Zizek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime

[Dave Monroe]

... continuing on, 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 also demonstrates the idea of the big Other through reference to
Roberto Benigni's film Life is Beautiful.  Here a father attempts to
shield his little son from the atrocities (the unbearable,
unrepresentable Real) of a Nazi concentration camp through the
competitive evocation of the Other's desire, as though they were simply
playing a game of survival, a metaphor for the symbolic fiction that
renders reality bearable.  Although this film remains problematic, in
part because it also treats its spectators as children, Zizek prefers
Benigni's scenario to that of Spielberg's Schindler's List, which
portrays the experience of a Nazi camp commander who seems torn between
his racist prejudices and sexual attraction to a Jewish prisoner, as
though it were simply an expression of his immediate psychological
self-experience.  The problem with this and other attempts to represent
the Holocaust, according to Zizek, is that it tries to explain the
horrors of Nazism (or Stalinism) through the "psychological profiles" of
the individual perpetrators of atrocities.  (xi-xii)

He explains the crimes committed in Stalin's or Hitler's name not
through the psychology or perverse nature of the individuals involved,
but through the logic of the big Other.... the question is not a matter
of the psychic economy of individuals versus the objective ideological
system of the symbolic order.  Lacan has show, precisely, how the
subject is a function of the gap between the two, that, as Zizek writes
here, "the difference between 'subjective' pathologies and the libidinal
economy of the 'objective' ideological system is something ultimately
inherent to the subject."  Although nobody really believes in the ruling
ideology, we nevertheless strive to keep up its appearance, which
illuminates "the status of deception in ideology: those who should be
deceived by the ideological 'illusion' are not primarily concrete
individuals but, rather, the big Other; we should thus say that
Stalinism has a value as the ontological proof of the existence of the
big Other." [Zizek, TSOOI, p. 198]  Zizek argues that the institution
exists only when people believe in it, or, rather, act as if they
believe in it.  The institution not only numbs people; they can also be
indifferent to the effects of their own actions because the system acts
(and hates) on their behalf.  As Terry Eagleton notes, "Zizek sees
ideological power as resting finally on the libidinal rather than the
conceptual, on the way we hug our chains rather than the way we
entertain beliefs."  (xii; Eagleton, "Enjoy!," London Review of Books,
27 November 1997)

According to Lacan, the drive is inherently ethical because, as Zizek
elsewhere explains, the drive "is not 'blind animal thriving,' but the
ethical compulsion which compels us to mark repeatedly the memory of a
lost cause."  [Zizek, For they know not what they do, p. 272]  Zizek has
expanded this psychoanalytic insight into the realm of politics.  The
drive is the compulsion to revisit, to encircle again and again, those
sites of lost causes, of shattered and perverted dreams and hopes not
out of nostalgic longing for something that was believed to be good and
only contingently corrupted (Communism), nor as a cautioning against the
recurrence of gruesome and traumatic events (Nazism), but because the
marking of all lost causes signals the impossibility of all totalizing
ethics and morals.  In this sense, Zizek's method shares much in common
with Ernesto Laclau's notion of an "ethical bricolage," a kind of
mediation between deconstructionist undecidability and Levinasian
ultra-ethics.  (xii-xiii)

Zizek sees the "end of psychology" in contemporary culture despite (or
precisely because of) what appears to be an increasing
"psychologization" of social life": through the personal confessions in
game shows and sitcoms people increasingly talk like puppets, and
politicians' public confessions of their private feelings about
political decisions mask a widespread cynicism.  Against the ideology of
"psychologically convincing" characters, Zizek favors Lynch's
"extraneation" of the characters, the effects of which are strangely
de-realized or de-psychologized persons.  There is a method to Lynch's
madness, so to speak.  The psychological unity of the characters
disintegrates into a "spiritual transubstantiation of common clichés,"
as Zizek calls it here, and into outbursts of the Real, with reality and
its fantasmatic supplement acting side by side, as though existing on
the same surface. (xiii)

Both in their own way provide proof that our fantasies support our sense
of reality, and that this is in turn a defense against the Real. (xiii)


... the big Other = They?  Big Other is watching you, at any rate.
Anyway, much here perhaps applicable to those Pynchonian texts, I
think.  Also reminds me, anybody see that film adaptation of  Time
Regained, the last novel of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps
perdu?  Saw it twice, myself (without having read past Swann's Way, mind
you), think that, if anyone ever attempted Gravity's Rainbow: Now a
Major Motion Picture, that might well be the way to go.  Though I also
saw a stark and very poignant animated short a while back that also
struck me as having Pynchonian potential, so ...