INTRODUCTION
“In 2000, the 100th anniversary of the publication of F.’s The Interpretation of Dreams was accompanied by a new wave of triumphalist acclamations of the death of psychoanalysis (…) it is buried where it always belonged, in the lumber-room of pre-scientific obscurantist quests for hidden meanings, alongside religious confessors and dream-readers. As Todd Dufresne [Killing Freud: 20th century culture and the death of psychoanalysis, 2004] puts it, no figure in the history of human thought was more wrong about all its fundamentals (…) It was only to be expected that in 2005 (…) The Black Book of Psychoanalysis¹ [appeared]”
¹ Em breve no Seclusão.
“Lacan did not understand his return as a return to what F. said, but to the core of the Freudian revolution of which F. himself was not aware.” Era a única maneira de manter F. vivo (dizer que ele disse tudo que ele jamais disse)!
“each chapter of this book will confront a passage from L. with another fragment from philosophy, art, popular culture and ideology.” Zizek exagera um pouquinho na CARGA POP…
“by cutting himself off from the decaying corpse of the IPA, L. kept the Freudian teaching alive.” Protestantismo de merda – o culto nunca morre, sempre sobrevive através de cisões infinitas!
1. EMPTY GESTURES AND PERFORMATIVES: LACAN CONFRONTS THE CIA PLOT
“Timeo Danaos, et dano ferentes”
“Novelas mexicanas são filmadas em ritmo tão frenético (todo dia um episódio de 25 minutos) que os atores sequer recebem o roteiro a fim de aprender as falas antecipadamente; eles colocam pequenos pontos auriculares para saberem o que devem fazer, e aprendem seu papel a partir do que escutam, instantaneamente (‘Agora dê um sopapo nele e diga-lhe que o odeia! Agora abrace-o!…’). Esse proceder nos oferece uma imagem do quê, de acordo com a percepção comum, Lacan quer dizer com seu ‘grande Outro’.”
O TERCEIRO: “Essa referência onipresente a um Outro é o tema de uma piada de baixo nível sobre um caipira que, vítima de um naufrágio, acha-se confinado numa ilha com, digamos, Cindy Crawford. Depois de fazer sexo com ele, ela pergunta como foi; sua resposta é ‘ótimo!’, mas ele ainda tem um pequeno pedido a fazer para se sentir inteiramente satisfeito – pode ela se vestir como seu melhor amigo, colocando umas calças e pintando um bigode? Ele lhe afiança que não é nenhum tipo de obscuro pervertido, o que ela entenderá assim que cumprir o pequeno favor. Quando ela está pronta, ele se aproxima, dá-lhe uma cutucada nas costelas e dispara, com malícia de macho: ‘Adivinha só? Acabei de comer a Cindy Crawford!’. Esse Terceiro, sempre testemunha, trai a possibilidade de um prazer privado inocente verdadeiro. O sexo é sempre minimamente exibicionista e depende do olhar de mais alguém. Esse Outro só existe enquanto faz-de-conta.” Victor Hugo (um charlatão com que fiz análise) mente.
“Sempre pode-se dizer que a única carta que verdadeiramente alcança o destinatário é a carta não-enviada – o endereço não é de carne-e-osso, mas ninguém senão esse grande Outro.”
“Escrever uma carta e guardá-la na gaveta é enviá-la.”
“Após me envolver numa competição feroz por uma promoção no trabalho com o meu melhor amigo, se eu ganho, o adequado a se fazer é declinar do cargo, fazendo do derrotado o beneficiário; e o adequado para o amigo fazer é rejeitar por sua vez e devolver-me a vaga – dessa forma, quem sabe, a amizade pode ser salva.”
“o que escapa do sociopata é o fato de que ‘muitos atos humanos são executados . . . apenas pela interação em si mesma’.” Ele faltou o ensaio da banda, ou da colação de grau.
Cansamos desse tipo de reciprocidade hipócrita. Somos majoritariamente sociopatas sem remorsos!
“In a traditional German toilet, the hole in which shit disappears after we flush water is way up front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff at and inspect for traces of any illness; in the typical French toilet the hole is far to the back, so that shit may disappear as soon as possible; finally, the American toilet presents a kind of synthesis, a mediation between these two opposed poles – the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. No wonder that, in the famous discussion of different European toilets at the beginning of her half-forgotten Fear of Flying, Erica Jong mockingly claims that ‘German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything.’”
