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85 3 The Cynic’s Fetish: Žižek and the Dynamics of Belief§11 What Do You Want Me to Be? The Alienated Subject Meets the Nonexistent Other One of the most obvious and oft-repeated objections to the general methodological procedure of Žižek is that he uncritically assumes the legitimacy of casually sliding back and forth between, on the one hand, Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology, and, on the other hand, analyses of cultural and political phenomena. According to this line of criticism (which, arguably, could just as easily be raised against Freud himself), whereas the former body of concepts is derived from and deals exclusively with the workings of the singular psyche, the latter calls for a separate constellation of ideas specifically custom-tailored to a handling of collective structures. Isn’t it problematic to assume that approaches endemic to the intimacy of the psychoanalytic clinic easily can be exported to or superimposed upon the public sphere of group existence?1 Implicit in this argument is the notion that an essential difference in kind strictly partitions intra-subjective dynamics (i.e., the functioning of the individual mind) from inter-subjective ones (i.e., the functioning of groups within socio-symbolic orders). Žižek is therefore doubly guilty of ignoring this line of demarcation, of ostensibly committing a grotesque category error: not only is one of the hallmarks of Žižek’s approach a use of psychoanalytic concepts to elucidate cultural entities (and vice versa), but, additionally , he refuses to acknowledge that anything is wrong with combining , among other intellectual genres, Lacanian and Marxist theoretical frameworks. Why doesn’t he pay more attention to the gap that seemingly separates the psychical from the social, the local from the global? Similarly, why does he treat libidinal economy and political economy as so easily interchangeable with one another? As Žižek correctly points out, Lacan goes to great lengths to undermine , at least as far as psychoanalysis is concerned, the apparent clarity and firmness sometimes attributed to the distinction between individual and collective levels of human existence. For instance, the Lacanian con- 86 S L A V O J Ž I Ž E K cept of “extimacy” emphasizes that the innermost, intimate core of a person ’s psychical being is, at root, an alien, foreign “thing.”2 In Lacan’s view, an interpretive progression through the successive layers of an analysand’s Innenwelt terminates in the de-subjectifying encounter with an inert, undigested fragment of some sort of Umwelt, that is, an asubjective exteriority lying at the very heart of the unconscious (this ultimate kernel being conceived of, by the earlier Lacan, as the “desire of the Other” encoded through the Symbolic, while the later Lacan refers to the primordial, traumatic Real of das Ding resisting all efforts at representational domestication ). From a Lacanian perspective, there is no such thing as strictly individual psychology per se (although, at the same time, this isn’t completely to discard distinctions between the micro/local and the macro/global entirely, dissolving the idiosyncratic individual into the collective group without remainder). The singular person scrutinized by psychoanalysis, in all the richness of his or her memories, identifications, fantasies, and patterns of comportment, is inherently intertwined with (while nonetheless still being different from) larger, enveloping matrices of mediation. That is to say, the individual is always, to a greater or lesser extent, transindividual (along the lines of, for instance, Lacan’s phrase “in you more than you,”3 as well as Jean Laplanche’s theme concerning the “primacy of the Other” in psychoanalysis).4 Similarly, just as the early Freud insists that analytic interpretation never deals with ideational materials as isolable , atomic units—for Freud, each particular node in the vast network of mental contents forming the layers of the psyche is itself a “complex” qua aggregate of multiple associative elements5 —so too would Lacan maintain that each individual analysand is shaped by a bundle of numerous intersubjective relations (i.e., bonds with “little-o” others) and trans-subjective structures (i.e., ties to “big-O” Others). Likewise, isn’t it the case that Lacan ’s recourse to figures from topology—the best example in the present discussion is the Klein bottle, a topological entity in which the continuous curvature of its surface encourages and yet simultaneously confounds attempts to identify a distinct interior space6 —is meant to emphasize the inadequacy of the crude inside-versus-outside dichotomy underpinning the primitive geometrical picture-thinking of those advocating the strict...

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