, yet I always feel like Zizek's work is like a long winding road that flies off course in perplexing ways. Deeply mesmerizing yet profoundly disorienting.
The central thesis of the book is that fantasy is not an escape from reality, but the very framework through which we constitute our reality and experience it as coherent and meaningful.
In simpler terms, fantasy isn't what you daydream about when you want to avoid the harsh real world. Instead, it's the unconscious, invisible screen that structures our perception of the real world. It fills in the gaps, smooths over contradictions, and provides a consistent narrative for our desires and social interactions.
I've been deeply attached to his works. Prior to this, I passed through Parallax View. Alongside interlocutors like Butler, Zupancic, Berlant, Hegel, Kant, and many others. I will continue to find curiosities in the deep convergent rectum of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxian Political economy and other prominent thinkers Zizek speaks through.
Breakdown included.
Have you ever thought that fantasy was a thing of fiction? A soft cushion to the challenges of ordinary life? What if fantasy was the superstructure that sustained all spheres of ordinary life--political, economic, and psychic? This book argues that fantasy isn't exceptional, rather it is a necessary lubricant of survival in all of experience.
Applying Lacanian Psychoanalysis, this book interrogates the seven veils of fantasy and furthermore enables us to disentangle its grasp on the (un)conscious to free us from painful values and beliefs.
--
The First Veil: The initial illusion is that a hidden truth exists behind the veil. This conceals the more radical fact that the presumed secret is itself a fantasy, and lifting the veil reveals only the void our desire created to fill.
Imagine the fantasy of the lover, we believe that through traversal we might find a kernel of wholeness, something profound that might relieve us of the unbearable possibility that we might forever be alone. But rather, we're left with the realization that love was more about endurance, a chaotic confusion filled with childhood wounds, complex contingencies and illusions of completeness. It was almost as if the the failures of the Other to manifest the fantasy of love, make up the object of admiration that we initially desired. That it was also never the destination and more about the fantasy of its idea, yet still worth investigating to realize our own humanity embedded in this understanding.
--
The Second Veil: This veil represents the paradoxical notion that the act of concealing is what supposedly creates the concealed secret. The true function is not to hide reality but to provide a phantasmatic structure that makes our reality coherent and bearable in the first place
Think about the personal enemy, how they seem to embody everything that's wrong with people and their seemingly natural toxicity. When in reality, they represent the unknown chaotic unconscious of our very actions, revealing the truth of our own cruel desires tendencies, our inclinations toward misunderstanding and fear that those impulses could manifest from our deepest thoughts--and the truth that they often do in reactive ways that we are always catching up to.
--
The Third Veil: This is the fantasy that organizes our desire itself. It is the subjective lens through which we perceive the world as desirable. It doesn't hide what we want; it constructs the coordinates of our wanting, making objects appear desirable to us.
Psychoanalysis argues that desire is an ontological and phenomenological structure of the subject. Desire is the inverse of lack--a condition of being cut of the void. We attach to objects (lovers, objects, dreams, opportunities) in the world, and desire is structured to maintain positive aspiration toward them. Yet even as we strive toward any object-attachment, we realize that the object of our desire is never exactly the same as the fantasy of which we invested. This might result in disappointment, surprise, confusion or humility. Yet desire reveals its phantasmatic nature through action.
--
The Fourth Veil: This veil is the illusion of a central, macabre object (the objet a) that we believe others possess and desire. It's the fantasmatic "thing" we believe we have lost and seek in others, driving our envy and social interactions.
Think about the beautiful influencer. With such a conventionally attractive appearance aligned with a justified quantity of admiration, here appears before us an image of the perfect life. Yes, they might navigate the social world with a certain conditional fluidity, but hiding behind the fantasy of completeness lies the void--the realization that they are haunted by the same fantasy creates them. Underneath such beauty is not perfection, but the void--a realization that even the beautiful do not know what they truly desire.
--
The Fifth Veil: This is the fantasy of a harmonious, pre-symbolic state before the "fall" into society or language. It creates the nostalgic idea of a lost fullness or jouissance, which the veils of culture are then perceived as having corrupted or covered.
Imagine the desire to return to a time before they came. A return to a world that wasn't poisoned by the horrifying unknown of the present. Often under confusing global flows and changes, people become attached to fantasies of a once 'good life' that was stolen by an Other. Reality is complex and chaotic, but there was no better world prior to the one now. It was always chaotic, and contingent to powers beyond our control. And that Other was rather a cluster of our own unconscious fears of mortality and vulnerability projected onto a common target of the historical present.
--
The Sixth Veil: This refers to the fantasy of "objective reality" itself. What we perceive as neutral reality is always already framed by a subjective, fantasmatic perspective. The ultimate illusion is that we can see the world without the filter of our own desire.
In the west, people love to exalt that they are at the precedent of innovation as a superior civilization of science, above the spiritual mysticism haunting the present ordinary of the east. But even science cannot account for the void or gap that constitutes existence for the subject. Quantum physics even argues that analysis is rested upon the volatile location of the subject, always in relation to a proximity rather than an absolute. Therefore the spiritual mends the gap of the unknown and allows space for speculation and possibility where science assumes is already complete.
--
The Seventh Veil: The final veil is the realization that the series of veils is a Moebius strip with no ultimate core. The very process of unveiling generates what it seeks to find. Fantasy is the irreducible screen; there is no "real" reality waiting behind it.
An infinite loops without a clear destination full of inverse opposites that provide no absolute destinations or tidy resolutions to the ongoingness of the historical present. But we can move through it, building awareness of its violence and hold compassion and sympathy to support each other through these challenges.
--
Fascinating, yet I always feel like Zizek's work is like a long winding road that flies off course in perplexing ways. Deeply mesmerizing yet profoundly disorienting.
The central thesis of the book is that fantasy is not an escape from reality, but the very framework through which we constitute our reality and experience it as coherent and meaningful.
