Western Dignity

Slavoj Žižek, "Dignity of the dream" (translated)

In the ethics of psychoanalysis, we can afford to add the famous Lacancı slogan, which says "Do not compromise your desire", as well as the inter-subject slogan: Avoid violating someone else's dream space as much as possible, that is, respect someone else's "specific mutla".

Someone else's specific contingance is his way of organizing his own universe of meaning in an absolutely unique way. Such an ethics (1) is neither imaginary nor symbolic (2):

1) It is not about loving our neighbor as we are, that is, loving him because he is like us, it is not about seeing our own image in him.

2) It's not about respecting the dignity that's bestowed on him with his symbolic identity, it's not that he belongs to the same symbolic community as us, even if we expand the respected community to "be human" [c.n. if you think backwards, it's actually narrowing it down].

What gives someone the dignity of being a "person" is not a universal-symbolic trait, it is precisely the element that is "absolutely specific" in it, its dream [c.n. delusion], the part where we can be sure that we will never be able to share it with it.

In Kant's words: Our respect for someone else is not due to the universal morality law that is enshressed in each of us, but by its most "pathological" nuance, with the absolute specific way in which each of us "dreams of his own world" to organize his arbitrariness.

So, in the process of psychoanalysis, the goal was to undermine the most basic dream of analysis? I thought the goal was to lead to "subjective deprivation", which allowed the subject to put a distance from his basic dream, the last denomination of his (symbolic) reality? Then wouldn't psychoanalysis be an even more cruel form of humiliation to the extent that it is nuanced? Wouldn't it be to pull the floor under the subject's feet? Wouldn't it be to force him to teach that the "divine details" that crystallize his arbitrariness are a giant nothingness?

The dream, which is "credibility" that masks imperfections or inconsistencies in the symbolic order, is always specific – its specificity is absolute, the dream resists "heeds", it cannot be incorporated into a wider universal symbolic medium.

So we can only manage to hear (feel, sense) the dignity of someone else's dream when we put a distance from our own dream, we can do it when we learn by experiencing the ultimate affirmation of dreams, we can manage to understand that dreaming is a way of hiding and covering dead ends that lock everyone's own desires in a unique way.

The dignity of a dream consists precisely of his "illusional" fragile, vulnerable character.

Notes:

From Crooked Stare

Turkish: Light Peace Fidaner

See "Resistance and Persistence: Contempt/Indecency and Dishonorability", "Chile did not support dignity", "The dignity of the Thing" Slavoj Žižek, "I Approve of Dignity" in Chile: Essential-Curating and Hegemony" Slavoj Žižek

Listen to "Disaster Coach#3: Taking Care of Our Own Delusion" Tulin Erinç