The Power of Nonsense. The only ‘realistic’ prospect is to ground a new political universality by opting for the impossible, fully assuming the place of the exception, with no taboos, no a priori norms (‘human rights,’ ‘democracy’), respect for which would prevent us from ‘resignifying’ terror, the ruthless exercise of power, the spirit of sacrifice … if this radical choice is decried by some bleeding-heart liberals as Linksfaschismus, so be it!
~ Slavoj Žižek Slavoj Žižek’s diagnosis of late capitalism is of genuine interest. His prescription is a disgrace. Žižek is a spirited critic of the maladies of a form of life that has swept the globe since Thatcher and Reagan. He indicts its “excesses of individualism” and promotion of “social disintegration,” its ruinous combination of “(selective) private affluence’ with ‘global (ecological, infrastructural) degradation,” and its hollowing-out of representative democracy. Žižek’s philosophy is, to be blunt, a species of linksfaschismus. Getting Marx Wrong Conclusion. JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN PSYCHOANALYSIS - Slavoj Zizek - The Big Other doesn't exist. Why did Freud supplement the Oedipal myth with the mythical narrative of the "primordial father" in Totem and Taboo (T&T)?
The lesson of this second myth is the exact obverse of the Oedipus: far from having to deal with the father who, intervening as the Third, prevents direct contact with the incestuous object (thus sustaining the illusion that his annihilation would give us free access to this object), it is the killing of the father, i.e., the very realization of the Oedipal wish, which gives rise to symbolic prohibition (the dead father returns as his Name). And today's much-decried "decline of Oedipus" (of the paternal symbolic authority) is precisely the return of figures which function according to the logic of the "primordial father" from "totalitarian" political leaders to the paternal sexual harasser.
But why? However, there is still something missing in the T&T matrix. These deadlocks indicate that today, in a sense, "the big Other no longer exists" however, in WHAT sense? RSA Animate - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. Hermenutic delirium zizek. The same holds for capitalism: its dynamics of perpetual self-revolutionizing relies on the endless postponing of its point of impossibility (final crisis, collapse).
What is for other, earlier, modes of production a dangerous exception, is for capitalism a sort of normality: crisis is in capitalism somehow internalized, taken into account, as the point of impossibility which pushes it to continuous activity. Capitalism is always structurally in crisis — this is why it is expanding all the time: it can only reproduce itself by way of “borrowing from the future,” by way of escaping into the future. The final settling of accounts when all its debts would have been paid cannot ever arrive. And this brings me to a possible Lacanian definition of auratic presence: it is simply the fantasm, the fantasm as - for Lacan - an imaginary scenario which stages an impossible scene, something that could only be seen from the point of impossibility.