In simpler terms, fantasy isn't what you daydream about when you want to avoid the harsh real world. Instead, it's the unconscious, invisible screen that structures our perception of the real world. It fills in the gaps, smooths over contradictions, and provides a consistent narrative for our desires and social interactions.
I've been deeply attached to his works. Prior to this, I passed through Parallax View. Alongside interlocutors like Butler, Zupancic, Berlant, Hegel, Kant, and many others. I will continue to find curiosities in the deep convergent rectum of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxian Political economy and other prominent thinkers Zizek speaks through.
August 16, 2022
“This is why the subject as such is hysterical: the hysterical subject is precisely a subject who poses jouissance as an absolute; he responds to the absolute of jouissance in the form of unsatisfied desire.“
“A 'miracle' is simply the sudden emergence of the New, which is irreducible to its preceding conditions, of something which retroactively 'posits' its conditions: every authentic act creates its own conditions of possibility.”
“This externality, which directly embodies ideology, is also occluded as 'utility'. That is to say: in everyday life, ideology is at work especially in the apparently innocent reference to pure utility”
“This 'purely material sincerity' of the external ideological ritual, not the depth of the subject's inner convictions and desires, is the true locus of the fantasy which sustains an ideological edifice.”
“...fantasy does not simply realize a desire in a hallucinatory way: rather, its function is similar to that of Kantian 'transcendental schematism': a fantasy constitutes our desire, provides its coordinates; that is, it literally 'teaches us how to desire'”
“The lesson is therefore clear: an ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it 'not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person' is the very form ofideology, of its 'practical efficiency.”
“The need for the phantasmic support of the public symbolic order (materialized in the so-called unwritten rules) thus bears witness to the system's vulnerability: the system is compelled to allow for possibilities of choices which must never actually take place, since their occurrence would cause the system to disintegrate, and the function of the unwritten rules is precisely to prevent the actualization of these choices formally allowed by the system.”
“This encounter with the real (jouissance) is always traumatic; there is something at least minimally obscene about it; I cannot simply integrate it into my universe, there is always a gulf separating me from it.”
“Every ideology attaches itself to some kernel of jouissance which, however, retains the status of an ambiguous excess.”
“The gap that separates beauty from ugliness is thus the very gap that separates reality from the Real: what constitutes reality is the minimum of idealization the subject needs in order to be able to sustain the horror of the Real.”
“Do we not encounter here, in this hoarse and cruel voice, ambushing us in its very intrusive overproximiey, the horrifying weight of the encounter of a neighbour in the Real of her presence? Love thy neighbour? No, thanks.”
“The point, of course, is that there never was a purely symbolic Power without an obscene supplement the structure of a power edifice is always minimally inconsistent, so that it needs a minimum of sexualization, of the stain of obscenity, to reproduce itself.”
“The procedure which enables us to discern the structural inconsistency of an ideological edifice is that of the anamorphic reading...
That is the elementary procedure of the critique of ideology: the 'sublime object of ideology' is the spectral object which has no positive ontological consistency, but merely fills in the gap of a certain constitutive impossibility.”
“One falls into the ideological trap precisely by succumbing to the illusion that anti-Semitism really is about Jews.”
“We are dealing with a structure in the strict sense of the term when one and the same collection is arranged in two sets: the 'structuralist' structure always consists of two structures; that is, it involves the difference between the 'obvious' surface structure and the 'true' concealed structure.”
“One can also say that this gap is constitutive of ideology: 'ideology' is the 'self-evident' surface structure whose function is to conceal the underlying 'unbalanced', 'uncanny' structure.”
“In German Idealism, however, (and in the radical versions of Hegelian Marxism, like Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness), 'objectivity' as such, as the firm, stable, immediate, determinate Being opposed to the fluidity of subjective mediation,
is conceived (and denounced) as a ‘fetish', as something 'reified', as the domain whose appearance of stable Being conceals its subjective mediation.”
“For the Marxist historical materialist, the very ideal agency which allegedly 'posits' or mediates every material reality (the 'tran- scendental subject') is already a fetish of its own, an entity which 'abbreviates', and thus conceals, the complex process of socio-historical praxis. For a deconstructionist 'semiotic materialist', the notion of'external reality' is - no less than the notion of the 'transcendental subject' - a 'reified' point of reference which conceals the textual process which generates it.”
“Lacan agrees with the German Idealist argument whereby any reference to 'external reality' falls short: our access to this 'reality' is always-already 'mediated' by the symbolic process.”
“In order to characterize this inversion, Marx refers to the Hegelian notion of 'reflective determination': in commodity fetishism proper, as well as in fetishized intersubjective relations, the property which is actually a mere 'reflective determination' of an object or person is misperceived as its direct 'natural' property.”
“With the prospect of electronic money, money loses its material presence and turns into a purely virtual entity (accessible by means of a bank card or even an immaterial computer code); this dematerialization, however, only strengthens its hold: money (the intricate network of financial transactions) thus turns into an invisible, and for that very reason all-powerful, spectral frame which dominates our lives.”
“In other words, people are well aware of how things really stand; they know very well that the commodity-money is nothing but a reified form of the appearance of social relations, that beneath the 'relations between things' there are 'relations between people' - the paradox is that in their social activity they act as if they do not know this, and follow the fetishist illusion.”
“Later Lacan is fully justified in reserving the term 'act' for something much more suicidal and real than a speech act.”
“Furthermore, is not the ultimate example of interpassivity the 'absolute example' (Hegel) itself: that of Christ, who took upon himself the (deserved) suffering of humanity? Christ redeemed us all not by acting for us, but by assuming the burden of the ultimate passive experience.”
“Fantasy, rather, belongs to the 'bizarre category ofthe objectively subjective - the way things actually, objectively seem to you even if they don't seem that way to you'.”
“The Lacanian subject is thus empty in the radical sense of being deprived of even the minimal phenomenological support: there is no wealth of experiences to fill in its void.”
“At its most radical, the Unconscious is the inaccessible phenomenon, not the objective mechanism which regulates my phenomenal experience.”
