Date: Mon, 11 Dec 1995 19:35:33 -0400
From: zupra-AT-exatas.pucsp.br (Jos\i Luiz Aidar Prado)
Subject: ideology/Diana Ambrosias


Diana Ambrosias:
Illusion refers in Zizek to fetichism and reification. For him a question must be faced: ideology is not an imaginary construction which serves to dissimulate social reality. He speaks of two substracts of ideological dimension: one symptomatic, related to savoir, and other phantasmatic, related to phantasy. In this aspect, of phantasy,ideology is a kind of error that constitutes reality, i.e., the form of human actions. It is Jacques-Alain Miller who speaks of symptom and phantasy. In the psychoanalysis is possible to treat the symptom, for one side, and to traverse phantasy, for the other. This term, phantasy, comes from Freud's "Ein kind wird geschlagen" (1919). In phantasy we build a figure of the Other, we put a face and a desire attributed to this Other-for-me. In other words, we dissimulate that the Other doesn't exist, that the Other doesn't ask anything from us. In the space defined by the phantasy the Other is a ma=EEtre, a Lord, for whom the slave works. I work for him, in order to please him. In analysys it is necessary to traverse this phantasy, or to construct it and explicit it. For Lacan we don't eliminate phantasy. We must perceive it,  be aware of it, for not to be devorated by it. It is not the case to know what is behind phantasy. There's not behind it, as in the case of fetich.
For Miller, in the end of analysys we must expect that something is altered in the relation of the patient with the fundamental phantasy. It is possible to cure the sinthom, but it is not possible to cure phantasy. The sinthom refers to the siginificant, phantasy refers to jouissance, what the Other asks from me as a body that "joues". This phantasmatic Other-for-me asks me to cancel myself as a subject. This machine converts me in an object of jouissance.
The political phantasy, for Zizek, conceals the violent side of the law, of the social contract (in Rawls, for instance). Men resolved to join together around the social contract because this would bring benefits to all. Men that obbeys the contract are abstract subjects of citizenship, taken apart from the violent dimension of law. And the subjects that don't obbey? In this just point is raised terror. When we say "you are a citizen", we begin a symbolic mission in this act. Lacan says that something escapes from this figure of subject of Good, something of this dimension of jouissance. The subject is said divided in the sense that he is not only sinthomatic, but also object of phantasy, where the dimension of responsible subject escapes. Something 'parasitize' it from inside. As Zizek says, the dimension of phantasy of law emerges in this sauvage side of a citizen that has eaten the last cannibal in order to finish cannibalism, but denies it.
Jose Luiz Aidar Prado