The absolute Other (in the form of the superego) is there in order to guarantee that there will always be a lack on the other side (the side of the subject); that this lack will never ‘run out’, and that ‘it’ (the act) will never succeed. If an accomplished (or ‘successful’) act is always related to the dimension of the ‘lack that comes to lack’, the superegoic version of the (moral) law focuses on preventing the act from even taking place. But the only real guarantee that can be fabricated to prevent the act from even taking place is the advent of the figure of an absolute Other. If there is ‘an Other of the Other’, the very possibility of the act is excluded by definition. And such an exclusion, in spite of the humiliation and torment that the subject must endure at the hands of this Other, is, in fact, pacifying. -Zupancic

Jujutsu With Zizek

The object of desire is simply the desired object: let’s say, in simple sexual terms, the person whom I desire. The object­ cause of desire, on the other hand, is that which makes me desire this person. And the two are not the same. Usually, we are not even aware of what was the object-cause of desire - it requires psychoanalysis to learn what, for example, made me desire that particular woman. This is something along the lines of what Freud already called the unary feature - and on which Lacan later devel­oped a whole theory: i.e. some feature which triggers my desire in the other. And I think this is how one should read Lacan’s statement that there is no sexual relationship. This means precisely that it is never simply me and my partner. There is at the centre of any relationship the object-cause of desire. - Zizek

Jujutsu With Zizek

The Other does not exist as the Guarantor of Truth, as the Other of the Other. … It is in this hole within the substantial Other that the subject must recognize its place: the subject is interior to the substantial Other insofar as it is identified with an obstruction in the Other, with the impossibility of achieving its identity by means of self-closure. The ‘abolition of the object’, in turn, represents the flip-side: it is not a fusion of the subject and the object into a subject-object, but rather a radical shift in the status of the object itself - the object here neither conceals nor fills the hole in the Other. Such is the post-fantasmatic relationship with the object: the object is ‘abolished’, ‘suppressed’, it loses its fascinating aura. That which at first dazzles us with its charm is exposed as a sticky and disgusting remainder. - Zizek

Jujutsu With Zizek

In the case of the saint, the subject, in an unheard-of way, “causes itself”, becomes its own cause. Its cause is no longer decentred, i. e. , the enigma of the Other’s desire no longer has any hold over it. … The status of the subject as such is hysterical: the subject ‘is’ only insofar as it confronts the enigma of “What do you want? ” … By means of the fantasy-formation, the subject provides an answer to the question, ‘What am I for my parents, for their desire? ’ and thus endeavours to arrive at the ‘deeper meaning’ of his or her existence, to discern the Fate involved in it. The reassuring lesson of fantasy is that “I was brought about with a special purpose”. At the end of psychoanalytic treatment, instead of being bothered of what I am for the others, I fully assume the uttermost contingency of my being. The subject becomes ‘cause of itself’ in the sense of no longer looking for a guarantee of his or her existence in another’s desire. http://zizek.livejournal.com/2266.html

Jujutsu With Zizek

In “pure” sex, the partner is reduced to a fantasy object, that is to say, pure sex is masturbation with a real partner who functions as a prop for our indulging in fantasies, while it is only through love that we can reach the Real (of the) Other. (This also accounts for the status of the Lady in courtly love: precisely because of its endless postponing of the consummation of the sexual act, courtly love remains on the level of sexual desire, not love – the proof of this is the fact that the Lady is reduced to a pure symbolic entity, indistinguishable from all others, not touched in the Real of her singularity.) Lacan’s extensive discussion of love in Encore is thus to be read in the Pauline sense, as opposed to the dialectic of the Law and its transgression: this second dialectic is clearly “masculine”/phallic, it involves the tension between the All (the universal Law) and its constitutive exception, while love is “feminine,” it involves the paradoxes of the non-All. -Zizek

Jujutsu With Zizek

In hysteria the subject himself has the status of a question addressed to the big Other: ‘What am I for the Other?’ In perversion the question is displaced on to the Other - that is, a pervert has the answer (say, a Stalinist Communist who knows what people really want), whereas the question is foisted on the Other in whom the pervert endeavours to arouse anxiety. -Zizek