“The Leftist politics of the 'chains of equivalences' among the plurality of struggles is strictly correlative to the abandonment of the analysis of capitalism as a global economic system - that is, to the tacit acceptance of capitalist economic relations and liberal-democratic politics as the unquestioned framework of our social life.”
“Here we find the logic of courtly love and of sublimation at its purest: some common, everyday object or act becomes inaccessible or impossible to accomplish once it finds itself in the position of the Thing - although the thing should be easily within our grasp, the entire universe has somehow been adjusted to produce, again and again, an unfathomable contingency blocking access to it.”
“In more topological terms: the subject’s division is not the division between one Self and another, between two contents, but the division between something and nothing, between the feature of identification and the void.”
“In other words, the very process of shifting among multiple identifications presupposes a kind of empty band which makes the leap from one identity to another possible, and this empty band is the subject itself.”
“That is to say: there is definitely
a Hitchcockian shibboleth; beneath the standard notion of Hitchcock - the great commercial entertainer, the 'master of suspense'-there is another Hitchcock who, in an unheard-of way, practiced the critique of ideology.”
“The vision of cyberspace opening up a future of unending possibilities of limitless change, of new multiple sex organs, and so on, conceals its exact opposite: an unheard-of imposition of radical closure.”
“Symbolic power is thus effective only as virtual, as a promise or threat of its full display.”
“Today's racism is strictly (postmodern; it is a reaction to the 'disenchantment' inflicted by the new phase of global capitalism.”
“The inherent violence of cybersex lies not in the potentially violent content of sexual fantasies played out on the screen, but in the very formal fact of seeing my innermost fantasies being directly imposed on me from without.”
“What we encounter here is the fundamental paradox of the Marxian notion of commodity fetishism: 'commodity fetishism' designates not a (bourgeois) theory of political economy but a series of presuppositions that determine the structure of the very 'real' economic practice of market exchange - in theory, a capitalist clings to utilitarian nominalism, yet in his own practice (of exchange) he follows 'theological whimsies' and acts as a speculative idealist.”
“Monty Python's Meaning of life is a kind of English revenge on this joke: the film is simultaneously sublime and ridiculous - ridiculous in the mode of humour.”
“Perhaps, the briefest way to render the superego paradox is the injunction 'Like it or not, enjoy yourself!'”
“Humour is thus one of the modes of defense against the dimension of the traumatic Real which pertains to the sexual act.”
“For that very reason, however, the sexual act cannot but appear at least minimally ridiculous to those who are not directly engaged in it; the comical effect arises out of the very discord between the intensity of the act and the indifferent calm of everyday life.”
“The true enigma of pornographic sexuality lies in the fact that the camera not only does not spoIl jouissance, but enables it: the very elementary structure of sexuality has to comprise a kind of opening towards the intruding Third, towards an empty place which can be filled in by the gaze of the spectator (or camera) witnessing the act.”
“Here we have the exact opposite of Soviet Socialist Realism, where lovers experience their love as a contribution to the struggle for Socialism, making a vow to sacrifice all their private pleasures for the success of the Revolution, and to submerge themselves in the masses. In Reds, on the contrary, revolution itself appears as a metaphor for the successful sexual encounter.”
“in the scene from Wild at Heart one should be attentive to the way Lynch turns on its head the standard procedure of male seduction, in which the gentle process of verbal coaxing is followed by the forceful physical act of sexual penetration, once consent is obtained: in Lynch, the violence is entirely displaced on to the process of verbal seduction itself) which functions as a nightmarish mockery of'proper' gentle coaxing, while the sexual act itself simply fails to materialize.”
“The crucial paradox is that we come closest to the Real in Wild at Heart, where the act itself does not occur: the very absence of the act in reality confronts us with the Real of the subject, with the innermost kernel of her jouissance.”
“Our point, however, is that this passage from Mozart to Wagner does not entail merely a loss: what is clearly gained in it is the 'depth'
of subjectivity.”
“Furthermore, music is not historical merely in the abstract sense according to which each determinate type of music is 'objectively possible' only within a given epoch, but also in the sense that each epoch, in a kind of 'synthesis of imagination', self-reflectively relates to preceding epoch.”
“Therein lies the Hegelian loss of a loss'; another way to put it is to paraphrase the Gospel - in the double renunciation, the subject loses that which he does not possess.”
“Is not Hitchcock's Vertigo the study in melancholic loss which also demonstrates how this loss is not the worst that can happen to the subject? That is to say: the film's thesis is that, in melancholy, the object is none the less 'possessed' in its very loss, as lost; while the true horror, worse than melancholy, is that of the 'loss of a loss': this occurs when the film's hero (Scottie) is forced to accept that the lost object which transfixes his desire never existed in the first place (that Madeleine herself was a fake).”
“The alien from Ridley Scott's movie of the same name, for example, is 'real' precisely as the pure elusive semblance whose shape changes again and again; the same goes for trauma, the traumatic event, in psychoanalysis, which is also irréel in the sense of a phantasmic formation -for Lacan, the Real is not primarily the horrible formless maternal substance beneath symbolic semblances, but is, rather, itself a pure semblance.”
“Humanism is pre-modern, pre-Cartesian, reducing man to the high point of creation, instead of conceiving of him as a subject which stands outside creation.”
“It is crucial to maintain the radically ambiguous status of the fragment (foreign intruder), its undecidability between presupposition and something posited: as we have learned from Freud, a trauma as the kernel of the impossible-real which sticks out and resists symbolization is none the less a retroactive product of this very process of symbolization.”
“ ‘Class struggle' is the Marxist name for this basic 'operator of dislocation'; as such, 'class struggle' means that there is no neutral metalanguage allowing us to grasp society as a given 'objective' totality, since we always-already 'take sides'. The fact that there is no 'neutral', 'objective' concept of class struggle is thus the crucial constituent of this notion.”
