Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 15:01:30 -0400
Subject: Re: Jouissance in the Dark



At 09:16 AM 10/23/00 -0400, you wrote:
>Incidentally, what I find to be revealing in BtW is the *miracle* at the end,
>which contrasts with the 'real world' style of the film. Without the miracle,
>which from a modernist perspective appears absurd, then the film loses all of
>its critical fitness.

         Except that if "God" is going to perform this miracle anyway, 
couldn't she have saved Emily Watson's character's degradation by just 
fixing the husband and her coming to her senses and leaving him?

>Not completely, but we might consider that the error is not completely on the
>side of the consumer, but also on the side of reality. "Reality" is lacking
>(this is the double split that Lacan introduces - the split in the subject 
>and
>the split in the object). This is one of the points that Zizek talks about in
>his introduction to the volume Mapping Ideology.

         Oh, god, this is the difficult issue of objective interests.  Do I 
as a feminist have a right, a duty, when seeing a women "enjoying" her 
abusive relationship to intervene?

>Tis a difficult question. I don't think the consumer is duped by the 
>advertiser,
>we all know that Coke isn't actually going to satisfy us much more than a 
>Pepsi
>or another name-brand cola (in blind taste tests only two percent of the
>population can distinguish between brand names) [insert age old statistic 
>from
>philosophy undergrad class]. But at the same time, we still buy Coke over the
>name brand... It seems to mere that there is a paradox at work here: we know
>damn well what we are doing, yet we are still doing it! (in contrast to "they
>known not what they do").

         But, do we drink Coke b/c our best friend is drinking Coke, or b/c 
at some level we've become convinced that we too can look like the 
beautiful others in the commercials?

O

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