Jujutsu With Zizek

Ego-Evil is motivated by greed, by disregard for universal ethical principles; the Evil attributed to the so-called ‘fundamentalist fanatics’, on the contrary, is Superego-Evil: Evil accomplished in the name of fanatical devotion to some ideological ideal; The Id-Evil thus stages the most elementary ‘short circuit’ in the subject’s relationship to the primordially missing object-cause of his desire: what ‘bothers’ us in the ‘other’ (Jew, Japanese, African, Turk …) is that he appears to entertain a privileged relationship to the object - the other either possesses the object-treasure, having snatched it away from us (which is why we don’t have it) , or poses a threat to our possession of the object. In short, the skinhead’s ‘intolerance’ of the other cannot be adequately conceived without a reference to the object-cause of desire that is, by definition, missing. Racism is always grounded in a particular fantasy (of cosa nostra, of our ethnic Thing menaced by ‘them’, of ‘them’ who, by means of their excessive enjoyment, pose a threat to our ‘way of life’) which resists universalization. The translation of the racist fantasy into the universal medium of symbolic intersubjectivity (the Habermasian ethics of dialogue) in no way weakens the hold of the racist fantasy upon us. Ego-Evil is motivated by greed, by disregard for universal ethical principles; the Evil attributed to the so-called ‘fundamentalist fanatics’, on the contrary, is Superego-Evil: Evil accomplished in the name of fanatical devotion to some ideological ideal; The Id-Evil thus stages the most elementary ‘short circuit’ in the subject’s relationship to the primordially missing object-cause of his desire: what ‘bothers’ us in the ‘other’ (Jew, Japanese, African, Turk …) is that he appears to entertain a privileged relationship to the object - the other either possesses the object-treasure, having snatched it away from us (which is why we don’t have it) , or poses a threat to our possession of the object. In short, the skinhead’s ‘intolerance’ of the other cannot be adequately conceived without a reference to the object-cause of desire that is, by definition, missing. Racism is always grounded in a particular fantasy (of cosa nostra, of our ethnic Thing menaced by ‘them’, of ‘them’ who, by means of their excessive enjoyment, pose a threat to our ‘way of life’) which resists universalization. The translation of the racist fantasy into the universal medium of symbolic intersubjectivity (the Habermasian ethics of dialogue) in no way weakens the hold of the racist fantasy upon us. - S. Zizek

Jujutsu With Zizek

For Lacan, desire is a form of entrapment that is governed by the Hegelian dialectic: the Aufhebung confirms the subject as a desiring being. Desire (of the slave) is the desire to be in the place of the Other (the master). This desire can only come to an end when life does: death is the absolute master. But, for Ricoeur, both slave and master are able to live their lives once they recognise each other: this is mutual recognition, not the meconnaissance of ‘primary narcissism’; the absolute master is not death; but life; life is lived in mutuality once desire has been left behind. - K Simms

Jujutsu With Zizek

belief that the Other knows the truth about her object a; she holds a belief that such an Other exists and that it is flawless. The hysteric also demands that every man be the embodiment of such an Other, which forces her to constantly question the authority of her partner. ”The hysteric, looking for an Other without lack, offers herself to him as phallicized object to make him complete, to install him as Other without flaw.” Through this desperate attempt, the hysteric hopes to become the only object of the desire of the Other, which would give her certainty as of her being. - R. Salecl

Jujutsu With Zizek

Violet writes to Vita, ‘I love in you something which is not you but me.’ A part of ‘ourselves’ may remain, as she implies, outside us. Lacan elaborated on St Augustine’s notion of that which is ‘closer to us than we are to ourselves’, the idea that we search for a part of ourselves that has somehow been lost outside us. - Darian Leader

Jujutsu With Zizek

Sex is, then, the impossibility of completing mean­ing. ... Sex is the structural incompleteness of language, not that sex is itself incomplete. ... The Kantian argument wants to desubstantialize sex. It links sex to the conflict of reason with itself, not simply to one of the poles of the conflict. This constitutes a more radical desubstantialization of sex, a greater sub­version of its conception as substance, than the one attempted by the Judith Butler position.
By linking sex to signification, Butler makes our sexuality something that communicates itself to others. While the fact that communication is a pro­cess, & thus ongoing, precludes a complete unfolding of knowledge
When, on the contrary, sex is disjoined from the signifier, it becomes that which does not communicate itself, that which marks the subject as unknow­ able. To say that the subject is sexed is to say that it is no longer possible to have any knowledge of him or her. Sex serves no other function than to limit reason, to remove the subject from the realm of possible experience or pure understanding. - Joan Copjec
Jujutsu With Zizek