“As Lenin emphasized, the history of philosophy consists in an incessant, repetitive tracing of the difference between materialism and idealism; what one has to add is that, as a rule, this line of demarcation does not run where one would obviously expect it to run - often, the materialist choice hinges on how we decide on a seemingly secondary alternative. Within the horizon of Kant's philosophy, 'materialism' does not consist in clinging to the Thing-in-itself (allegedly the last vestige of materialism which poses a limit to the idealist thesis on the subjective positing of reality), as Lenin himself incorrectly claimed, but, rather, in asserting the primacy of mathematical antinomy, and conceiving dynamic antinomy as secondary, as an attempt to 'save phenomena' through the noumenal Law as their constitutive exception."
“The way to undermine ethical particularism (the notion that a subject can find his or her ethical Substance only in the particular tradition out of which he grew) is thus not via reference to some more universal positive content (like the unfortunate 'universal values shared by all humanity’), but only by accepting that the ethical Universal is in itself indeterminate, empty, and that it can be translated into a set of positive explicit norms only by means of my active engagement, for which I take full responsibility... thus there is no determinate ethical universality without the contingency of the subject's act of positing it as such.”
“In short, what Lacan calls 'act' has the precise status of an object which the subject can never 'swallow', subjectivize - which forever remains a foreign body, a bone stuck in his throat. The standard subject's reaction to the act is that of aphanisis, of his/her self-obliteration, not of heroically assuming it: when the awareness of the full consequences of 'what I have just done' hits me, I want to disappear.”
.”That is to say: the noumenal Law is phenomenally accessible to us, finite humans, only in a negative way, in the guise of the feeling of guilt, in our awareness that we have betrayed its call, that we have not lived up to our ethical duty - never in a positive way, 'as such'; and this necessity which makes us 'a priori and forever guilty" is the sole content of 'radical Evil’.”
“Hegel's implicit thesis is that diabolical Evil is another name for the Good it self, for the concept 'in itself’, the two are indistinguishable; the difference is purely formal, and concerns only the point of view
of the perceiving subject.”
“...it is only my failure to act ethically which guarantees that I remain an ethical subject, since were I to accomplish a pure ethical act, I would change into a being of diabolical Evil (into a Sadeian Supreme-Being-of-Evilness)...”
“A revolutionary terrorist, for example, is of aesthetic interest if he is not merely a bloodthirsty executioner killing and torturing out of pure egotistical baseness, but a sincere idealist ready to sacrifice everything for his Cause, convinced that he is doing a service to humanity, and thus caught in the tragic deadlock of his predicament.”
“A 'miracle' is simply the sudden emergence of the New, which is irreducible to its preceding conditions, of something which retroactively 'posits' its conditions: every authentic act creates its own conditions of possibility.”
“This externality, which directly embodies ideology, is also occluded as 'utility'. That is to say: in everyday life, ideology is at work especially in the apparently innocent reference to pure utility”
“This 'purely material sincerity' of the external ideological ritual, not the depth of the subject's inner convictions and desires, is the true locus of the fantasy which sustains an ideological edifice.”
“...fantasy does not simply realize a desire in a hallucinatory way: rather, its function is similar to that of Kantian 'transcendental schematism': a fantasy constitutes our desire, provides its coordinates; that is, it literally 'teaches us how to desire'”
“The lesson is therefore clear: an ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it 'not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person' is the very form ofideology, of its 'practical efficiency.”
“The need for the phantasmic support of the public symbolic order (materialized in the so-called unwritten rules) thus bears witness to the system's vulnerability: the system is compelled to allow for possibilities of choices which must never actually take place, since their occurrence would cause the system to disintegrate, and the function of the unwritten rules is precisely to prevent the actualization of these choices formally allowed by the system.”
“This encounter with the real (jouissance) is always traumatic; there is something at least minimally obscene about it; I cannot simply integrate it into my universe, there is always a gulf separating me from it.”
“Every ideology attaches itself to some kernel of jouissance which, however, retains the status of an ambiguous excess.”
“The gap that separates beauty from ugliness is thus the very gap that separates reality from the Real: what constitutes reality is the minimum of idealization the subject needs in order to be able to sustain the horror of the Real.”
“Do we not encounter here, in this hoarse and cruel voice, ambushing us in its very intrusive overproximiey, the horrifying weight of the encounter of a neighbour in the Real of her presence? Love thy neighbour? No, thanks.”
“The point, of course, is that there never was a purely symbolic Power without an obscene supplement the structure of a power edifice is always minimally inconsistent, so that it needs a minimum of sexualization, of the stain of obscenity, to reproduce itself.”
“The procedure which enables us to discern the structural inconsistency of an ideological edifice is that of the anamorphic reading...
That is the elementary procedure of the critique of ideology: the 'sublime object of ideology' is the spectral object which has no positive ontological consistency, but merely fills in the gap of a certain constitutive impossibility.”
“One falls into the ideological trap precisely by succumbing to the illusion that anti-Semitism really is about Jews.”
“We are dealing with a structure in the strict sense of the term when one and the same collection is arranged in two sets: the 'structuralist' structure always consists of two structures; that is, it involves the difference between the 'obvious' surface structure and the 'true' concealed structure.”
“One can also say that this gap is constitutive of ideology: 'ideology' is the 'self-evident' surface structure whose function is to conceal the underlying 'unbalanced', 'uncanny' structure.”
“In German Idealism, however, (and in the radical versions of Hegelian Marxism, like Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness), 'objectivity' as such, as the firm, stable, immediate, determinate Being opposed to the fluidity of subjective mediation,
is conceived (and denounced) as a ‘fetish', as something 'reified', as the domain whose appearance of stable Being conceals its subjective mediation.”
“For the Marxist historical materialist, the very ideal agency which allegedly 'posits' or mediates every material reality (the 'tran- scendental subject') is already a fetish of its own, an entity which 'abbreviates', and thus conceals, the complex process of socio-historical praxis. For a deconstructionist 'semiotic materialist', the notion of'external reality' is - no less than the notion of the 'transcendental subject' - a 'reified' point of reference which conceals the textual process which generates it.”
“Lacan agrees with the German Idealist argument whereby any reference to 'external reality' falls short: our access to this 'reality' is always-already 'mediated' by the symbolic process.”
