1: The Symptom, 1. How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?, p 15 – 16 “the social effectivity of the commodity exchange and the ‘consciousness’ of it is that – to use again a concise formulation by Sohn-Rethel – ‘this non-knowledge of the reality is part of its very essence’: the social effectivity of the exchange process is a kind of reality which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic; that is, a kind of reality whose very ontological consistency implies a certain non-knowledge of its participants – if we come to ‘know too much’, to pierce the true functioning of social reality, this reality would dissolve itself.
This is probably the fundamental dimension of ‘ideology’: ideology is not simply a ‘false consciousness’, an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ‘ideological’ – ‘ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence – that is, social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals ‘do not know what they are doing’. ‘Ideological’ is not ‘false consciousness’ of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness’. Thus we have finally reached the dimension of the symptom, because one of its possible definitions would also be ‘a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject’: the subject can ‘enjoy his symptom’ only in so far as its logic escapes him – the measure of the success of its interpretation is precisely its dissolution.”
1: The Symptom, 1. How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?, p 16 “every ideological Universal – for example freedom, equality – is ‘false’ in so far as it necessarily includes a specific case which breaks its unity, lays open its falsity.”
1: The Symptom, 1. How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?, p 17 – 18 “We have here again a certain ideological Universal, that of equivalent and equitable exchange, and a particular paradoxical exchange – that of the labour force for its wages – which, precisely as an equivalent, functions as the very form of exploitation.”
1: The Symptom, 1. How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?, p 18 “utopian socialism consists in the very belief that a society is possible in which the relations of exchange are universalized and production for the market predominates, but workers themselves none the less remain proprietors of their means of production and are therefore not exploited – in short, ‘utopian’ conveys a belief in the possibility of a universality without its symptom, without the point of exception functioning as its internal negation.”
1: The Symptom, 1. How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?, p 22 “With the establishment of bourgeois society, the relations of domination and servitude are repressed: formally, we are apparently concerned with free subjects whose interpersonal relations are discharged of all fetishism; the repressed truth – that of the persistence of domination and servitude – emerges as a symptom which subverts the ideological appearance of equality, freedom, and so on.”
1: The Symptom, 1. How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?, p 24 “The most elementary definition of ideology is probably the well-known phrase from Marx’s Capital: ‘Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es’ – ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’.”
1: The Symptom, 1. How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?, p 25 “the paradox of a being which can reproduce itself only in so far as it is misrecognized and overlooked: the moment we see it ‘as it really is’, this being dissolves itself into nothingness or, more precisely, it changes into another kind of reality. That is why we must avoid the simple metaphors of demasking, of throwing away the veils which are supposed to hide the naked reality.”
1: The Symptom, 1. How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?, p 25 – 26 “The cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he none the less still insists upon the mask. The formula, as proposed by Sloterdijk, would then be: ‘they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it’. Cynical reason in no longer naïve, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it.
We must distinguish this cynical position strictly from what Sloterdijk calls kynicism. Kynicism represents the popular, plebian rejection of the official culture by means of irony and sarcasm: the classical kynical procedure is to confront the pathetic phrases of the ruling official ideology – its solemn, grave tonality – with everyday banality and to hold them up to ridicule, thus exposing behind the sublime noblesse of the ideological phrases the egotistical interests, the violence, the brutal claims to power. This procedure, then, is more pragmatic than argumentative: it subverts the official proposition by confronting it with the situation of its enunciation; it proceeds ad hominem (for example when a politician preaches the duty of patriotic sacrifice, kynicism exposes the personal gain he is making from the sacrifice of others).
Cynicism is the answer of the ruling culture to this kynical subversion: it recognizes, it takes into account, the particular interest behind the ideological universality, the distance between the ideological mask and the reality, but it still finds reasons to retain the mask.”
1: The Symptom, 1. How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?, p 30 “If our concept of ideology remains the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge, then today’s society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not that of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way – one of many ways – to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.”
1: The Symptom, 1. How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?, p 39 “Oxford and Cambridge in the 1930s offered such a rich field for the KGB: not only because of the ‘guilt complex’ of rich students doing so well in the midst of the economic and social crisis, but above all because of this stuffy atmosphere of enjoyment, the very inertia of which creates an unbearable tension, a tension which could be dissolved only by a ‘totalitarian’ appeal to renunciation of the enjoyment”
1: The Symptom, 1. How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?, p 41 “in a universe in which all are looking for the true face beneath the mask, the best way to lead them astray is to wear the mask of truth itself. But it is impossible to maintain the coincidence of mask and truth: far from gaining us a kind of ‘immediate contact with our fellow men’, this coincidence renders the situation unbearable; all communication is impossible because we are totally isolated through the very disclosure – the sine qua non of successful communication is a minimum of distance between appearance and its hidden rear.”
