As I return to Zizek, I cannot help but do so with a certain amount of hesitation and anxiety. As anyone knows who has occupied these boards with me: my love (maybe just like/hate (with a dash of contempt (relationship with Capitalism has often led to some rants that have been hurtful towards people who, despite my issues with their issues, I care a great deal about. As I have said before: I try to make peace with it since there is nothing I can do about it which makes it hardly worth alienating people I actually do love despite their politics. At the same time, as I once saw on an avatar that consisted of graffiti written on a broken down wall:
“Every day I wake up on the wrong side of Capitalism.”
With Zizek, I find myself approaching the beast, and everyone in between, with my finger on the trigger. And even within my start with the introducing graphic guide (and quit rolling your eyes: they are a useful summary of the issue (the notes are flowing. The rants are sure to follow. And I apologize ahead of time to anyone who gets caught in the crossfire.
All of which kind of imposes upon me the first point to be made: the push-pull relationship I/we tend to have with Capitalism and the Jouissance it implies –Jouissance being a term that was strangely missing from the graphic guide. One of Zizek’s concerns that came up was the intimate relationship between law and prohibition and the transgression of them. In a sense, it is as if the very creation of these laws and prohibitions creates the desire to transgress them and, in turn, the very push-pull relationship that defines Jouissance.
Now what is notable here is Zizek’s Lacanian understanding of the subconscious as that which works in a way opposite to consciousness: as a kind of counterbalance to the conscious imperatives the self finds itself faced with. The thing is that Carl Jung saw the subconscious in the same sense and used it as a primary agent in the maladies that extreme introverts or extreme extroverts can succumb to. But first we have to understand what Jung actually meant by the terms as compared to the popular notions about them. The terms extrovert and introvert are actually a phenomenological issue of one’s relationship with the world of objects. For the extrovert everything begins and ends in the world of objects (the realists (while for the introvert everything begins and ends in the self (the groundhogs of reality going into the world and bringing back objects to store in their own little hole.
Jung then goes on to describe the maladies that both can fall into because of the counterbalancing role of the subconscious. The malady of the extrovert is that of hysteria: the subconscious seeking to overwhelm their focus on the world of objects and them reacting by throwing themselves deeper into that world in an exaggerated way. Hence: their propensity towards dogma since dogma is basically “out there”: a product of the symbolic order.
The malady of the introvert (for which I lack the actual term (consists of the subconscious asserting an attraction to the world of objects while the individual, at a conscious level, is repulsed by it. And, unfortunately, I can testify to this anecdotally in that much of my critical stance towards Capitalism results from the push-pull relationship I find myself in with a world of consumer goods: the objects occupying my environmental and cultural space.
I hope to go into this deeper in the context of Zizek (my window has run out (but before I go I would offer a more finished piece I did on the subject: