Having reached the end of my second full reading of Žižek’s Plague of Fantasies (as well as countless partial stabs at it along with my ventures into Lacan), I’m starting to get a better (if yet vague (understanding of the relationship between desire, drive, castration, the symbolic order, and the phallic and the fetish: the objet petite a. If I understand it right, castration (that which ropes in drive and the desires that emerge from it (is the symbolic order’s way initiating us into its self. This, for us as individuals, creates a void that we have to fill in with phallic supplements that often take the form of fetishes built on the dynamic of the objet petit a, a process that is supplemented by fantasy.
?: or am I getting it wrong….
But assuming I am getting it somewhat right, it seems to me that this could as effectively be described as society not so much suppressing our desires as channeling them to the interests of the powers that be. Now, of course, anyone more familiar with the continental approach might protest that I am over-simplifying what the writer(s) was saying. And I will give them that. Still, I have to question the practicality of taking all these oblique and poetic back roads in order to represent the subtleties they are trying to get across when they could just as easily start with what is immediately accessible and work their way from there.
And the only answer I see to my interrogation is that the continentals are more interested in being interesting writers than they are purveyor’s of truths. It’s a little like what Umberto Eco pointed out in an interview:
The difference between the analytic and continental approach is that the analytic approach attempts to build off of previous discoveries much as science does while the continental approach attempts to say the same old things in such novel ways that they seem to be saying something totally original.