Nietzsche perceives in Wagner the lack of an erect, assertive, firm male attitude—instead of the clearly structured rhythmic and melodic edifice, his music indulges in the “feminized” attitude of passively submerging into the shapeless ocean of feeling… . This femininity scorned by Nietzsche is the “eternal Feminine,” the phantasmatic support of the actual subordination of women; paradoxically, Nietzsche’s scorn for Wagner’s “feminization” of music is thus much closer to feminism than the Wagnerian elevation of woman as man’s redeemer. - Slavoj Zizek

Jujutsu With Zizek

The subject gives to the other what he or she does not have. This object is the traumatic objet petit a, the object cause of desire. Behind the narcissistic relation- ship toward the love object we encounter the Real, the traumatic object in ourselves, as well as in the other: “Analysis proves that love is in its essence narcissistic, and reveals the substance of the presumably—fallaciously—objectal as that which is in the desire its residue, i.e., its cause: the support of its dissatisfaction, even its impossibility.” I-can-t-love-you-unless-I-give-you-up Renata Salecl

Jujutsu With Zizek

For Kant it is unimaginable that someone would want his own destruction—this would be diabolical. … On a certain level every subject, as average as he might very well be, wants his destruction, whether he wants it or not. It is this level that Lacan calls the death drive, and it is here that he situates jouissance. In other words, the “angelization” of the good and the “diabolization” of the evil is the (conceptual) price to pay for making the Real an object of the will, that is, for making the coincidence of the will with the Law the condi­tion of an ethical act. - Alenka Zupancic

Jujutsu With Zizek

Although sexual jouissance is inherently masturbatory and idiotic, isolating me – the core of my subjectivity - from my partner, reducing the partner to an instrument (of my jouissance), it does NOT hold that, for this reason, I must renounce sexual jouissance in order to assert my love for the other. On the contrary, it is precisely such a renunciation which is, as a rule, a fake, a stratagem masking some unacknowledged jouissance (there is nothing more elementary than the jouissance provided by renouncing pleasures in sacrificing oneself for the other). For that reason, perhaps the ultimate proof of love for the other is that I am ready to share with the other the very heart of my masturbatory idiotic jouissance. - Slavoj Zizek

Jujutsu With Zizek

What is of special interest here are the perverse paradoxes Kant gets involved in when he endeavors to articulate the interaction of a beautiful woman and a sublime man: man’s ultimate message to a woman is “even if you do not love me, I shall force you to respect me by the sheer force of my sublime grandeur,” whereas woman’s counter-claim is “even if you do not respect me, I shall force you to love me for my beauty.” These para­ doxes are perverse insofar as their underlying premise is that, in order to discover the sublime grandeur of man’s moral stance, woman must cease to love him, and vice versa, man must disdain woman for her lack of proper moral attitude if he is to experience the true character of his love for her. Along these lines, Kant even provides his own formulation of the impossibility of sexual relationship: in sexual­ ity, man’s object is either the nonspecified universality of “any woman” (if he is driven by raw bodily passion) or the fantasy-image to which no actual woman can ever correspond in reality (the romantic notion of sublime infatuation). In both cases, the real object—the actual woman in her uniqueness—is annihilated. tarrying

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The Other is the unconscious regarded as “the pure subject of the signifier”, whereas others are the counterparts of the ego: any object, including other persons qua objects, with which the subject may affiliate in a real, imaginary, or symbolic mode. The difference between Other and other is consti­ tuted by the bar of repression, much as attention to particular beings veils the meaning of Being, according to Heidegger. FIGURATIONS-OF-THE-OB-JET-A

Jujutsu With Zizek FIGURATIONS-OF-THE-OB-JET-A

when the subject fully assumes his or her identification with the sinthome, when he or she unreservedly “yields” to it, rejoins the place where “it was,” giving up the false distance which defines our everyday life. “ — Tarrying With The Negative - Slavoj Zizek

Jujutsu With Zizek

Crucial to Buddhism is the reflexive change from the object to the thinker himself:first,we isolate the thing that bothers us,the cause of our suffering;then we change not the object but ourselves,the way we relate to (what appears to us as)the cause of our suffering:“What was extinguished was only the false view of self.What had always been illusory was understood as such.Nothing was changed but the perspective of the observer.” … The path towards Buddhist Enlightenment begins by focusing on the most elementary feelings of “injured innocence,”of suffering an injustice without cause (the preferred topic of narcissistic,masochistic thoughts:“How could she do this to me?I don‟t deserve to be treated that way.” ). The next step is to make the shift to the Ego itself,the subject of these painful emotions,rendering clear and palpable its own fleeting and irrelevant status—the aggression directed against the object causing the suffering should be turned against the Self itself. … We gain the insight into the illusory nature of that which appears to need repair. http

