Subject: Re: Breaking the Jouissance
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 09:06:44 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)



On Fri, 27 Oct 2000 08:39:36 +0300 Boris.Vidovic-AT-sea.fi wrote:

> The fact that neither Bess nor Jan are 'happy' in the end still doesn't 
amount to 'oppositional discourse' that questions the patriarchal society.

No, it doesn't. But I wasn't really starting and finishing my argument with 
that either, was I?

> In fact, most of the women I have discussed the film with find it misogynic 
and were quite offended by it.

Yes, because the moral fibre of Sleeping in Seattle is so much more thought 
provoking, eh?

> What Zizek is doing (here and in most of his writings) is reading into the 
film (or into whatever phenomena his 'theoretical' teeth get stuck) his own 
interpretation(s) that may or may not have to do much with the text itself.

And yet, after reading Zizek things appear differently. 

> The fact that he is quite witty and well read doesn't mean that his writings 
should be read as sacred texts. After all, has anyone noticed any development 
in his thought in last 10 years? He just keeps giving the same answers to all 
possible questions and his analyses (ranging from Hitchcock's films to the 
public toilets in different cultures) are all the same.

That isn't quite true. In his book Enjoyment as a Political Factor (1991) Zizek 
barely discussed the notion of jouissance at all. It isn't until Plague 
(1997) of Fantasies that he develops the concept. There hasn't been a 
revolutionary change in his thought - but this isn't all that unusual. Habermas 
hasn't much deviated from his tragectory since 1981 (after the Paris 
Lectures)... 
 
I have no investment in Zizek, I simply happen to think that he's a brilliant 
social theorist. If there are problems in his work (and I don't really consider 
repetition to be a problem with Zizek) then let's hear them. I have a series of 
questions / concerns ranging from Lacan's conceptualization of sexuation to his 
four discourses. I wonder if, truly, "the subject is not substance."  I 
struggle with the idea that political economy is a fundamental antagonism, and 
have tried to think critically about whether a democracy is, in fact, healthy 
when it is radically contested and split. One of my biggest concerns is that 
desire is overdetermined in Lacan... to the great neglect of a more 
differentiated understanding of reason or rationality, and I'm skeptical about 
the notion that the unconscious is unified... what if it is just as fragmented 
as the symbolic? And yes, there is a certain madness in granting meaning to 
each and every particle of existence (as Zizek notes in the Hitchcock 
anthology) - at the same time, we wouldn't want to say that the things that 
happen in our lives are completley unmotivated, would we?

But I've found that levelling these criticisms isn't helpful when I don't 
understand what the original position is, so that's what I'm doing here. I'm 
defending Zizek against criticism because it helps me understand what he's 
talking about. So, I agree, no sacred texts here. My strategy is pedagogical. 
There is no point in me criticizing what I doesn't understand.

ken