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Subject: HAB: To Bill Schaffer et al. on Sublime
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Sorry for a time lag between Bill Schaffer's full citation of Derrida's 
"Economimesis" and my thanks for it.  The discussion about  sublimity as 
some sort of 'challenge' to the Kantian or enlightenment system in general or 
a disequilibrium between ethics and aesthetics has been a rare experience on 
internet for me.

In the middle of this, my concern is Lacan, Kristeva, Zizek nexus which was 
mentioned in the previous posts.  Esp. because I'm working on the 
national/nationalist psyche, Kristeva's "pre-oedipal semiotic" 
and Zizek's The thing or The Real or sublime object or "objet petit a" or 
simply surplus (of course deriving from Lacan/Freud) has a significant 
indication to a "national thing."   Zizek's logic says that the nationalist project 
is a consequence of structuring one's own method, jouissance (enjoyment) 
with which other nations cannot share.   The nationalists believe that their 
way of jouissance has their own excess of sense that other nations cannot 
understand nor take away with.  (The immediate response should be how 
one nation does bother to share with another nation's "own" structure of 
enjoyment because that structure presupposes another nation's "own" 
character.)  

According to Zizek, perhaps as a warning to this nationalist logic,  "the 
greatest mass murders and holocausts have always been perpetrated in the 
name of man as harmonious being, of a New Man without antagonistic 
tension" (The Sublime Object of Ideology 5).  For example, "we can save 
democracy only by taking into account its own radical impossibility" (6).  In 
this sense, a provisional, temporary, contingent and conflicting sense  of 
identity would be ethical. 

I'm not quite sure whether this has an analogical significance to  Zizek's 
thesis about nationalism.  The expectation that I have while approaching 
Zizek (to be honest, a "thick" description about nationalist psyche and its 
alternative) sounds like flat here.   Right now I'm disappointed with my own 
understanding.  For further reading and conjecture about Zizek, my current 
question is: What does Zizek mean when he entitles one of his books "Enjoy 
Your Symptom!" ( which I did not check out yet because it's coming through 
interlibrary)?  In his analysis about nationalism, does Zizek have any specific 
relation with Kristeva?  As Bill Schaffer raised, can we connect this to 
Kristeva's concept of "abject" and that concept's significance also extends to 
the nationalism.

PS: The significance about nationalism in Zizek is also found in last chapters 
of Looking Awry (1991) and Tarrying with the Negative (1994). 

Kyu-hyung Cho
Dept. of English
Texas A&M University
K0c3351-AT-acs.tamu.edu [k "zero" c]