2. THE INTERPASSIVE SUBJECT: LACAN TURNS A PRAYER WHEEL
“The prayer wheels of Tibet: I attach a piece of paper with the prayer written on it to the wheel, turn it around mechanically (or, even more practically, let the wind or water turn it round), and the wheel is praying for me”
“the canned laughter on a TV show, when the reaction of laughter to a comic scene is included in the soundtrack itself. Even if I do not laugh, but simply stare at the screen, tired after a hard day’s work, I nonetheless feel relieved after the show, as if the soundtrack has done the laughing for me.
To properly grasp this strange process, one should supplement the fashionable notion of interactivity with its uncanny double, interpassivity.”
“Although I do not actually watch the films, the very awareness that the films I love are stored in my video library gives me a profound satisfaction, and occasionally enables me to simply relax and indulge in the exquisite art of far niente – as if the VCR is in a way watching them for me, in my place. VCR stands here for the big Other”
“Therein resides the typical strategy of the obsessional neurotic: he is frantically active in order to prevent the real thing from happening.”
“People intervene all the time, attempting to ‘do something’, academics participate in meaningless debates; the truly difficult thing is to step back and withdraw from it. Those in power often prefer even a critical participation to silence”
“The paradox of Predestination is that the theology which claims that our fate is determined in advance and that our redemption does not depend on our acts served as the legitimization of capitalism, the social system that triggered the most frantic productive activity in the history of humanity.”
“As every historian knows, Scottish kilts (in the form they are known today) were invented in the course of the 19th century.”
“According to a well-known anthropological anecdote, the primitives to whom certain superstitious beliefs were attributed (that they descended from a fish or from a bird, e.g.), when directly asked about these beliefs, answered: ‘Of course not – I’m not that stupid! But I have been told that some of our ancestors actually did believe that…’”
“Niels Bohr, who had aptly replied to Einstein’s ‘God doesn’t play dice’ (‘Don’t tell God what to do!’), also provided the perfect example of how a fetishist disavowal of belief works in ideology. Seeing a horseshoe on Bohr’s door, a surprised visitor remarked that he didn’t believe in the superstition that it brought luck. Bohr snapped back: ‘I don’t believe in it either; I have it there because I was told that it also works if one does not believe in it!’”
“Why are you saying you’re glad to see me, when you’re REALLY glad to see me?”
“what is false about ‘reality’ TV shows: the life we get in them is as real as decaf coffee.”
“The standard disclaimer in a novel (‘The characters in this text are a fiction; any resemblance to real-life characters is purely accidental’) holds also for the participants of reality soaps”
“Richard II is Shakespeare’s ultimate play about hystericization (in contrast to Hamlet, the ultimate play about obsession).” Mas Zizek dirá algumas dúzias de páginas depois que para Lacan histeria e obsessão são tudo a mesma coisa (basicamente matizes de neuroses).
“in the Rawls model of a just society, social inequalities are tolerated only in so far as they also help those at the bottom of the social ladder, and in so far as they are not based on inherited hierarchies, but on natural inequalities, which are considered contingent, not signifying merit. What Rawls doesn’t see is how such a society would create the condition for an uncontrolled explosion of resentment: in it, I would know that my inferior status is fully justified, and would be deprived of blaming my failure on social injustice.” “No wonder that even today’s conservatives are ready to endorse Rawls’ notion of justice” “the good thing about success or failure in free-market is that it allows me to perceive my failure as undeserved, contingent.”
“Lacan shares with Nietzsche and Freud the idea that justice as equality is founded on envy: our envy of the other who has what we do not have, and who enjoys it. The demand for justice is ultimately the demand that the excessive enjoyment of the other should be curtailed, so that everyone’s access to enjoyment will be equal. The necessary outcome of this demand, of course, is asceticism: since it is not possible to impose equal enjoyment, what one can impose is an equally shared phohibition.”
“Enjoy! We are all under the spell of this injunction, with the result that our enjoyment is more hampered than ever – recall the yuppie who combines narcissistic self-fulfillment with the utterly ascetic discipline of jogging and eating health food. This, perhaps, is what Nietzsche had in mind with his notion of the Last Man”
“Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being so.”
3. FROM CHE VUOI?(*) TO FANTASY: LACAN WITH EYES WIDE SHUT
(*) O que desejas?
Zizek diz com todas as palavras: Lacan não passa de um filósofo confinado entre a fenomenologia e o estruturalismo.
“What’s bugging you? What is it in you that makes you so unbearable not only for us, but also for yourself, that you yourself obviously do not control?”
