The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Zizek

Author:Slavoj Zizek [Zizek, Slavoj]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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THE SUBLI M E O BJ ECT OF I D E O LOGY

Overtones of racism were easy to detect in this question, because it was

never raised about other candidates. The conclusion that we are here dealing with racism is further confirmed by the fact that this ' Che vuoi?' erupts most violently in the purest, so to say distilled, form of racism, in anti

Semitism: in the anti-Semitic perspective, the Jew is precisely a person

about whom it is never clear 'what he really wants' - that is, his actions

are always suspected of being guided by some hidden motives (the Jewish

conspiracy, world domination and the moral corruption of Gentiles, and

so on). The case of anti-Semitism also illustrates perfectly why Lacan put,

at the end of the curve designating the question ' Che vuoi?' the formula

of fantasy ($ 00): fantasy is an allfwer to this ' che vuoi?'; it is an attempt to

fill out the gap of the question with an answer. In the case of anti-Semitism,

the answer to 'What does the Jew want?' is a fantasy of'Jewish conspiracy':

a mysterious power of Jews to manipulate events, to pull the strings

behind the scenes. The crucial point that must be made here on a theoretical level is that fantasy functions as a construction, as an imaginary scenario filling out the void, the opening of the desire of the Other. by

giving us a definite answer to the question 'What does the Other want?',

it enables us to evade the unbearable deadlock in which the Other wants

something from us, but we are at the same time incapable of translating

this desire of the Other into a positive interpellation, into a mandate

with which to identify.

Now we can also understand why it has been the Jews who have been

chosen as the object of racism par excellence: is not the Jewish God the

purest embodiment of this ' Che vuoi?', of the desire of the Other in its

terrifying abyss, with the formal prohibition on 'making an image of God'

- on filling out the gap of the Other's desire with a positive fantasyscenario? Even when, as in the case of Abraham, this God pronounces a concrete demand (ordering Abraham to slaughter his own son), it remains

quite open what he really wants from it: to say that with this horrible

act Abraham must attest to his infinite trust and devotion to God is

already an inadmissible simplification. The basic position of a Jewish

believer is, then, that of Job: not so much lamentation as incomprehension,

'CHE VUOI?'

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perplexity, even horror at what the Other (God) wants with the series of

calamities that are being inflicted upon him.

This horrified perplexity marks the initial, founding relationship of

the Jewish believer to God, the pact that God concluded with the Jewish

people. The fact that Jews perceive themselves as the 'chosen people' has

nothing to do with a belief in their superiority; they do not possess any

special qualities; before the pact with God they were a people like any

other, no more and no less corrupted, living their ordinary life - when

suddenly, like a traumatic flash, they came to know (through Moses .

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