Terry Eagleton describes the Slovenian critic Slavoj yizek ‘as the most formidably bril-liant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in Europe for some decades (quoted in Myers, 2003: 1). Ian Parker (2004), on the other hand, claims that ‘[t]here is no theoretical system as such in yizek’s work, but it often seems as if there is one. . . . He does not actually add any specific concepts to those of other theorists but articulates and blends the concepts of others’ (115, 157).
The three main influences on yizek’s work are the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the politics of Marx and the psychoanalysis of Lacan. It is, however, the influence of Lacan that organizes the place of Marx and Hegel in his work. Whether we agree with Eagleton or Parker, what is true is that yizek is an interesting reader of texts (see, for example, yizek, 1991, 2009). In this short account, I will focus almost exclusively on his elaboration of the Lacanian notion of fantasy.
Fantasy is not the same as illusion; rather, fantasy organizes how we see and under-stand reality. It works as a frame through which we see and make sense of the world.
Our fantasies are what make us unique; they provide us with our point of view; organ-izing how we see and experience the world around us. When the pop musician Jarvis Cocker (former lead singer with Pulp) appeared on BBC Radio 4’s long-running pro-gramme, Desert Island Discs (24 April 2005), he made this comment: ‘It doesn’t really matter where things happen, it’s kinda what’s going on in your head that makes life interesting.’ This is an excellent example of the organizing role of fantasy.
yizek (1989) argues that ‘ “Reality” is a fantasy construction which enables us to mask the Real of our desire’ (45). Freud (1976) gives an account of a man who dreams that his dead son came to him to complain, ‘Can’t you see that I am burning?’ The father, Freud argues, is awoken by the overwhelming smell of burning. In other words, the outside stimulation (burning), which had been incorporated into the dream, had become too strong to be accommodated by the dream. According to yizek (1989),
The Lacanian reading is directly opposed to this. The subject does not awake him-self when the external irritation becomes too strong; the logic of his awakening is quite different. First he constructs a dream, a story which enables him to prolong his sleep, to avoid awakening into reality. But the thing that he encounters in the dream,
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Chapter 5 Psychoanalysis
the reality of his desire, the Lacanian Real – in our case, the reality of the child’s reproach to his father, ‘Can’t you see that I am burning?’, implying the father’s funda-mental guilt – is more terrifying than so-called external reality itself, and that is why he awakens: to escape the Real of his desire, which announces itself in the terrifying dream. He escapes into so-called reality to be able to continue to sleep, to maintain his blindness, to elude awakening into the real of his desire (45).
It is the father’s guilt about not having done enough to prevent his son’s death that is the Real that the dream seeks to conceal. In other words, the reality to which he awakes is less Real than that which he encountered in his dream.
yizek (2009) provides other examples from popular culture of the fantasy construc-tion of reality. Rather than fulfilling desire, fantasy is the staging of desire. As he explains, [W]hat the fantasy stages is not a scene in which our desire is fulfilled, fully satisfied, but on the contrary, a scene that realises, stages, the desire as such. The fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in advance, but something that has to be constructed – and it is precisely the role of fantasy to give the coordinates of the subject’s desire, to specify its object, to locate the position the subject assumes in it. It is only through fantasy that the subject is constituted as desiring: through fantasy, we learn how to desire (335).
In this way, then, ‘fantasy space functions as an empty surface, a kind of screen for the projection of desires’ (336). He gives as an example a short story by Patricia Highsmith,
‘Black House’. In a small American town old men gather in a bar each evening to remember the past. In different ways their memories always seem to become focused on an old black house on a hill just outside town. It is in this house that each man can recall certain adventures, especially sexual, having taken place. There is now, however, a general agreement amongst the men that it would be dangerous to go back to the house. A young newcomer to the town informs the men that he is not afraid to visit the old house. When he does explore the house, he finds only ruin and decay.
Returning to the bar, he informs the men that the black house is no different from any other old, decaying property. The men are outraged by this news. As he leaves, one of the men attacks him, resulting in the young newcomer’s death. Why were the men so outraged by the young newcomer’s behaviour? yizek explains it thus:
[T]he ‘black house’ was forbidden to the men because it functioned as an empty space wherein they could project their nostalgic desires, their distorted memories;
by publicly stating that the ‘black house’ was nothing but an old ruin, the young intruder reduced their fantasy space to everyday, common reality. He annulled the difference between reality and fantasy space, depriving the men of the place in which they were able to articulate their desires (337).
Desire is never fulfilled or fully satisfied, it is endlessly reproduced in our fantasies.
‘Anxiety is brought on by the disappearance of desire’ (336). In other words, anxiety is 108
the result of getting too close to what we desire, thus threatening to eliminate ‘lack’
itself and end desire. This is further complicated by the retroactive nature of desire. As yizek observes, ‘The paradox of desire is that it posits retroactively its own cause, i.e.
the objet a [object small other] is an object that can be perceived only by a gaze “dis-torted” by desire, an object that does not exist for an “objective” gaze’ (339). In other words, what I desire is organized by processes of fantasy which fix on an object and generate a desire which appears to have drawn me to the object but which in fact did not exist until I first fixed upon the object: what appears to be a forward movement is always retroactive.
Further reading
Storey, John (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 4th edition, Harlow:
Pearson Education, 2009. This is the companion volume to this book. It contains examples of most of the work discussed here. This book and the companion Reader are supported by an interactive website (www.pearsoned.co.uk/storey). The website has links to other useful sites and electronic resources.
Belsey, Catherine, Culture and the Real, London: Routledge, 2005. A very clear account of Lacan and yizek.
Easthope, Antony, The Unconscious, London: Routledge, 1999. An excellent introduc-tion to psychoanalysis. Highly recommended.
Evans, Dylan, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge, 1996. Indispensable for understanding Lacan.
Frosh, Stephen, Key Concepts in Psychoanalysis, London: British Library, 2002. An excel-lent introduction.
Kay, Sarah, yiZek: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. An excellent introduction. I particularly like the way she acknowledges that sometimes she just does not understand what yizek is saying.
Laplanche, J. and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, London: Karnac Books, 1988. A brilliant glossary of concepts.
Mitchell, Juliet, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1974. A classic and groundbreaking account of how feminism can use psychoanalysis to under-mine patriarchy. As she claims, ‘psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patri-archal society, but an analysis of one.’
Myers, Tony, Slavoj YiZek, London: Routledge, 2003. A very accessible introduction to yizek’s work.
Parker, Ian, Slavoj YiZek: A Critical Introduction, London: Pluto, 2004. Another very good account of yizek’s work. The most critical of the recent introduction.
Wright, Elizabeth, Psychoanalytic Criticism, London: Methuen, 1984. A very good intro-duction to psychoanalytic criticism.
Further reading 109
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