“There exists a creature that is perfectly harmless; when it passes before your eyes, you hardly notice it and immediately forget it again. But as soon as it somehow, invisibly, gets into your ears, it begins to develop, it hatches, and cases have been known where it has penetrated into the brain and flourished there devastatingly, like the pneumococci in dogs which gain entrance through the nose . . . This creature is Your Neighbor.” Rilke
“why the hell did you tell me you liked me? Answer me, because I didn’t like you saying that at all. You can’t just walk up to a woman you barely know and tell her you like her. Y-o-u-c-a-n’t. You don’t know what she’s going through, what she’s feeling. I’m not married, you know. I’m not anything in this world. I’m just not anything.”
“a Third has to step in between me and my neighbours so that our relations do not explode in murderous violence.”
“In contrast to Althusser, Lacan advocates that we recognize practical anti-humanism, an ethics that goes beyond the dimension of what Nietzsche called ‘human, all too human’, and confronts the inhuman core of humanity. This means an ethics that fearlessly stands up to the latent monstrosity of being human, the diabolic dimension that erupted in the phenomena broadly covered by the label Auschwitz.”
“He is not human is not the same as he is inhuman. He is not human means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while he is inhuman means something thoroughly different, namely the fact that he is neither human nor inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as humanity, is inherent to being human. And perhaps one should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian philosophical revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excess of animal lusts and divine madness, while with Kant, the excess to be fought is immanent and concerns the very core of subjectivity itself. (Which is why, in German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, the ‘Night of the World’, in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the darkness around.)”
“A couple of years ago, Slovene feminists raised a hue and cry against a poster for sun lotion issued by a large cosmetics factory depicting a number of suntanned female rears clad in clinging swimsuits and accompanied by the slogan To each her own factor. Of course, this ad was based on a tacky double entendre: the slogan ostensibly referred to the sun lotion, which was offered to customers with different sun factors so as to suit different skin types; however, its entire effect was based on its obvious male-chauvinist reading: Each woman can be had, if only the man knows her factor, her specific catalyst, what turns her on!”
“Reds integrates the October Revolution – for Hollywood the most traumatic historical event – into the Hollywood universe by staging it as the metaphorical background for the sexual act between the movie’s main characters, John Reed (played by Warren Beatty) and his lover (Diane Keaton).” “the cries of the crowd serve as a metaphor for the rebirth of passion. The key mythical scenes of the revolution (street demonstrations, the storming of the Winter Palace) alternate with the depiction of the couple’s lovemaking, against the background of the crowd singing the International.” “Here we have the exact opposite of that Soviet socialist realism in which lovers would experience their love as a contribution to the struggle for socialism, making a vow to sacrifice all their private pleasures for the cause of the revolution and to drown themselves in the masses”
“In his recently discovered secret diaries, Wittgenstein reports that, while masturbating at the Front during World War I, he was thinking about mathematical problems.”
“In other words, psychoanalysis allows us to formulate a paradoxical phenomenology without a subject – phenomena arise that are not phenomena of a subject, appearing to a subject.”
“For standard [?] feminism it is an axiom that rape is a violence imposed from without: even if a woman fantasizes about being raped or brutally mistreated, this is either a male fantasy about women, or a woman does it in so far as she has ‘internalized’ the patriarchal libidinal economy and endorsed her victimization” “So the moment one mentions that a woman may fantasize about being raped, one hears it objected that ‘This is like saying that Jews fantasize about being gassed in the camps, or that African-Americans fantasize about being lynched!’” “The practical conclusion from this is that while (some) women really may daydream about being raped, this fact not only in no way legitimizes the actual rape, but renders it all the more violent.” “the core of our fantasy is unbearable to us.”
“it is not that dreams are for those who cannot endure reality, reality itself is for those who cannot endure their dreams.”
“The scenario was as follows: when the smoke disturbed his sleep, the father quickly constructed a dream that incorporated the disturbing element (smoke-fire) in order to prolong his sleep; however, what he confronted in the dream was a trauma (of his responsibility for the son’s death) much stronger than reality, so he awakened into reality in order to avoid the Real.”
