Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out by Slavoj Žižek

Author:Slavoj Žižek [Žižek, Slavoj]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781135957544
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

From the modernist sinthome…

The standard designation by which Scream conveys anxiety is therefore appropriate–provided that we conceive the notion of anxiety in its strict Lacanian sense, i.e., as the affect which registers the subject's panic reaction to the overproximity of the object-cause of desire: the little man's features clearly recall a homunculus or a fetus, that is to say, a subject not yet torn from the mother's body (the same homunculus is depicted in the lower left corner of Munch's Madonna (1895/1902), as part of the frame otherwise ornamented by spermatic trickles).14 The general conclusion to be drawn from it is that the stain as such has the status of the objet petit a (surplus enjoyment). Aside from Starlit Night (1893) where the substantial mass of dark earth in the foreground directly evokes a blurred stain, the same effect occurs at its clearest in two paintings from the turn of the century, Girls on the Bridge (1899) and The Dance of Life (1900): the background earth and trees in the first case, the contours of the dancing bodies in the second, transmute into extended sperm-like stains which encumber reality with the substance of enjoyment. As to their status, these stains present therefore a kind of visual correlate to the “voix acousmatique” in the cinema, the voice which transgresses the boundary outside/inside, since it belongs neither to diegetic reality nor to the external vocal accompaniment, but lurks in the in-between space, like a mysterious foreign body which disintegrates from within the consistency of “reality.”

On this basis, one could risk some passing general remarks concerning the relationship between modernism and postmodernism. The modernist procedure is that of a “symptomal reading”: confronted with the totality, modernism endeavors to subvert it by detecting the traces of its hidden truth in the details which “stick out” and belie its “official” truth, in the margins which point toward what has to be “repressed” so that the “official” totality could establish itself–modernism's elementary axiom is that details always contain some surplus which undermines the universal frame of the “official” Truth. What characterizes a typical modernist film is therefore the fact that its material texture (“writing”) in a way tells another story which, by means of its lateral links and resonances, redoubles and undermines the “official” story. An exemplary case of it is to be found in the excellent early Blake Edwards thriller Experiment In Terror, the story of a young bank teller (Lee Remick), victim of an asthmatic blackmailer. One of a multitude of motifs which resound in it beneath the “official” narrative line is the melancholic, inanimate gaze: first the gaze of the hanged woman hidden between the dolls, then the doll of a tiger with a sad face, a gift from the blackmailer to his lover's son–although these elements have nothing whatsoever in common on the level of the “official” narrative, they nonetheless constitute the same sinthome, the uncanny gaze which subverts the border between life and death, since it belongs to a “dead” object (corpse, doll), which nonetheless possesses a gaze of melancholic expressiveness.

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