A Little Melodrama...

Slavoj Žižek, "Our lives are structured like melodramas"

On the one hand, it is not accurate to put the fact that the woman is according to and for someone else, the narcissistic reflection of the man, the image of the masculine woman, and on the other hand, it is not very accurate to put the 'real woman herself' beyond the masculine discourse. In fact, I would like to suggest the opposite: the notion of  'the woman herself' is the last bastion of masculine fantasy, and when you follow the mundane predicaments of men's discourse on women to the end, you will come much closer to the 'real woman'. Here is that woman who is beyond that masculine symbolic order and who is called semiotic and so on, which can never be expressed... This notion of the strangeness is the last bastion of the masculine fantasy, let's call it so.

Now let's come to the other side. According to the man, division is excluded. In order to escape the inconsistency of his own desire, the man draws a line between the phallic field – the field of sexual pleasure, the field of intercourse with the sexual partner – and the non-phallic field – the non-sexual sphere of public activity. At that point, we encounter the paradoxes of the by-product-should-be-states mentioned in rational theories of choice: the man subordinates his relationship with the woman to the realm of ethical goals: if he is forced to choose between the woman and the ethical duty, profession, duty, etc., the man will immediately choose the duty; but he is also aware of genuine happiness, of personal fulfillment, of this and that cannot be achieved without association with the woman. So roughly speaking, what is the conspiracy of the masculine economy? You see that all the time in good Hollywood melodramas. What is the number of melodramas?

I can give you a lot of examples, but I shouldn't take up your time. The logic goes like this: A man sacrifices his love for a woman in the name of a high cause—revolution, work, anything that is claimed to be non-sexual—but his message between the lines is that his sacrifice of that love is precisely the undisputed proof of that love, in fact the woman is his everything; At the most glorious moment of melodrama (which is crucial to understanding the masculine sexual position), the woman finally realizes that the fact that the man who betrayed her, who abandoned her, sacrificed the woman, is in fact the undisputed proof of his love for the woman. The key phrase of melodramas is "I actually did it for you" if you pay attention, it is said just as you leave the woman.

This is the trick that a man is plotting: A woman is your supreme good, but in order to be worthy of her, you must betray her. I believe in melodramas. My motto is that our lives are structured like melodramas, where you find your own structure.

From Questioning the Truth

Notes:
Turkish: Işık Barış Fidaner