“After Tom Cruise confesses his night’s adventure to Nicole Kidman and they are both confronted with the excess of their fantasizing, Kidman – upon ascertaining that now they are fully awake, back into the day, and that, if not for ever, at least for a long time, they will stay there, keeping the fantasy at bay – tells him that they must do something as soon as possible. ‘What’ he asks, and her answer is: ‘Fuck.’ End of the film, the final credits roll. The nature of the passage à l’acte as the false exit, the way to avoid confronting the horror of the phantasmatic netherworld, was never so bluntly stated in a film: far from providing them with a real-life bodily satisfaction that will supersede empty fantasizing, the passage to the act is presented as a stopgap, as a desperate preventive measure aimed at keeping at bay the spectral netherworld of fantasies. It is as if her message is Let’s fuck right now, and then we can stifle our teeming fantasies, before they overwhelm us again.” Ou tudo era só uma piada metalingüística de Kubrick sobre Tom Cruise e Nicole Kidman realmente irem foder na vida real, sem luz e câmera, mas com muita ou pouca ação… Além disso, como easter-egg ou sobremesa, ofereceu a predição (muito simples de fazer para grandes estrelas, aliás) de que o casal se divorciaria eventualmente.
4. TROUBLES WITH THE REAL: LACAN AS A VIEWER OF ALIEN
“Every word has a weight here, in this deceptively poetic [and boring] description of the mythic creature called by Lacan the ‘lamella’ (which can vaguely be translated as ‘manlet’, a condensation of ‘man’ and ‘omelet’), an organ that gives body to libido. Lacan imagines the lamella as a version of what F. called ‘partial object’ [he never ever wrote that expression!]”
“A lamella is indivisible, indestructible and immortal – more precisely, undead in the sense this term has in horror fiction”
Esforço sobre-humano (talvez inhuman!) para salvar o conceito de death drive freudiano…
“Andersen’s The Red Shoes, the story of a girl who puts on magic shoes that move on their own and compel her to dance on and on. The shoes stand for the girl’s unconditional drive, which persists, ignoring all human limitations, so that the only way the poor girl can get rid of them is to cut off her legs.”
MR. OBVIOUS: “For those used to dismissing Lacan as just another ‘postmodern’ relativist, this may come as a surprise: Lacan is resolutely anti-postmodern, opposed to any notion of science as just another story we are telling ourselves about ourselves, a narrative whose apparent supremacy over other – mythic, artistic – narratives is grounded only in the historically contingent Western ‘regime of truth’.”
De página em página dizendo “esse conceito de Lacan é muito complexo!”, “é mais complexo do que se imagina!”, “ao contrário do que muitos pensam, não é tão simples de entender!”… Pff.
“não tem nada a ver com a coisa-em-si de Kant” E quem foi que disse que tem?
“If there is a notion of the real, it is extremely complex and, because of this, incomprehensible, it cannot be comprehended in a way that would make an All out of it. How, then, are we to find our way and introduce some clarity into this conundrum of the Reals?”
Tive que abortar a leitura desse capítulo quando começou a falar do sonho da injeção de Irma. Não SUPORTO mais qualquer referência a essa fabricação!
5. EGO IDEAL AND SUPEREGO: LACAN AS A VIEWER OF CASABLANCA
F. hipostaseou uma entidade chamada “superego”. Lacan vai além e divide o que já não existe em mais TRÊS entidades!
6. “GOD IS DEAD, BUT HE DOESN’T KNOW IT”: LACAN PLAYS WITH BOBOK
“Alguns fragmentos de Lacan são peças de um quebra-cabeça que temos de resolver” Não me diga, Einstein!
“if God exists, then everything is permitted – is this not the most succinct definition of the religious fundamentalist’s predicament?” Eu só fico puto porque um autor precisa usar Lacan de muleta para abordar um tema desses…
suck, sink
“How are we to account for this paradox? Think of the situation known to most of us from our youth: the unfortunate child who, on Sunday afternoon, has to visit his grandmother instead of being allowed to play with friends. The old-fashioned authoritarian father’s message to the reluctant boy would have been: ‘I don’t care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to your grandma’s and behave yourself there!’ (…) although forced to do something he clearly doesn’t want to, he will retain his inner freedom and the ability to (later) rebel against the paternal authority. Much more tricky would have been the message of a ‘postmodern’ non-authoritarian father: ‘You know how much your grandmother loves you! But, nonetheless, I do not want to force you to visit her – go there only if you really want to!’ Every child who is not stupid (which is to say most children) will immediately recognize the trap of this permissive attitude: beneath the appearance of free choice there is an even more oppressive demand than the one formulated by the traditional authoritarian father, namely an implicit injunction not only to visit Grandma, but to do it voluntarily, out of the child’s free will. Such a false free choice is the obscene superego injunction: it deprives the child even of his inner freedom, instructing him not only what to do, but what to want to do.”
“For decades, a classic joke has circulated among Lacanians to exemplify the key role of the Other’s knowledge: a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to convince him that he is not a seed but a man. When he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and is allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling. There is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that it will eat him. ‘My dear fellow’, says his doctor, ‘you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.’ ‘Of course I know that’, replies the patient, ‘but does the chicken know it?’”
