The Most Sublime Hysteric by Zizek Slavoj

Author:Zizek, Slavoj
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

Therefore, the massive presence of the pre-genital object – the object that, through its inert phantasy presence, appears to block the achievement of a full, mature, genital, sexual rapport – obscures the fundamental blockage, the emptiness of the impossible sexual rapport. Far from masking another presence, it only blinds us, through its own presence, to the space that it has filled. Where does this error in perspective come from? From the fact that the void is strictly co-substantial with the very movement of its own dissimulation. It's true that the phantasy masks the emptiness of “there is no sexual rapport,” but at the same time it serves as this void. The phantasy object masks the open, self-supported, emptiness.

The same thing goes for the Hegelian object, the objectual fetish-figure: far from being a “premature” figure of a true dialectical synthesis, it conceals, through its “non-dialectical,” “unmediated” presence, the impossibility of a final Synthesis of subject and object. In other words, the error in perspective consists in thinking that the end of the dialectical process consists in the subject finally obtaining what he was looking for. This is an error in perspective because the Hegelian solution is not that the subject will never be able to possess the thing that he was searching for, but that he already had it, in the form of its loss. Gérard Miller's description of the difference between Marxism and psychoanalysis (“In Marxism, man knows what he wants but does not have it, in psychoanalysis, man does not know what he wants and has always had it”) applies well to the distance between Hegel and Marxism as well, particularly the way in which Marxism ignores the dialectical reversal of the impasse into the pass. Saying that the pass is the final moment of the analytical process in no way means that the impasse has finally been resolved (that the transfer has closed off the unconscious, for example), that its obstacles have been overcome. Rather, the pass is just the retroactive experience that the impasse itself was already its own “resolution.” In other words, the pass is exactly the same thing as the impasse (the impossibility of the sexual rapport), in the same way that – as I said earlier – the synthesis is exactly the same thing as the antithesis. The only thing that changes is the subject's position, his “perspective.”

However, there is a definition of AK in Lacan's first seminars that seems to directly contradict the one I have just given. He lays out AK as the impossible ideal of attaining the complete closure of the field of discourse:

Absolute knowledge is this moment in which the totality of discourse closes in on itself in a perfect non-contradiction up to and including the fact that it posits, explains and justifies itself. We are some way yet from this ideal! (Lacan 1991a: 264)

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