That is to say, why was the Christian injunction “love thy neighbor like thyself” so problematic for Freud? The proximity of the Other which makes a neighbor a neighbor is that of jouissance: When the presence of the Other becomes unbearable, suffocating, it means that we experience his or her mode of jouissance as too intrusive. And, what is the contempo- rary “postmodern” racism, if not a violent reaction to this virtual- ization of the Other, a return of the experience of the neighbor in his or her (or their) intolerable, traumatic presence? The fea- ture which disturbs the racist in his Other (the way they laugh, the smell of their food …) is thus precisely the little piece of the real which bears witness to their presence beyond the symbolic order. We are thus far from bemoaning the loss of the contact with a “real,” flesh-and-blood other in cyberspace, in which all we en- counter are digital phantoms: Our point is rather that cyber- space is not spectral enough.

http://ift.tt/2aSNDFJ