Jujutsu With Zizek

The object is ceded as a way to avoid anxiety. Anxiety is not triggered by a loss. Anxiety predates the loss of the object. The object is given up in order to quell anxiety. The infant at the breast is confronted above all by the unanswerable question of the mother’s desire. It is in the fate of this question that the mother assumes the form of das Ding, not the little other of the imaginary object, the mirror object of the imaginary human being, but the unknowable, unmasterable, and monstrous big Other. … The infant comes to experience itself as a body for the first time with the separation or ceding of the breast. “ — Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher, p. 246

Jujutsu With Zizek

The drive can be ‘mortal’ precisely because it is indifferent to death (as well as to life); because it is not preoccupied with death, because death does not interest it. - A Zupancic

Jujutsu With Zizek

Death drive is the opposite of dying, a name for the ‘undead’eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain. ... Human life is never just life: humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which derails the ordinary run of things .

—	Slavoj Zizek, Adieu Derrida

You must sacrifice being recognized for recognizing. Your project, so to speak, needs to fit in with what the other wants you to be (or what you imagine they want you to be). p43 - Missing Out, A. Phillips

Jujutsu With Zizek

He has to produce what she lacks, he has to guarante a wholeness. In exchange she offers herself as the answer to the question she has asked in his place, an answer she refuses beforehand. In a tacit conspiracy, the lack is never brought to the negotiating table. This hysterical solution has to be avoided. Psychoanalysis does not make the woman, nor the master. - Paul Verhaeghe, From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine p245

Jujutsu With Zizek

hate is the excess of desire that threatens to destroy the ego and slightly later the object and the forbidden desires. “ — Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling And Being Bored

Jujutsu With Zizek

In the phobic fantasy you convince a part of yourself that the bad things are elsewhere only because there is really no elsewhere. Finding hate objects may be every bit as essential as finding love objects, but if one can tolerate some of ones badness then one can take some fear out of the world. “ — Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling And Being Bored

Jujutsu With Zizek

A response to desire that is understood destroys desire. These limits define desire (define us). We are to the degree that we risk ourselves. “ — Bataille, On Nietzsche

Jujutsu With Zizek

Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression. “ — Deleuze, quoted in: Karmen MacKendrick, Word Made Skin, p20

Jujutsu With Zizek

Lacan differs from the paranoid only in the realization that “the Other of the Other” is as illusory as “the Other” itself. “ — Aline Flieger, Is Oedipus Online?, p239

Jujutsu With Zizek

Zizek thinks masochism obfuscates a longing for discipline at the hands of the dominatrix. Here Zizek plays double double - his private phantasy eliminating a terrible symbolic father is in fact reinforced by a “need” for the “pacifying” real father, who seems to have some maternal qualities. On the other hand, the fantasy of an infantile reunion with the mother that subtends the formulation of parent-as-pacifier seems to be accompanied by a need for a chastising real mother (the dominatrix). This seems to mask, render, & reconfigure the terrifying Symbolic Father as Phallic Mother, and the Nurturing Mother as Mr. Mom, in order to avoid the confrontation (at the Oedipal interaction or website) with the other as Other. “ — Aline Flieger, Is Oedipus Online, p63

Jujutsu With Zizek

The hysteric’s withdrawal of love can be interpreted in a mulltitude of other ways: as the expression of so-called feminine masochism preventing a woman to fully seize the day; as a protofeminist gesture of stepping out of the confines of phallic economy, wwhich posits as the woman’s ultimate goal her happiness in a relationship with a man; and so on. These Interpretations miss the point. If we equate subject with freedom & autonomy, is such a gesture of withdrawal not the ultimate form of autonomy” - Not as a sacrificial gesture addressed at some version of the big Other, but as a gesture that provides its own satisfaction in the bery gap that separates me from the object. “ — Slavoj Zizek, Four Discourses, Four Subjects, SIC2, p86