1: The Symptom, 1. How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?, p 45 “The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernal.”
1: The Symptom, 1. How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?, p 49 “The proper answer to anti-Semitism is therefore not ‘Jews are really not like that’ but ‘the anti-Semitic idea of Jew has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of a Jew is a way to stitch up the inconsistency of our own ideological system.’”
1: The Symptom, 1. How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?, p 50 “An ideology really succeeds when even the facts which at first sight contradict it start to function as arguments in its favour.”
1: The Symptom, 1. How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?, p 53 “The ‘normal’ state of capitalism is the permanent revolutionizing of its own conditions of existence: from the very beginning capitalism ‘putrefies’, it is branded by a crippling contradiction, discord, by an immanent want of balance: this is exactly why it changes, develops incessantly – incessant development is the only way for it to resolve again and again, come to terms with, its own fundamental, constitutive imbalance, ‘contradiction’. Far from constricting, its limit is thus the very impetus of its development.”
1: The Symptom, 1. How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?, p 54 – 55 “How can we not detect in this formulation the fact that Marx failed to cope with the paradoxes of surplus-enjoyment? And the ironic vengeance of history for this failure is that today there exists a society which seems to correspond perfectly to this vulgar evolutionary dialectics of forces and relations: ‘real socialism’, a society which legitimizes itself by reference to Marx. Is it not already a commonplace to assert that ‘real socialism’ rendered possible rapid industrialization, but that as soon as the productive forces reached a certain level of development (usually designated by the vague term ‘post-industrial society’), ‘real socialist’ social relationships began to constrict their further growth?”
1: The Symptom, 2. From Symptom to Sinthome, p 79 “in its very constitution, the symptom implies the field of the big Other as consistent, complete, because its very formation is an appeal to the Other which contains its meaning.”
1: The Symptom, 2. From Symptom to Sinthome, p 81 – 82 “in its ‘pathological’ particularity you must recognize the element which gives consistency to your being.
This, then, is a symptom: a particular, ‘pathological’, signifying formation, a binding enjoyment, an inert stain resisting communication and interpretation, a stain which cannot be included in the circuit of discourse, a social bond network, but is at the same time a positive condition of it.”
1: The Symptom, 2. From Symptom to Sinthome, p 87 “The main point is to perceive how this acceptance of given empirical, ‘pathological’ (Kant) customs and rules is not some kind of pre-Enlightenment remnant – a remnant of the traditional authoritarian attitude – but, on the contrary, the necessary obverse of the Enlightenment itself: through this acceptance of the customs and rules of social life in their nonsensical, given character, through acceptance of the fact that ‘Law is law’, we are internally freed from its constraints – the way is open for free theoretical reflection.”
1: The Symptom, 2. From Symptom to Sinthome, p 91 ALEXIS TOCQUEVILLE: “I do not know whether a jury is useful to the litigants, but I am sure that it is very good for those who have to decide the case. I regard it as one of the most effective means of popular education at society’s disposal.”
2: Lack in the Other, 3. ‘Che Vuoi?’, p 116 “The ‘effect of retroversion’ is based precisely upon this imaginary level – it is supported by the illusion of the self as the autonomous agent which is present from the very beginning as the origin of its acts: this imaginary self-experience is for the subject the way to misrecognize his radical dependence on the big Other, on the symbolic order as his decentered cause.”
2: Lack in the Other, 3. ‘Che Vuoi?’, p 117 { 1986 Austrian presidential campaign }
2: Lack in the Other, 3. ‘Che Vuoi?’, p 117 “the trait-of-identification can also be a certain failure, weakness, guilt of the other, so that by pointing out the failure we can unwittingly reinforce the identification. Rightist ideology in particular is very adroit at offering people weakness or guilt as an identifying trait: we can find traces of this even with Hitler. In his public appearances, people specifically identified themselves with what were hysterical outbursts of impotent rage – that is, they ‘recognized’ themselves in this hysterical acting out.”
