So much feedback from this particular study, and, for today, only around 500 words to cover it in. But then it leaves more for the next couple of days (reserves), so I’ll just have to prioritize. Thank God Zizek has little to say about existentialism; otherwise I would have to add angst to the pile.
*
Anyway, one of the terms (a Lacanian one) that tends to pop up regularly in Zizek’s writings, and especially in The Plague of Fantasies, is the objet petit a. Early in the book (pg. 9) he describes it as:
“…the object of fantasy….[and] ‘something in me more than myself on account of which I perceive myself’ as ‘worthy of the Other’s desire’.”
And we can see a connection here with Lacan’s Mirror Phase in which the child, for the first time, sees the molecular multiplicity of drives and impulses that constitutes their experience drawn into a molar and coherent whole. And it is because of this experience that we spend the rest of our lives trying to recreate it through the fictions we form about ourselves. And given the role that our fictions play in our relationships with the Other that desires us, fictions that we, at some level must recognize as fictions, does it seem any surprise that insecurity would play such a large role in our relationship with that Other? There are, of course, those who would argue:
“I never feel insecure; I can take it or leave it.”
But doesn’t that sound like just another fiction one might create about themselves (a fantasy)? And in that context, can’t we also consider the possibility that this affected confidence may be little more than a common hysterical response? Couldn’t this be little more than a psychological wall built against the distinction this person sees between their actual selves and the fiction they have created for themselves in order to maintain a molar sense of self?
At the same time, it is suggested that the objet petit a can be found in the other in a partial object that creates a space around it that fantasy can fill in. Take, for instance, a foot fetish –that which women exploit all the time through high heels (the curve), nail polish, and the toe rings they wear (to draw attention to their feet). As Zizek points out, the fetish (via the petit objet a) acts in a metonymical way in that it suggests something beyond the foot. It fills in with fantasy. The man looks at the foot and imagines the toes curling, then extends this, through fantasy, to her face contorting in ecstasy. And in this sense, the male experiences Jouissance through the small other –another common theme in Zizek’s thought.
The cool thing about this for me, is that it may tie into a possibility I played around with in another essay, Anguish, Boredom, Jouissance: The Unbearable Push and Pull of Presence and Absence (viewtopic.php?f=15&t=179930), in that it suggests the push/pull Jouissance involved in the phenomenological experience of presence and absence –that between Eros (the desire for the fullness of being) and Thanatos (the death instinct that draws us to the purity of nothingness).