Guilty!

Slavoj Žižek, "The Great Other: the guilty, the assurance of meaning, the threat to arbitrariness, the zawahiri to be saved" (Google translated from Turkish)

We don't just run away from guilt, we can run away from guilt, we can take refuge in guilt. To grasp this paradox, let us look at the relationship of subjective guilt to the inconsistency of the great Other (symbolic order), that is, to the fact that the great Other is "all-already dead."

This is how we should interpret Freud's dream of a "father who doesn't know he's dead": the father figure resists and remains consistent, until you tell him the truth. This is where the typical obsessional compulsion comes from: I must at all costs prevent the Other from learning (that he is dead, that he is helpless); I'd better die than know that terrible truth...

In sum, the subject assumes the crime himself: as long as the subject takes the blame and sacrifices himself, he frees the Other from destructive knowledge: the Other will remain ignorant of his own inconsistency, impotence, and absence. Who does not pass through this circle with the people with whom he has a relationship of transmission: Instead of the stupidity, helplessness, etc. of the other (the father, the beloved woman), I better take the blame immediately; this is what readily distinguishes lovers, the loving man is ready to be the scapegoat [1].

What more closely determines the relation of this logic of guilt to the inconsistency of the greater Other is the contradictory nature of the concept of the greater Other: the perpetrator of the Great Other takes place in two discrete modes in ideological discourse.

The "Great Other" first appears in the guise of a hidden perpetrator who "pulls the strings", that is, manages the spectacle on stage with the plots it turns backstage: Divine Providence, Hegelian "cunning of reason" (or rather its popular version) in Christian ideology, "the invisible hand of the market" in commodity economy, "objective logic of history" in Marxism-Leninism, "Jewish conspiracy" in the Nazis, etc.

In sum, the distance between what we want to achieve and the results of our activity, the excess that the subject imposes on the subject because the results of his actions do not match his original intention, is embodied in another agent, which is a higher subject (God, Reason, History, Jew). This reference to the Great Other certainly contains a deep-rooted ambivalence: it can also give a sense of security that soothes and strengthens man (the pious trusting in the will of God; The Stalinist believed that it served the historical imperative), but on the contrary, it could also be a paranoid perpetrator (just as Nazi ideologues identified the same hidden Jewish hand behind the economic crisis, national humiliation, moral degradation, and everything else).

The psychoanalyst figure combines these two contradictory aspects under the "supposedly known subject" (Lacan): in the psychoanalytic deva, the presence of the analyst is left hostage, as if it were a guarantee that all the inconsistently stringed "free associations" will make sense in the future. The presence of the analyst also embodies a threat to the arbitrariness of the analyst, it is felt that the analyst can plunder his arbitrariness by eroding his signs/symptoms; When the analytical panacea approaches its final stage, it often leads to a paranoid fear in the analyst, as if the analyst had laid eyes on the analysis's most secret treasure, as if he had set his eyes on the secret of the core of arbitrariness.

These two sides, which make you feel safe and threaten, are not, as you will immediately perceive, symmetrical tendencies: the assurance that the assumed subject provides to the analyst is based on meaning, and the threat is directed at his arbitrariness. In fact, in the anti-Semitic Jewish figure, these two sides are found together, it is both the guarantee of meaning – if we accept the thesis of the Jewish conspiracy, events suddenly become "clear" and we can identify the unique pattern behind the appearance of economic and moral turmoil – and it is an enemy that deprives us of the arbitrariness to which we are entitled.

The most important point that should not be overlooked is that the ideological "great Other" has assumed another function opposite to the hidden perpetrator pulling the strings: the activity of pure images, though it consists of images, is essential, that is, it must be saved at all costs. In "real socialism", which takes the logic of the necessity of these images to extremes, the sole purpose of the whole system was to maintain the image that "Our people, united under the support of the Party, are building Socialism with enthusiasm"; There was no one who "really believed" in the constantly renewed and repeated ritualistic demonstrations, and everyone knew this, but the Party bureaucrats were still terribly afraid of the possibility of the disintegration of the image of faith. According to their perception, such a disintegration would be a total disaster, and the entire social order would melt away.

The question here is simple: If there was no one who "really believed" and everyone knew this, then to which perpetrator was the evil eye addressed by the staged demonstration of faith? It is at this point that we encounter the purest form of the "great Other" function. The everyday reality of life can be awful and boring, but as long as we hide all this from the eyes of the "great Other," things are still on track.

The show "our happy and enthusiastic people, our people" should be staged once again every time for this evil eye. If the first meaning of the "great Other" is the function of "the subject who is supposed to know", then here on the contrary it assumes the function of "subject presumed not to know", it is necessary to hide from that perpetrator the arrogance of everyday reality [2]. In summary, if we recall once again Freud's dream of a "father who does not know that he is dead", the only thing that needs to be hidden from the great Other (embodied in the eyes of leadership) is that he is dead.

Zizek Notes: 

[1] We must add to the standard psychoanalytic interpretation that explains the son's guilt before the father through the return of the repressed desire for fatherly murder in the guise of guilt: one of the most traumatic moments for the son is when his father is forced to admit that he is "dead" (an incapable person who covers his own helplessness with a mask of authority); then the son assumes guilt so that the father, who represents the Law, can keep his dream pure. In other words, the desire for fatherly murder is actually a bait aimed at concealing the weakness of the father.

[2] One of the forms taken by the "supposedly unfamiliar subject" in ideology is the myth of the "noble savage" that lives in a world undisturbed by our rotten civilization. In this context, the enlightened West respects the typical obsessional economy: the "noble savage" must remain ignorant at all costs, it is imperative that we prevent his life from being undermined by accessing our degenerate knowledge. Aldous Huxley Jesting Pilate touched on this ambiguity in his book Jesting Pilate: The English, who greatly admired the wisdom of the Indians who resisted the pressure of our way of life and preserved their own ancient traditions, were ready to confess that unfathomable indigenous spiritual depth beyond the reach of vulgar materialists and utilitarians like us, but an unbearable unease in the face of a Indian who was more commanded of our knowledge and technology than we were. and he told me that they were resisting... In sum, everyone is ready to admit the "deep-rooted otherness" of the Indian; What really creates panic is that he looks too much like us, the moment when he "looks more like us than we do."

Enjoy Your Symptom (refurbished edition)

Turkish: Işık Barış Fidaner

Fidaner Notes: 

Another great burden The other
magic is the other:

1) you will grow!
2) You will be fascinated!