2: Lack in the Other, 3. ‘Che Vuoi?’, p 118 “This gap between the way I see myself and the point from which I am being observed to appear likeable to myself is crucial for grasping hysteria (and obsessional neurosis as its subspecies)”
2: Lack in the Other, 3. ‘Che Vuoi?’, p 132 “through fantasy, we learn ‘how to desire’. In this intermediate position lies the paradox of fantasy: it is the frame co-ordinating our desire, but at the same time a defence against ‘Che vuoi?’, a screen concealing the gap, the abyss of the desire of the Other. Sharpening the paradox to its utmost – to tautology – we could say that desire itself is a defence against desire: the desire structured through fantasy is a defence against the desire of the Other, against this ‘pure’, trans-phantasmic desire (i.e., the ‘death drive’ in its pure form).
2: Lack in the Other, 3. ‘Che Vuoi?’, p 140 “there are [.] two complementary procedures of the ‘criticism of ideology’:
one is discursive, the ‘symptomal reading’ of the ideological text bringing about the ‘deconstruction’ of the spontaneous experience of its meaning – that is, demonstrating how a given ideological field is a result of a montage of heterogenous ‘floating signifiers’, of their totalization through the intervention of certain ‘nodal points’;
the other aims at extracting the kernel of enjoyment, at articulating the way in which – beyond the field of meaning but at the same time internal to it – an ideology implies, manipulates, produces a pre-ideological enjoyment structured in fantasy.”
2: Lack in the Other, 3. ‘Che Vuoi?’, p 142 “fantasy is a means for an ideology to take its own failure into account in advance.”
2: Lack in the Other, 3. ‘Che Vuoi?’, p 143 “Society is not prevented from achieving its full identity because of Jews: it is prevented by its own antagonistic nature, by its own immanent blockage, and it ‘projects’ this internal negativity into the figure of the ‘Jew’.
2: Lack in the Other, 4. You Only Die Twice, p 156 – 157 “In the monad, ‘time stops’ in so far as the actual constellation is directly charged with the past constellation – in other words, in so far as we have to do with a pure repetition. Repetition is ‘located outside time’, not in the sense of some pre-logical archaism but simply in the sense of the pure signifier’s synchrony: we do not have to look for the connection between past and present constellations in the diachronous time arrow; this connection reinstates itself in the form of an immediate paradigmatic short-circuit.
The monad is thus the moment of discontinuity, of rupture, at which the linear ‘flow of time’ is suspended, arrested, ‘coagulated’, because in it resounds directly – that is to say: bypassing the linear succession of continuous time – the past which was repressed, pushed out of the continuity established by prevailing history.”
2: Lack in the Other, 4. You Only Die Twice, p 158 “the revolution ‘comes from the future’ – was already in itself pregnant with the open dimension of the future.”
2: Lack in the Other, 4. You Only Die Twice, p 165 “The Lacanian definition of democracy would then be: a sociopolitical order in which the People do not exist – do not exist as a unity, embodied in their unique representative. That is why the basic feature of the democratic order is that the place of Power is, by the necessity of its structure, an empty place. In a democratic order, sovereignty lies in the People – but what is the People if not, precisely, the collection of the subjects of power? Here we have the same paradox as that of a natural language which is at the same time the ultimate, the highest metalanguage. Because the People cannot immediately govern themselves, the place of Power must always remain an empty place; any person occupying it can do so only temporarily, as a kind of surrogate, a substitute for the real-impossible sovereign – ‘nobody can rule innocently’, as Saint-Just puts it. And in totalitarianism, the Party becomes again the very subject who, being the immediate embodiment of the People, can rule innocently. It is not by accident that the real-socialist countries call themselves ‘people’s democracies’ – here, finally, ‘the People’ exist again.”
2: Lack in the Other, 4. You Only Die Twice, p 166 “In vain do we conceal this thoroughly ‘irrational’ character of what we call ‘formal democracy’: at the moment of an election, the society is delivered to a stochastic process. Only the acceptance of such a risk, only such a readiness to hand over one’s fate to ‘irrational’ hazard, renders ‘democracy’ possible”
3: The Subject, 5. Which Subject of the Real?, p 176 – 177 “The punk imitating the ‘sadomasochistic’ power ritual is not to be conceived as a case of the victim’s identification with the aggressor (as it is usually interpreted). The message to the power structure is, on the contrary, the negation implied in the positive act of imitation: you are so powerful, but for all that, you are impotent. You cannot really hurt me! In this way, the power structure is caught in the same trap. The more violent its reaction, the more it confirms its fundamental impotence.”