“In order to characterize this inversion, Marx refers to the Hegelian notion of 'reflective determination': in commodity fetishism proper, as well as in fetishized intersubjective relations, the property which is actually a mere 'reflective determination' of an object or person is misperceived as its direct 'natural' property.”
“With the prospect of electronic money, money loses its material presence and turns into a purely virtual entity (accessible by means of a bank card or even an immaterial computer code); this dematerialization, however, only strengthens its hold: money (the intricate network of financial transactions) thus turns into an invisible, and for that very reason all-powerful, spectral frame which dominates our lives.”
“In other words, people are well aware of how things really stand; they know very well that the commodity-money is nothing but a reified form of the appearance of social relations, that beneath the 'relations between things' there are 'relations between people' - the paradox is that in their social activity they act as if they do not know this, and follow the fetishist illusion.”
“Later Lacan is fully justified in reserving the term 'act' for something much more suicidal and real than a speech act.”
“Furthermore, is not the ultimate example of interpassivity the 'absolute example' (Hegel) itself: that of Christ, who took upon himself the (deserved) suffering of humanity? Christ redeemed us all not by acting for us, but by assuming the burden of the ultimate passive experience.”
“Fantasy, rather, belongs to the 'bizarre category ofthe objectively subjective - the way things actually, objectively seem to you even if they don't seem that way to you'.”
“The Lacanian subject is thus empty in the radical sense of being deprived of even the minimal phenomenological support: there is no wealth of experiences to fill in its void.”
“At its most radical, the Unconscious is the inaccessible phenomenon, not the objective mechanism which regulates my phenomenal experience.”
“The Leftist politics of the 'chains of equivalences' among the plurality of struggles is strictly correlative to the abandonment of the analysis of capitalism as a global economic system - that is, to the tacit acceptance of capitalist economic relations and liberal-democratic politics as the unquestioned framework of our social life.”
“Here we find the logic of courtly love and of sublimation at its purest: some common, everyday object or act becomes inaccessible or impossible to accomplish once it finds itself in the position of the Thing - although the thing should be easily within our grasp, the entire universe has somehow been adjusted to produce, again and again, an unfathomable contingency blocking access to it.”
“In more topological terms: the subject’s division is not the division between one Self and another, between two contents, but the division between something and nothing, between the feature of identification and the void.”
“In other words, the very process of shifting among multiple identifications presupposes a kind of empty band which makes the leap from one identity to another possible, and this empty band is the subject itself.”
“That is to say: there is definitely
a Hitchcockian shibboleth; beneath the standard notion of Hitchcock - the great commercial entertainer, the 'master of suspense'-there is another Hitchcock who, in an unheard-of way, practiced the critique of ideology.”
“The vision of cyberspace opening up a future of unending possibilities of limitless change, of new multiple sex organs, and so on, conceals its exact opposite: an unheard-of imposition of radical closure.”
“Symbolic power is thus effective only as virtual, as a promise or threat of its full display.”
“Today's racism is strictly (postmodern; it is a reaction to the 'disenchantment' inflicted by the new phase of global capitalism.”
“The inherent violence of cybersex lies not in the potentially violent content of sexual fantasies played out on the screen, but in the very formal fact of seeing my innermost fantasies being directly imposed on me from without.”
“What we encounter here is the fundamental paradox of the Marxian notion of commodity fetishism: 'commodity fetishism' designates not a (bourgeois) theory of political economy but a series of presuppositions that determine the structure of the very 'real' economic practice of market exchange - in theory, a capitalist clings to utilitarian nominalism, yet in his own practice (of exchange) he follows 'theological whimsies' and acts as a speculative idealist.”
“Monty Python's Meaning of life is a kind of English revenge on this joke: the film is simultaneously sublime and ridiculous - ridiculous in the mode of humour.”
“Perhaps, the briefest way to render the superego paradox is the injunction 'Like it or not, enjoy yourself!'”
“Humour is thus one of the modes of defense against the dimension of the traumatic Real which pertains to the sexual act.”
“For that very reason, however, the sexual act cannot but appear at least minimally ridiculous to those who are not directly engaged in it; the comical effect arises out of the very discord between the intensity of the act and the indifferent calm of everyday life.”
“The true enigma of pornographic sexuality lies in the fact that the camera not only does not spoIl jouissance, but enables it: the very elementary structure of sexuality has to comprise a kind of opening towards the intruding Third, towards an empty place which can be filled in by the gaze of the spectator (or camera) witnessing the act.”
“Here we have the exact opposite of Soviet Socialist Realism, where lovers experience their love as a contribution to the struggle for Socialism, making a vow to sacrifice all their private pleasures for the success of the Revolution, and to submerge themselves in the masses. In Reds, on the contrary, revolution itself appears as a metaphor for the successful sexual encounter.”
“in the scene from Wild at Heart one should be attentive to the way Lynch turns on its head the standard procedure of male seduction, in which the gentle process of verbal coaxing is followed by the forceful physical act of sexual penetration, once consent is obtained: in Lynch, the violence is entirely displaced on to the process of verbal seduction itself) which functions as a nightmarish mockery of'proper' gentle coaxing, while the sexual act itself simply fails to materialize.”
“The crucial paradox is that we come closest to the Real in Wild at Heart, where the act itself does not occur: the very absence of the act in reality confronts us with the Real of the subject, with the innermost kernel of her jouissance.”
“Our point, however, is that this passage from Mozart to Wagner does not entail merely a loss: what is clearly gained in it is the 'depth'
of subjectivity.”
“Furthermore, music is not historical merely in the abstract sense according to which each determinate type of music is 'objectively possible' only within a given epoch, but also in the sense that each epoch, in a kind of 'synthesis of imagination', self-reflectively relates to preceding epoch.”
“Therein lies the Hegelian loss of a loss'; another way to put it is to paraphrase the Gospel - in the double renunciation, the subject loses that which he does not possess.”
