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