Hopefully, Iona, we’ll work that out as we go along. And having seen you work, I’m quite sure you can say a lot about Zizek and am looking forward to it.
The main thing I can offer now is that I am primarily working from the book Plague of Fantasies and the role that Jouissance (that push/pull relationship we tend to have with reality (can play in human cruelty among other aspects of the human condition.
However, I feel like I owe you an elaboration on the point of Jouissance. I was hoping to just come on the boards and just respond to points the peers I have collected have made: to just engage in a friendly exchange of licks: the jam. But you have turned this into yet another postcard -you bastard.
Anyway, my understanding of Jouissance came from the graphic guide: Lacan for Beginners. And know that I am mainly explaining this for the sake of intellectual curiosity. If it feels like I am hitting on you, it is only because Lacan was a bit of womanizer and tended to use his intellect towards that purpose.
But if you look at the experience of sex, it is one of experiencing pleasure at a conscious level while experiencing discomfort at a subconscious level. The argument used for this is that if you cut the sexual act off just before climax, you will experience discomfort. But I think it runs a little deeper and more subtle than this. If you actually think back to any sexual experience you have had, it is one of trying to work towards a threshold that will take you out of place you are really enjoying at the time. In other words, when you are in the sexual act, you are in a state of going in 2 directions at once.
Lacan then goes on to explain that in the case of neurosis or hysteria, the dynamic is reversed. In that case, discomfort is experienced at a conscious level while pleasure is experienced at a subconscious level. This is why we tend to repeat behaviors that give us displeasure at a conscious level. This, for instance, explains why women will stay in abusive relationships or why a guy will continue to imagine their girlfriend having sex with someone else regardless of what they’re actually doing.
Now in order to understand what I’m getting at: imagine a song that makes you want to fold into yourself: that is the very Jouissance that underlies acts of cruelty: the way Nazi’s would go home at night and listen to Wagner in order to prove to themselves that they were, after all, civilized men. As Zizek writes in Plague of Fantasies:
“It is especially important to bear in mind how the very ‘bureaucratization’ of the crime was ambiguous in its libidinal impact: on the one hand, it enabled (some of) the participants to neutralize the horror and take it as ‘just another job’; on the other, the basic lesson of the perverse ritual also applies here: this ‘bureaucratization’ was in itself the source of an additional jouissance (does it not provide an additional kick if one performs the killing as a complicated administrative-criminal operation? Is it not more satisfying to torture prisoners as part of some orderly procedure –say, the meaningless ‘morning exercises which served only to torment them –didn’t it give another ‘kick’ to the guards satisfaction when they were inflicting pain on their victims not by directly beating them up but in the guise of an activity officially destined to maintain their health?)”