Yeah, the nice thing about Zizek’s use of film in describing his points is that it gives us something concrete to relate to as compared to say Deleuze who tends to describe things in pure abstraction and obscure French films that give us little to relate to. In this sense, Zizek always offers us a stepping stone into the more subtle concepts he is presenting us with –especially concerning those of Lacan. I tend to twist Russell’s point into philosophy which lies in that no man’s land between Science and Art. And Zizek works mainly on the art side of that spectrum. Hence: his designation as a continental philosopher. And as much as I respect Deleuze, as someone who considers himself more of writer who happens to love philosophy (in terms of philosophy, I’m more of a tourist more interested in presenting perspectives than the truth), I consider Zizek a closer model to what it is I want my process to do.
That said, having described Jouissance as the (non) satisfaction of promised satisfaction fulfilled through what never truly satisfies, I have to wonder if it might not have something to do with subjective time as described by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition. To put it in nominal terms, given the description of Jouissance, what we are always dealing with is the anti-climax that ultimately constitutes our experience of pleasure. Take, for instance, your computer screen as you are reading this. It seems to be a stable object. Still, no matter what point you are looking at it in, you are always looking at it at a different point in subjective time. It’s always moving even while standing still. It goes along the lines of the question:
At what point in this sentence are you right now?
As Deleuze pointed out, you are always dealing with a past present that was never truly present. Take, for instance, a vacation from work. If you think about it, most of the pleasure we arrive from it comes from the anticipation of it (we never feel so good about it as those last minutes of work before we start it) and in what we remember when it is over which is the method by which we constitute the value of it. However, throughout it all, we’re rarely, if ever, truly are in the moment. It always seems to be a matter of what is coming (the future) and what is passing (the future past). And isn’t it this phenomenon that Zen Buddhism seeks to overcome in order to achieve true content? And whether that is ever truly achieved I’ll leave to the Buddhists.
To me, though, this experience of subjective time constitutes the push/pull tension facilitated by presence and absence. We should also consider a point made by Raymond Tallis concerning ontological time: that time never really flows or moves: only objects in space do. It seems to me that this would only add to the push/pull tension (the Jouissance) in the Kantian aspect of the interaction between the noumenal and the phenomenal. In other words, there is every reason to believe there is a noemic foundation to the noetic experiences by which we know the world. Still, we are always dealing with the frustration of being stuck with the phenomenal and never being able to directly connect with the noumenal: the (non)satisfaction of promised satisfaction fulfilled by that which can never truly satisfy.