“Is not Hitchcock's Vertigo the study in melancholic loss which also demonstrates how this loss is not the worst that can happen to the subject? That is to say: the film's thesis is that, in melancholy, the object is none the less 'possessed' in its very loss, as lost; while the true horror, worse than melancholy, is that of the 'loss of a loss': this occurs when the film's hero (Scottie) is forced to accept that the lost object which transfixes his desire never existed in the first place (that Madeleine herself was a fake).”
“The alien from Ridley Scott's movie of the same name, for example, is 'real' precisely as the pure elusive semblance whose shape changes again and again; the same goes for trauma, the traumatic event, in psychoanalysis, which is also irréel in the sense of a phantasmic formation -for Lacan, the Real is not primarily the horrible formless maternal substance beneath symbolic semblances, but is, rather, itself a pure semblance.”
“Humanism is pre-modern, pre-Cartesian, reducing man to the high point of creation, instead of conceiving of him as a subject which stands outside creation.”
“It is crucial to maintain the radically ambiguous status of the fragment (foreign intruder), its undecidability between presupposition and something posited: as we have learned from Freud, a trauma as the kernel of the impossible-real which sticks out and resists symbolization is none the less a retroactive product of this very process of symbolization.”
“ ‘Class struggle' is the Marxist name for this basic 'operator of dislocation'; as such, 'class struggle' means that there is no neutral metalanguage allowing us to grasp society as a given 'objective' totality, since we always-already 'take sides'. The fact that there is no 'neutral', 'objective' concept of class struggle is thus the crucial constituent of this notion.”
“As Lenin emphasized, the history of philosophy consists in an incessant, repetitive tracing of the difference between materialism and idealism; what one has to add is that, as a rule, this line of demarcation does not run where one would obviously expect it to run - often, the materialist choice hinges on how we decide on a seemingly secondary alternative. Within the horizon of Kant's philosophy, 'materialism' does not consist in clinging to the Thing-in-itself (allegedly the last vestige of materialism which poses a limit to the idealist thesis on the subjective positing of reality), as Lenin himself incorrectly claimed, but, rather, in asserting the primacy of mathematical antinomy, and conceiving dynamic antinomy as secondary, as an attempt to 'save phenomena' through the noumenal Law as their constitutive exception."
“The way to undermine ethical particularism (the notion that a subject can find his or her ethical Substance only in the particular tradition out of which he grew) is thus not via reference to some more universal positive content (like the unfortunate 'universal values shared by all humanity’), but only by accepting that the ethical Universal is in itself indeterminate, empty, and that it can be translated into a set of positive explicit norms only by means of my active engagement, for which I take full responsibility... thus there is no determinate ethical universality without the contingency of the subject's act of positing it as such.”
“In short, what Lacan calls 'act' has the precise status of an object which the subject can never 'swallow', subjectivize - which forever remains a foreign body, a bone stuck in his throat. The standard subject's reaction to the act is that of aphanisis, of his/her self-obliteration, not of heroically assuming it: when the awareness of the full consequences of 'what I have just done' hits me, I want to disappear.”
.”That is to say: the noumenal Law is phenomenally accessible to us, finite humans, only in a negative way, in the guise of the feeling of guilt, in our awareness that we have betrayed its call, that we have not lived up to our ethical duty - never in a positive way, 'as such'; and this necessity which makes us 'a priori and forever guilty" is the sole content of 'radical Evil’.”
“Hegel's implicit thesis is that diabolical Evil is another name for the Good it self, for the concept 'in itself’, the two are indistinguishable; the difference is purely formal, and concerns only the point of view
of the perceiving subject.”
“...it is only my failure to act ethically which guarantees that I remain an ethical subject, since were I to accomplish a pure ethical act, I would change into a being of diabolical Evil (into a Sadeian Supreme-Being-of-Evilness)...”
“A revolutionary terrorist, for example, is of aesthetic interest if he is not merely a bloodthirsty executioner killing and torturing out of pure egotistical baseness, but a sincere idealist ready to sacrifice everything for his Cause, convinced that he is doing a service to humanity, and thus caught in the tragic deadlock of his predicament.”
July 30, 2019
“Esas imágenes que nublan nuestro razonamiento, han llegado a sus últimas consecuencias”
Imagina que te han mentido, o peor , te han traicionado; ¿sería acaso lo primero qué pasa por tu mente el olvidarlo, dejarlo ir , pensarías que eres lo suficientemente maduro para ignorar el suceso ?, probablemente no (por mas que te esfuerces, el hecho será latente y tu imaginación será invadida de fantasías ).
El autor a través de cientos de referencias populares cinematográficas y literarias, nos envuelve en una narrativa profunda y cruda sobre sucesos que podrían parecer tan banales como burdos , pero que sin darnos cuenta están llenos de fantasmas , ideales encarnados en nuestro subconsciente que dictaminan nuestros actos de una u otra manera .
El autor aborda aspectos religiosos (porque la religión ha perneado tanto en nuestra moral ) , indaga en nuestras aspiraciones y deseos ( narra una hermosa analogía del ideal masculino y el ideal femenino encarnado en los objetos más absurdos consumistas), nos cuenta a detalla de los fetiches , la sexualidad y un muy sugestivo y evolutivo entorno fantasmagórico digital ( de lo real a lo digital y las fantasías que rodean ambos mundos al grado de impedirnos distinguir la diferencia ).
De verdad una joya filosófica con tintes sociológicos , completamente atemporal y paradójicamente moderno , te prometo que disfrutarás cada palabra y anécdota contada.
Calificación : 8.5 de 10 .
Como todo gran libro , su costo es relativamente elevado , la editorial recomendada por excelencia para disfrutar de una buena traducción es Akal y lamentablemente si requiere cierto nivel básico técnico de psicología (notaras que está obsesionado con Lacan y Freud , por lo tanto leer algo de ellos con antelación ayuda ). Es un libro que te tomará algo de tiempo en terminar y completamente denso (mientras devoraba cada una de sus páginas tuve que recurrir varias veces al diccionario o a fuentes externas que explicaban a profundidad muchas de sus ideas ). Que gran escritor es Žižek , brillante .
