The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Žižek

Author:Slavoj Žižek
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Verso

The Jew and Antigone

We come across this ‘Che vuoi?’ everywhere in the political domain, including the 1988 American election struggle in which, after Jesse Jackson’s first successes, the press started to ask ‘What does Jackson really want?’ 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 ($◊o): fantasy is an answer 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 fantasy-scenario? 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, 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

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.