“In other words, when a Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, the Marxist’s reproach to him is not: ‘The commodity may seem to you to be a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified expression of relations between people’, but rather: ‘You may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple embodiment of social relations (that, e.g., money is just a kind of voucher entitling you to a part of the social product), but this is not how things really seem to you. In your social reality, by means of your participation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that a commodity really appears to you as a bourgeois object endowed with special powers.’” O reaça pensa que o comuna não tem direito a sentir o que é decorrência necessária do social, por isso a piadinha (que ele leva a sério – eis o único problema) do iphone.
“Above all, things like money, stock-exchange, the foreign currency administration, type-writer, are for Kafka thoroughly mystical (what they effectively are, only not for us, the others).” Milena Jesenska
“K. was able to experience directly these phantasmatic beliefs that we ‘normal’ people disavow.”
“Dostoievsky provided the most radical version of the idea that If God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted in Bobok, his weirdest short story, which even today continues the perplex interpreters. Is this bizarre ‘morbid fantasy’ simply a product of the author’s own mental sickness? Or is it a cynical sacrilege, an abominable attempt to parody the truth of the divine Revelation as disclosed in the Holy Bible?”
“The great thing is that we have 2 or 3 months more of life and then – bobok! I propose to spend these 2 months as agreeably as possible, and so to arrange everything on a new basis. Gentlemen! I propose to cast aside all shame.”
“(All passages are from www.kiosk.com/dostoevsky/livrary/bobok.txt)” É claro que já está off-line! Dez anos é um tempo mais macarrônico, labiríntico e improvável na world wide web do que seriam mil anos numa biblioteca mofada… É assim que finalmente esqueceremos toda a literatura mundial dentro em breve…
No fim, a crítica literária zizekiana é tão bobinha e ingênua… Cada vez mais eu acho que Dostoievsky diminui de estatura, também, para mim… Relendo-o aos poucos chego à conclusão de que seu realismo era mais unidimensional do que um dia já cri…
7. THE PERVERSE SUBJECT OF POLITICS: LACAN AS A READER OF MOHAMMAD BOUYERI
“A true Stalinist politician loves mankind, yet carries out horrible purges and executions – his heart is breaking while he does it, but he cannot help it, it is his Duty towards the Progress of Humanity.” “In her Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt provided a precise description of this sidestep that Nazi executioners accomplished in order to be able to endure the horrible acts they performed. Most of them were not simply evil, they were well aware that they were doing things that brought humiliation, suffering and death to their victims. The way out of this predicament was that ‘instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!’”
“When, on 2 November 2004, the Dutch documentary filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdan by the Islamist extremist Mohammad Bouyeri, a letter was found stuck into a knife wound in his belly, addressed to his friend Hirshi Ali, a female Somali member of the Dutch parliament known as a fierce fighter for the rights of Muslim women. If there ever was a ‘fundamentalist’ document, this is one: (…) Since your appearance in the Dutch political arena you have been constantly busy criticizing Muslims and terrorizing Islam with your statements.”
“from If you are truthful, you should not fear death, a pervert passes to If you wish death, you are truthful.” Zaratustra deturpado – mas mais ou menos?! Qual a escala da deturpação?!
“This brings us to Lacan’s depiction of the pervert (…)” É esse tipo de link forçado que estraga completamente a leitura!
“The late Pope John Paul II propagated the Catholic ‘culture of Life’ as our only hope against today’s nihilist ‘culture of death’”
“a man can only pretend to be a woman; only a woman can pretend to be a man who is pretending to be a woman, because only a woman can pretend to be what she is” Esse estilo de discurso essencialista de Zizek em pleno 2006 soa muitíssimo ultrapassado – ainda presa da má consciência sartreana.
NOTES
“Signifier is a technical term, coined by Saussure, which Lacan uses in a very precise way” Bela forma de dizer que Lacan usa uma palavra arbitrária e/ou erradamente.
O “a” de pequeno objeto a decorre de autre. E Lacan não o diz em nenhuma de suas talvez mais de 20 mil páginas… Então, bom (ou mau?) saber!
“One of the ridiculous excesses of this joint venture of religious fundamentalism and the scientific approach is taking place today in Israel, where a religious group convinced of the literal truth of the Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah will come when a calf that is totally red is born, is expending huge amounts of time and energy to produce such a calf, through genetic engineering.”
Seclusão Anagógica 