Jujutsu With Zizek

Sade’s fictional world is populated by libertine beasts. But at no point do they claim to be disciples of some philosophy of pleasure, eroticism or freedom. What they implement is a desire to destroy the other and to destroy themselves through sexual excess. Nature, as Sade understands it, is murderous, passionate, and excessive. Whereas the Encyclopaedists tried to explain the world, Sade constricted an Encyclopedia of Evil based upon the need for a strict apprenticeship in boundless joissance. The perverse sexual act is primarily a narrative, a funeral operation, a macabre form of education. It is as ordered as a grammar & as devoid of affection as a lesson in rhetoric. “ — Elizabeth Rodinesco, Our Dark Side, p31

Jujutsu With Zizek

"Sexual difference is that “bedrock of impossibility” on account of which every “formalization” of sexual difference fails. In the sense in which Butler speaks of “competing universalities,” one can thus speak of competing symbolizations/ normativizations of sexual difference: if sexual difference may be said to be “formal,” it is certainly a strange form—a form whose main result is precisely that it undermines every universal form that aims at capturing it. If one insists on referring to the opposition between the universal and the particular, between the transcendental and the contingent/pathological, then one could say that sexual difference is the paradox of the particular that is more universal than universality itself—a contingent difference, an indivisible remainder of the “pathological” sphere (in the Kantian sense of the term), that always somehow derails or destabilizes normative ideality itself. Far from being normative, sexual difference is thus pathological in the most radical sense of the term: a contingent stain that all symbolic actions of symmetrical kinship positions try in vain to obliterate. Far from constraining in advance the variety of sexual arrangements, the Real of sexual difference is the traumatic cause that sets in motion their contingent proliferation. This notion of the Real also enables me to answer Butler’s reproach that Lacan hypostasizes the “big Other” into a kind of prehistorical transcendental a priori. For as we have already seen, when Lacan emphatically asserts that “there is no big Other,” his point is precisely that there is no a priori formal structural scheme exempted from historical contingencies—there are only contingent, fragile, inconsistent configurations. (Furthermore, far from clinging to the paternal symbolic authority, the “Name-of-the-Father” is for Lacan a fake, a semblance that conceals this structural inconsistency.)"

- Slavoj Zizek

In allegory, history looks like a petrified landscape. … No sense of freedom lives in its features. The fate of every human being is symbolized in this token of mortality. This is the core of the allegorical vision, of the Baroque idea of history; History is significant only in the stations of its corruption. Signification is a function of mortality - because it is death that marks the passage from corruptibility to meaningfulness.

Jujutsu With Zizek

That is precisely what Eichmann wanted: to be hanged in public & to enjoy his own execution so that he could believe to immortal & the equal of god. At the foot of the gibbet, he defieshis judges, telling them ‘we shall meet again’ & forgot that it was his own funeral: ‘It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness has taught him - the lesson of the fearsome, word-&-thought defying banality of evil’ (Arendt).

Jujutsu With Zizek

Jujutsu With Zizek

“sexuality is the vanishing point of meaning” because there can be no sexual relation when desire is always directed beyond the object which represents its desire." 

- penelope ingram

via Jujutsu With Zizek

Woman is the symptom of man, caught in the hysterical game of demanding that he refuse her demand, precisely to the extent to which she is submitted to the phallic enjoyment. … Woman redeems man by renouncing phallic enjoyment. (What we have here is the exact opposite to Weininger where man redeems-destroys woman by overcoming his phallicity.) This is what Wagner was not able to confront, and the price to be paid for this avoidance fully to assume the “feminization” of Parsifal after he enters the domain “beyond the phallus” was the fall into perversion. - Slavoj Zizek

Zizek on love: The standard notion of love in psychoanalysis is reductionist: there is no pure love, love is just "sublimated" sexual lust. Until his late teaching, Lacan also insisted on the narcissistic character of love: in lovin an Other, I love myself in the Other; even if the Other is more to me than myself, even if i am ready to sacrifice myself for the Other, what I loved in the Other is my idealized perfected Ego, my Supreme Good - but still my Good.


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Zizek on aura:
Walter Benjamin noted that the aura surrounding an object signals that it returns the gaze; he simply forgot to add that the auratic effect arises when this gaze is covered up, "gentrified" - the moment this cover is removed, the aura changes into a nightmare, the gaze becomes that of Medusa. http://jujutsu-with-zizek.tumblr.com/post/21376624364/do-you-eavesdrop-what-others-say-about-you-zizek (art by elle shushan) 

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