Imagina que te han mentido, o peor , te han traicionado; ¿sería acaso lo primero qué pasa por tu mente el olvidarlo, dejarlo ir , pensarías que eres lo suficientemente maduro para ignorar el suceso ?, probablemente no (por mas que te esfuerces, el hecho será latente y tu imaginación será invadida de fantasías ).
El autor a través de cientos de referencias populares cinematográficas y literarias, nos envuelve en una narrativa profunda y cruda sobre sucesos que podrían parecer tan banales como burdos , pero que sin darnos cuenta están llenos de fantasmas , ideales encarnados en nuestro subconsciente que dictaminan nuestros actos de una u otra manera .
El autor aborda aspectos religiosos (porque la religión ha perneado tanto en nuestra moral ) , indaga en nuestras aspiraciones y deseos ( narra una hermosa analogía del ideal masculino y el ideal femenino encarnado en los objetos más absurdos consumistas), nos cuenta a detalla de los fetiches , la sexualidad y un muy sugestivo y evolutivo entorno fantasmagórico digital ( de lo real a lo digital y las fantasías que rodean ambos mundos al grado de impedirnos distinguir la diferencia ).
De verdad una joya filosófica con tintes sociológicos , completamente atemporal y paradójicamente moderno , te prometo que disfrutarás cada palabra y anécdota contada.
Calificación : 8.5 de 10 .
Como todo gran libro , su costo es relativamente elevado , la editorial recomendada por excelencia para disfrutar de una buena traducción es Akal y lamentablemente si requiere cierto nivel básico técnico de psicología (notaras que está obsesionado con Lacan y Freud , por lo tanto leer algo de ellos con antelación ayuda ). Es un libro que te tomará algo de tiempo en terminar y completamente denso (mientras devoraba cada una de sus páginas tuve que recurrir varias veces al diccionario o a fuentes externas que explicaban a profundidad muchas de sus ideas ). Que gran escritor es Žižek , brillante .
March 4, 2017
I've spent the better part of my intellectual life as a harsh critic of Žižek. In retrospect, while I stand by the majority of my criticisms as theoretically correct, they have been a bit overstated. In The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Žižek proves himself to be a gifted reader of both Freud and Marx in a moment when a better articulation of dream-work and the unconscious's relation to dreams was desperately needed. Furthermore, in that text, he powerfully links the intellectual practice of Freud and Marx to save Lacan from being accused of baseless hyperbole. In Looking Awry (1991), Žižek offers some of the best articulations of the Lacanian real and desire through a rigorous analysis of pop-culture. In this case, Lacan does not simply elucidate films and genre fiction, but the art objects Žižek analyze speak back to Lacan in crucial ways. All of this is to say that Žižek is at his best when providing concise readings of psychoanalysis.
In the case of The Plague of Fantasies (1997), we have Žižek exploring concepts of fantasy and jouissance in a familiar fashion to many of his earlier texts. However, Plague lacks the boldness of Sublime Object and the incisiveness of Looking Awry. In Plague, Žižek appears as a terribly inefficient writer. There is a lot to enjoy here, but his roving and capacious text seems to arbitrarily attempt to integrate anecdotes and pop-cultural examples one after the other, when perhaps a more sparse explanation would suffice to support his claims. This result, while ultimately not undermining his argument, simply makes the text less enjoyable. Gone is the finely tuned examples of Looking Awry, and with their disappearance goes a great deal of his argumentative power.
Still, Plague is an important text. It is worth reading if only for the second chapter, "Love Thy Neighbour? No, Thanks!" where Žižek provides a wonderful anecdote of familial unrest ("On the rare occasions when, owing to various kinds of social obligations, I cannot avoid meeting my relatives who have nothing to do with Lacanian theory (or with theory in general)...") and jouissance. It is crucial here what Žižek reveals about the social functioning of jouissance and derivative jouissance. Because Žižek enjoys his work, his relatives are threatened by the jouisssance they perceive he experiences even if their perception is mistaken. Just the threat of the annihilating power of jouissance is enough to inspire irrational hatred.
Žižek also does great work on the aesthetic privileging of "incomplete" works in his first chapter, doing a virtuoso reading of the Venus de Milo. Elsewhere, he outlines neurotic-hysteria and perversion in important ways. Finally, his explication of the phallus as a signifier and prosthesis anticipates work done in gender studies on Lacan. Žižek even makes the crucial link between Poe's "The Purloined Letter" and the status of the subject in Lacan as empty set.
It is strange, then, that the sometimes terrible writing and some of the most theoretically uninteresting ideas are the ones that have been picked up by critics, mostly Marxists. Žižek's notion of interpassivity is moderately interesting but has only been developed in the most crassly pseudo-Marxist fashions, annihilating the psychoanalytic element crucial to the formulation here. Furthermore, Žižek's writing on cyberspace is at best elementary and at worst woefully misguided.
For those who approach The Plague of Fantasies, come with a road map. Out of the Žižek texts worth reading (of which this is one), this is one of the most uneven.
In the case of The Plague of Fantasies (1997), we have Žižek exploring concepts of fantasy and jouissance in a familiar fashion to many of his earlier texts. However, Plague lacks the boldness of Sublime Object and the incisiveness of Looking Awry. In Plague, Žižek appears as a terribly inefficient writer. There is a lot to enjoy here, but his roving and capacious text seems to arbitrarily attempt to integrate anecdotes and pop-cultural examples one after the other, when perhaps a more sparse explanation would suffice to support his claims. This result, while ultimately not undermining his argument, simply makes the text less enjoyable. Gone is the finely tuned examples of Looking Awry, and with their disappearance goes a great deal of his argumentative power.
