Zizek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime

[Dave Monroe]

... I didn't realize how long my original version of this post was, but
I believe I might have exceeded the Pynchon List 10k (is that right?)
limit by a coupla k.  So I've divided it into two sections.  So here
'tis ...

Now if there's one recent, important title on the sublime that I didn't
list earlier, it's Slavoj Zizek's The Sublime Object of Ideology (New
York: Verso, 1989).  The cutting edge of Slovenian psychoanalytic
theory, which is, interestingly, the cutting edge of theory these days,
apparently.

Had intended to post this for months now, and, given recent uses,
mentions of excess, the ridiculous, the sublime, the traumatic, not to
mention the pulp beneath the enamel, the flesh beneath the tattooed
skin, that is, the Real beneath the surface, of "reality," of the
symbolic, from Marek Wieczorek, "The Ridiculous, Sublime Art of Slavoj
Zizek," i.e., his Introduction to Slavoj Zizek's The Art of the
Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway (Seattle: U of
Washington P, 2000) ...

Zizek's Lacan is not the Lacan of post-structuralism, the theorist of
the floating signifier, but the Lacan of the Real, the first category in
the famous Lacanian triad of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic.
The most under-represnted of the Lacanian categories, the Real is also
the most unfathomable because it is fundamentally impenetrable and
cannot be assimilated to the symbolic order of language and
communication (the fabric of daily life); nor does it belong to the
Imaginary, the domain of images with which we identify and which capture
our attention.  According to Lacan, fantasy is the ultimate support of
our "sense of reality."  The Real is the hidden/traumatic underside of
our existence or sense of reality, whose disturbing effects are felt in
strange and unexpected places: the Lacanian Sublime.  Lynch's films
attest to the fact that the fantasmatic support of reality functions as
a defense against the Real, which often intrudes into the lives of the
protagonists in the form of extreme situations, through violence or
sexual excesses, in disturbing behavior that is both horrific and
enjoyable, or in the uncanny effects of close-ups or details.  The
unfathomable, traumatic nature of the situations Lynch creates also
makes them sublime. (viii-ix)

"Lynch's entire 'ontology,'" Zizek writes, "is based upon the
discordance between reality, observed from a safe distance, and the
absolute proximity of the Real.  His elementary procedure involves
moving forward from the establishing shot of reality to a disturbing
proximity that renders visible the disgusting substance of enjoyment,
the crawling and glistening of indestructible life." (ix, quoting Zizek,
"David Lynch, or, the Feminine Depression," The Metastases of Enjoyment,
p. 114)

In The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Zizek writes that "there is
nothing intrinsically sublime in a sublime object--according to Lacan, a
sublime object is an ordinary, everyday object which, quite by chance,
finds itself occupying the place of what he calls das Ding [the Thing],
the impossible-real object of desire.... It is its structural place--the
fact that it occupies the sacred/forbidden place of jouissance--and not
its intrinsic qualities that confers on it its sublimity." (ix, quoting
Zizek, TSOOI, p. 194, ellipses in Wieczorek's text)

Zizek's reading is structured around a complex set of complementary
oppositions: that of reality and its fantasmatic support, and of the law
and its inherent transgression, which in Lynch's universe are marked by
the opposition of the ridiculous and the sublime. (x)

... those sublime, hyperactive, life-enjoying agents against which the
characters in Lynch's films attempt to protect themselves by resorting
to a fantasy, equally ridiculous, of something innocuously beautiful.
"The gap that separates beauty from ugliness, " Zizek writes, "is the
very gap that separates reality from the Real: what constitutes reality
is the minimum of idealization the subject needs in order to sustain the
horror of the Real."  (x; Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 66; cf.
TSOOI, pp. 202-7)

By using extreme oppositions, Zizek argues, Lynch shows that evil is
mediated, that there is a speculative identity to good and evil, that
instead of being a substantial force, evil is reflexivized and composed
of ludicrous clichés.  He presents reality and its fantasmatic support
on the same surface, as a complementarity or coincidence of opposites,
as in itself necessarily multiple and inconsistent.  It is this
enigmatic juxtaposition or coincidence of opposites in Lynch's films--of
the protagonists' comical fixation on an ordinary yet "sublime" object;
of an unbearably naive yet deadly serious vision; or the redemptive
quality of cliches--that makes them paradigmatically postmodern,
corresponding to what Zizek here qualifies as the enigma of
"postmodernity." (xi)

There is a radical decentering of human subjectivity characteristic of
Freudian/Lacanian theory ....  The uncanny specter of the automatic,
mechanical production of our innermost feelings provides the model for
Lacan's notion of the "empty subject," the barred subject (represented
by the mathem $) whose innermost fantasmatic kernel is transposed onto
the "big Other," "the symbolic order which is the external place of the
subject's truth." [Zizek, TPOF, p. 49]  Since our desire is always the
desire of the Other--that is, both drawn from the Other and directed to
it--the disturbing thing is that we can never be certain what this Other
demands of us, what we are expected to be.  (xi)

To be continued ...