Religious Hatred? or Envy?

Proximity towards the jouissance of the Other, or the neighbor, in Lacan’s seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis becomes a matter of ethical concern because the Other as das Ding (the thing) poses problems outside of the moral relationship. The proximity towards the excessive jouissance of the neighbor as das Ding presents a number of interesting ethical problems. Žižek’s confrontation with das Ding is a complex procedure that remains ambiguous, particularly in light of his sympathies towards the Christian Pauline agape version of radical love. Žižek’s treatment of proximity towards the Other seeks a total escape from the fantasmatic symbolic coordinates of the oppressive symbolic order, whereas with Santner, in his text The Psychotheology of Everyday Life, the “mental excess” of jouissance caused by confrontation with the Other as das Ding is sought to be converted into an owning of the excessive proximity into a “blessings of more life.”

- Daniel Tutt, "The Onject of Proximity: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis in Zizek and Santner Via Lacan"
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Is the post-68’ drive to jouissance - to reaching the extreme of forms of sexual pleasures that would dissolve all social links and allow me to find a climax in the solipsism of absolute jouissance - not the very opposite of the consummation of the commodified products promising jouissance? The first (best exemplified by the work of Foucault) stands for a radical, "authentic," subjective position, while the second signals a defeat, a surrender to market forces... Is, however, this opposition effectively so clear? Is it not all too easy to denounce jouissance offered on the market as "false," as providing only the empty package-promise with no substance? Is the hole, the void, in the very heart of our pleasures not the structure of every jouissance? Furthermore, is it, rather, not that the commodified provocations to enjoy which bombard us all the time push us towards, precisely, an autistic-masturbatory, "asocial," jouissance whose supreme case is the addiction to drugs? Are drugs not at the same time the means for the most radical autistic experience of jouissance and a commodity par excellence?

The drive to pure autistic jouissance (through drugs or other trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when the emancipatory "sequence" of 1968 exhausted its potentials. At this critical point (mid-1970s), the only option left was a kind of direct, brutal, passage à l’acte, push-towards-the-Real, which assumed three main forms: the search for extreme forms of sexual jouissance; Leftist political terrorism (RAF in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy, etc.) whose wager was that, in an epoch in which the masses are totally immersed into the capitalist ideological sleep, the standard critique of ideology is no longer operative, so that only a resort to the raw Real of direct violence - l’action directe - can awaken the masses); and, finally, the turn towards the Real of an inner experience (Oriental mysticism). What all three share is the withdrawal from concrete socio-political engagement into a direct contact with the Real.

The problem with today’s superego injunction to enjoy is that, in contrast to previous modes of ideological interpellation, it opens up no "world" proper - it just refers to an obscure Unnameable. Even the Nazi anti-Semitism opened up a world: by way of describing the present critical situation, naming the enemy ("Jewish conspiracy"), the goal and the means to achieve it, Nazism disclosed reality in a way which allowed its subjects to acquire a global "cognitive mapping," inclusive of the space for their meaningful engagement. This is why Badiou recently started to elaborate this topic of world, the "logic of worlds": what if the impetus came from his deeper insight into capitalism? What if the concept of world was necessitated by the need to think the unique status of the capitalist universe as world-less? Badiou recently claimed that our time is devoid of world - [1] how are we to grasp this strange thesis?

Perhaps, it is here that one should locate the "danger" of capitalism: although it is global, encompassing the whole worlds, it sustains a stricto sensu "worldless" ideological constellation, depriving the large majority of people of any meaningful "cognitive mapping." The universality of capitalism resides in the fact that capitalism is not a name for a "civilization," for a specific cultural-symbolic world, but the name for a truly neutral economico-symbolic machine which operates with Asian values as well as with others, so that Europe's worldwide triumph is its defeat, self-obliteration, the cutting of the umbilical link to Europe. The critics of "Eurocentrism" who endeavor to unearth the secret European bias of capitalism fall short here: the problem with capitalism is not its secret Eurocentric bias, but the fact that it REALLY IS UNIVERSAL, a neutral matrix of social relations.

In what, more precisely, does this "worldlessness" consist? As Lacan points out in his Seminar XX, Encore, jouissance involves a logic strictly homologous to that of the ontological proof of the existence of God. In the classic version of this proof, my awareness of myself as a finite, limited, being immediately gives birth to the notion of an infinite, perfect, being, and since this being is perfect, its very notion contains its existence; in the same way, our experience of jouissance accessible to us as finite, located, partial, "castrated," immediately gives birth to the notion of a full, achieved, unlimited jouissance whose existence is necessarily presupposed by the subject who imputes it to another subject, his/her "subject supposed to enjoy."

Our first reaction here is, of course, that this absolute jouissance is a myth, that it never effectively existed, that its status is purely differential, i.e., that it exists only as a negative point of reference with regard to which every effectively experienced jouissance falls short ("pleasurable as this is, it is not THAT!"). However, the recent advances of brain studies open up another approach: one can (no longer only) imagine the situation in which pain (or pleasure) is not generated through sensory perceptions, but through a directly excitation of the appropriate neuronal centers (by means of drugs or electrical impulses) – what the subject will experience in this case will be "pure" pain, pain "as such," the REAL of pain, or, to put it in precise Kantian terms, the non-schematized pain, pain which is not yet rooted in the experience of reality constituted by transcendental categories.

"Neurotheologians" applied this insight to religion, by way of identifying the brain processes which accompany intense religious experiences: when a subject experiences himself as timeless and infinite, part of the cosmic All, delivered of the constraints of his Self, the region of his brain which processes information about space, time, and the orientation of the body in space "goes dark"; in the blocking of the sensory inputs which occurs during intense meditative concentration, the brain has no choice but to perceive the self as endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything. The same goes for visions: they clearly correspond to abnormal bursts of electrical activity in the temporal lobes (the "temporal-lobe epilepsy"). The counterargument here is: while, of course, everything we experience also exists as a neurological activity, this in no way resolves the question of causality. When we eat an apple, we also experience the satisfaction of its good taste as a neuronal activity, but this in no way affects the fact that the apple was really out there and caused our activity. In the same fashion, it is totally undecided whether our brain wiring creates (our experience of) God, or whether God created our brain wiring… Is, however, the question of causality not simple to resolve? If we (the experimenting doctor) directly intervene in the appropriate parts of the brain, causing the brain activity in question, and, if, during this activity of ours, the subject "experiences the divine dimension," does this not provide a conclusive answer? The further question here is: how will the subject who is aware of all this subjectivize his religious experience? Will he continue to experience it as "religious" in the appropriate ecstatic sense of the term? The extreme solution is here that of a US religious sect which claims that God, who observes us all the time and took note of the lack of authentic religious experiences among his believers, organized the discovery of drugs which can generate such experiences… Further experiments show that when individuals are able to directly stimulate their neuronal pleasure-centres, they do not get caught into a blind compulsive drive towards excessive pleasure, but provide themselves pleasure only when they judge that they "deserved" it (on account of their everyday acts) – however, do many of us not do the same with pleasures provided in a "normal" way? What all this indicates is that people who experienced directly generated pleasures do not suffer a breakdown of their symbolic universe, but integrate smoothly these pleasure experiences into it, or even rely on them to enhance their experience of sacred meaning. However, again, the question is what disavowals do such integrations involve: can I really accept that the industrially fabricated pill that I hold in my hand provides a contact with god?

- Slavoj Zizek, "Religion between Knowledge and Jouissance"