3: The Subject, 5. Which Subject of the Real?, p 178 – 179: LENIN IN WARSAW JOKE
\3: The Subject, 5. Which Subject of the Real?, p 186 “the community is saying to the subject: you have freedom to choose, but on condition that you choose the right thing” […] “The subject who thinks he can avoid this paradox and really have a free choice is a psychotic subject, one who retains a kind of distance from the symbolic order – who is not really caught in the signifying network.”
3: The Subject, 5. Which Subject of the Real?, p 198: JEW LEAVING SOVIET RUSSIA JOKE
3: The Subject, 5. Which Subject of the Real?, p 199 “in the anti-Semitic vision, the Jew is experienced as the embodiment of negativity, as the force disrupting stable social identity – but the ‘truth’ of anti-Semitism is, of course, that the very identity of our position is structured through a negative relationship to this traumatic figure of the Jew. Without the reference to the Jew who is corroding the social fabric, the social fabric itself would be dissolved.”
3: The Subject, 5. Which Subject of the Real?, p 200 “the antagonism between Society as a corporate Whole transcending its members and Society as an external, ‘mechanical’ net connecting atomized individuals is the fundamental antagonism of contemporary society, it is in a way its very definition.”
3: The Subject, 5. Which Subject of the Real?, p 210 “to produce new meaning, it is necessary to presuppose its existence in the other.”
3: The Subject, 5. Which Subject of the Real?, p 216: HEGEL “if the fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science, which in the absence of such scruples gets on with the work itself, and actually cognizes something, it is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust. Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?”
3: The Subject, 5. Which Subject of the Real?, p 217 “The fear of error which conceals its opposite, the fear of Truth: this Hegelian formula encapsulates perfectly the subjective position of the obsessional neurotic: the incessant procrastination, the endless precautions, which characterize his approach.”
3: The Subject, 5. Which Subject of the Real?, p 219 “The appearance implies that there is something behind it which appears through it; it conceals a truth and by the same gesture gives a foreboding thereof, it simultaneously hides and reveals the essence behind its curtain. But what is hidden behind the phenomenal appearance? Precisely the fact that there is nothing to hide. What is concealed is that the very act of concealing conceals nothing.”
3: The Subject, 5. Which Subject of the Real?, p 221 “the place logically precedes objects which occupy it: what the objects, in their given positivity, are masking is not some other, more substantial order of objects but simply the emptiness, the void they are filling out. We must remember that there is nothing intrinsically sublime in a sublime object – according to Lacan, a sublime object is an ordinary, everyday object which, quite by chance, finds itself occupying the place of what he calls das Ding, the impossible-real object of desire.”
3: The Subject, 5. Which Subject of the Real?, p 223 “the properly human way to deceive a man is to imitate the dissimulation of reality – that act of concealing deceives us precisely by pretending to conceal something.”
3: The Subject, 6. ‘Not Only as Substance, but Also as Subject’, p 230: KANT “The feeling of the Sublime is, therefore, at once a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain, to its estimation by reason, and a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgement of the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with ideas of reason, so far as the effort to attain to these is for us a law.”
3: The Subject, 6. ‘Not Only as Substance, but Also as Subject’, p 249 “Human nature ‘in itself’ – in its abstraction from culture – is indeed ‘innocent’, but as soon as the form of spirit begins to reign, as soon as we enter culture, man becomes, so to speak, retroactively responsible for his own nature, for his most ‘natural’ passions and instincts.”
3: The Subject, 6. ‘Not Only as Substance, but Also as Subject’, p 254 “EVERYTHING depends on me – the point of the riddle – but for all that I can do NOTHING – the point of St Augustine’s theory. […] we define as ‘transcendental’ the inversion by means of which the subject experiences his radical limitation (the fact that he is confined to the limits of his world) as his constitutive power (the a priori network of categories structuring his perception of reality).”
3: The Subject, 6. ‘Not Only as Substance, but Also as Subject’, p 255 “reflection presupposes the positive world of appearance as the starting point of its activity of mediating it, of positing it as ‘mere appearance’.
To exemplify this presupposing, let us take the classical procedure of the ‘criticism of ideology’: this procedure ‘unmasks’ a certain theoretical, religious, or other edifice by enabling us to ‘see through it’, by making us see in it ‘just an [ideological] appearance’, an expression-effect of some concealed mechanisms; this procedure consists thus in a purely negative movement which presupposes a ‘spontaneous’, ‘non-reflected’ ideological experience in its given-immediate positivity.”