Friday, November 26, 2004

Zizek and Lacan

I didn't really understand this, but I thought it was interesting. In fact, I find every little bit I hear about Lacan to be interesting so I guess I should read him. Anyway, this is from Zizek's The Ticklish Subject:
Classic onto-theology is focused on the triad of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. What Lacan does is to push these three notions to their limit, demonstrating that the Good is the mask of 'diabolical' Evil, that the Beautiful is the mask of the Ugly, of the disgusting horror of the Real, and that the True is the mask of the central Void around which every symbolic edifice is woven. In short, there is a domain 'beyond the Good' that is not simply everyday 'pathological' villainy, but the constitutive background of the Good itself, the terrifying ambiguous source of its power; there is a domain 'beyond the Beautiful' that is not simply the ugliness of ordinary everyday objects, but the constitutive background of Beauty itself, the Horror veiled by the fascinating presence of Beauty; there is a domain 'beyond Truth' that is not simply the everyday domain of lies, deceptions and falsities, but the Void that sustains the place in which one can only formulate symbolic fictions that we call 'truths'. If there is an ethical-political lesson of psychoanalysis, it consists in the insight into how the great calamities of our century (from the Holocaust to the Stalinist disaster) are not the result of our succumbing to the morbid attraction of this Beyond but, on the contrary, the result of our endeavour to avoid confronting it and to impose the direct rule of the Truth and/or Goodness.
To which I am tempted to reply "duh," but then, as I said, I don't know much about Lacan.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home