Still, Plague is an important text. It is worth reading if only for the second chapter, "Love Thy Neighbour? No, Thanks!" where Žižek provides a wonderful anecdote of familial unrest ("On the rare occasions when, owing to various kinds of social obligations, I cannot avoid meeting my relatives who have nothing to do with Lacanian theory (or with theory in general)...") and jouissance. It is crucial here what Žižek reveals about the social functioning of jouissance and derivative jouissance. Because Žižek enjoys his work, his relatives are threatened by the jouisssance they perceive he experiences even if their perception is mistaken. Just the threat of the annihilating power of jouissance is enough to inspire irrational hatred.
Žižek also does great work on the aesthetic privileging of "incomplete" works in his first chapter, doing a virtuoso reading of the Venus de Milo. Elsewhere, he outlines neurotic-hysteria and perversion in important ways. Finally, his explication of the phallus as a signifier and prosthesis anticipates work done in gender studies on Lacan. Žižek even makes the crucial link between Poe's "The Purloined Letter" and the status of the subject in Lacan as empty set.
It is strange, then, that the sometimes terrible writing and some of the most theoretically uninteresting ideas are the ones that have been picked up by critics, mostly Marxists. Žižek's notion of interpassivity is moderately interesting but has only been developed in the most crassly pseudo-Marxist fashions, annihilating the psychoanalytic element crucial to the formulation here. Furthermore, Žižek's writing on cyberspace is at best elementary and at worst woefully misguided.
For those who approach The Plague of Fantasies, come with a road map. Out of the Žižek texts worth reading (of which this is one), this is one of the most uneven.
August 4, 2021
Hard to tell if it's this particular work, or maybe just a change in me since I last read Zizek, but I found myself basically un-enthralled. Could be that I've read and understood more Lacan since last time, and also have a bit of a firmer grasp of Hegel and Marx so I didn't have to constantly battle a sense of confusion and keeping up. But I also couldn't help thinking Zizek was trying to cover too much ground without any sort of obvious game plan to hold everything together. I would come across some great sections that still held relevance today, and then across others like his section on cyberspace, which just felt dated and off somehow in the year 2021. I suppose that's always the cost of writing about very current technology when it changes so quickly, so perhaps that's not Zizek's fault. Truthfully reading this only made me want to get back to reading Lacan rather than dancing at the edges. So it goes...
November 5, 2018
The thing with Zizek seems to be that he’s an aphoristic writer convinced he’s a longform essayist. The funniest and most insightful moments here come when he’s at his most tangential. His greatest strength is peeling back the layers of postmodernity to see just how little we’ve developed from our primitive state. However, it’s oftentimes hard to see just how the central thesis of the book relates to the disparate chaos of thought presented here. There are moments where he really shines, others where it’s easy to believe even he doesn’t know what the hell he’s getting at, and others where his hero worship of Lacan and Hegel get in the way of his own unique analysis. Still, I love the guy and his analysis of the Bobby Peru character from David Lynch’s Wild at Heart is worth the price of entry alone.
December 31, 2023
Žižek blends Lacanian psychoanalysis (derived from Freudianism), Marxist dialecticism (derived from Hegelianism), and cultural commentary to describe fantasy in humanity. Unfortunately, I disagree with his approach which is to view imagination as a perversion of humanity to be primarily viewed through a sexual lens to create that which is not (not that Žižek says that these perversions should not be, merely that they can be analyzed). While interesting overall, the book recycles a lot of Žižek's comments in other books and even other parts within this book. With editing, it could be cut down a fair bit. (I would also recommend cutting out the most vulgar references to sexuality since these are unique to particular circumstances, not just a different level of the same modes of thought everyone is having at all times as Žižek seems to presume.)
May 1, 2025
Es sin duda una lectura intelectual que trasluce la experiencia, filosofía y labor de investigación del autor; las reflexiones que plantea realmente resonaron en mi persona y me han dejado con la inquietude de buscar y saber más; algo que ame fueron todas la referencias cinematográficas y literarias.
It's undoubtedly an intellectual read that reflects the author's experience, philosophy, and research; the reflections it raises truly resonated with me and have left me eager to search and learn more. One thing I loved were all the cinematic and literary references.
It's undoubtedly an intellectual read that reflects the author's experience, philosophy, and research; the reflections it raises truly resonated with me and have left me eager to search and learn more. One thing I loved were all the cinematic and literary references.
November 9, 2020
For Zizek his constant rehashing of previous material and analogy is his own castration. His hyper-sexual perversity runs rampant through any book he has written. Overall a good book. It's a good sequel to The Dialectic of Enlightenment and a contrast to Michel Foucaults perverse vision of power structures.
August 21, 2021
His usual bit on material force of ideology as an invisible screen which clarifies our lives but it's an illusion filled with power and norms ect ect, but in a more accessible way. Good intro to psychoanalytical Marxism though, if you're not super versed in the dense philosophical tradition it draws on. He only quotes Hegel a few times
August 4, 2024
My first book by Slavoj Žižek, what an exhilarating read! I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how intriguing the concepts encapsulated by Žižek in The Plague Of Fantasies were. An immersing display of ideas exemplified in a way that’s opening me up to philosophy and psychoanalysis, definitely won’t be my last book by him.
January 17, 2023
Perfecto, slavoj zizek aunque sea de los autores más retadores que he leído en mi vida; su forma de escritura es tan disruptiva, diferente, retadora, pasional, cuestionante.
Psicoanálisis puro; una gran reformulacion de Lacan y retoma excelente a Hegel.
Psicoanálisis puro; una gran reformulacion de Lacan y retoma excelente a Hegel.
February 27, 2025
Wow Zizeks as much challenging as he is fascinating, his constant berrage of analogies and examples can becomr stressful, especiallyw ehn you canpt even place them in your head.I didnt get A LOT of this book but what I did get was so so helpful, loved it.
April 2, 2018
I'm a little skeptic with this kind of philosophers, I think he inserts scandalous references with no real importance to his arguments. Anyway the last essays turn to be very lucid and interesting.
October 14, 2020
Zizek says fantasy is necessary for constituting reality for the subject. As usual he gives mindbending examples from movies to holocaust. Prepare yourself for a journey
May 12, 2022
four jokes about balls in the first 80 pages? This book rules
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