Ob Skene Beginnings...

Zizek on watching the show of life from the wings...

Excerpt from video above:

Mladen Dolar concisely formulates Hannah Arendt's reflections on authority. Symbolic authority essentially functions as a postponed threat, a suspended force or violence. It works as authority only for as long as it does not need to directly deploy force. The moment it does, authority loses its authority.

In relation to authority, authoritarianism starts at the opposite end. It begins as an already lost authority. It usually starts with force and the realization of threats and tries to make its way back to the impossible point of the coincidence of symbolic authority with the real. In authoritarianism, authority is over-realized. Authoritarianism is all about realization. We do things and efficiently, not just talk about them. Yet at the same time, this realization is desperately trying to reach the point of symbolic efficiency. That is the efficiency of talk itself, which remains inaccessible to it. This inaccessibility is the driving force of the surplus, realization, and efficiency. The flood of executive orders we are witnessing these days is not merely a strategy to overwhelm the opposition. It is also a need that drives this particular authoritarian order which operates through a peculiar combination of paranoia and perversion. Or should we say that in the position of symbolic power, paranoia becomes a form of perversion.

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From its perspective, it is not the signifier that forges reality. Rather, force is applied to reality in order for it to finally produce and spit out its signifier. And this is the point where it becomes perverse. The paranoiac idea that signifiers are hiding in the real meets here the perverse logic of forcing reality to itself produce what it is lacking when the woman has to exist.

This is important if we are to understand the peculiar combination in these authoritarian orders of naturalism, biologism, genetic engineering and symbolism. The current obsession of the Trump administration with biological sex, which also accompanies the rise of the far right in many other countries, has everything to do with this and very little, if anything, to do with serious debate about sex and gender. It is also no surprise that the focus is again, as so often throughout history, on women. Defining what a woman is, thus comically or sinisterly became a number one state priority.

One of the first executive orders signed by President Trump after he took office in the midst of major world crises in domestic social problems was titled defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government. The way it goes about this goal is well illustrated in the article women or woman and girls or girl shall mean adult and juvenile human females respectively. It is difficult not to see in this pirouetted definition the impossibility that Lacan pointed to in his famous dictum. The woman doesn't exist. And it is a fact that the imperative to make her exist on a signifying level has always played a role in the most brutal repression of women. Women have historically been repressed not by the eraser of their symbolic identity, but by being assigned one, by being told what they are and what that means.

Feminine and masculine sex are not subjected to culture and cultural meanings of their sex in the same way. There is no symmetry here. When it comes to men, the given cultural signification of masculinity colors their being in this or that way. Whereas when it comes to women, it creates their being. The cultural meaning is their being.

Immediately from the Lacanian perspective, we could thus say that woman is cultural construction in a much stronger ontological sense of the term. The specifications and determination of what does it mean to be a woman take place of the non-existing signifier and is expected to fulfill the role of the later. The content or signification has to function itself as a signifier of the feminine.

And it is precisely at this point that the worst violence is being generated. We can also see in the executive order how and why policing trans and policing women are essentially part of the same agenda. Trans functions as the surplus object in which the lack of a signifier for the other sex appears as something positive, something visible and external. The underlying idea is that if you remove this surplus object, women will be whole again. They will function as the proper signifying counterpart to men and this restored complimentarity will resolve the sexual as well as social non- relation. In other words, the Trumpian real men are not afraid of the woman as a possible signifying counterpart to their own manhood. They are afraid of women as the other sex with whom they share the same signifier despite their different sexualities.

This is the Lacanian point. Sexual difference functions across an irreducible sameness. The sexes share the same lack represented by the phallic signifier. What these real men reject is precisely this phallic signifier. Phallus as signifier because it already presupposes castration. Their obsessive attachment to anything phallic or phallic-shaped is a direct correlate of that. It only works for them if they are full of it or if it is full of them.

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How do these two things, this absolute, often paranoid distrust and unconditional trust, go together? In his text, "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego" (1921), Freud calls this blind trust love, which indeed comes closer to the mark than simply calling it blind trust. Because at a crucial point, this trust is not actually blind. It sees something, namely enjoyment. Love is situated here, in contrast to trust as based on respect. Simply put, respect presupposes a distance to be maintained, one that evacuates the immediate issues of enjoyment and desire from the relation to the other. Love, on the other hand, implies an intimate and privileged relation to the other, one that includes desire and enjoyment.

However, Lacan seems to bring the two together when he rather surprisingly places the question of knowledge at the heart of love. Salui a qui j'suppose le savois ja lem. The one to whom I suppose knowledge, I love.

Love is never simply immediate. It involves a presupposition of knowledge on the part of the other. This could help us distinguish between two kinds of love. One is predicated on desire that is on the lack in the other, and consequently on the interrogation of the enigma of the other. What does the other want and what am I for the other? Love is an answer to this interrogation. An answer in which the subject responds to the lack in the other with its own lack by giving the other what one does not have.

In love, we fill in the lack implied in the desire of the other with our own lack or desire rather than with any positive content. More precisely and to reiterate Lacan's point, it is the presupposition of knowledge that constitutes the positive concrete form that giving my lack to the other takes. This presupposition is of course not based on any empirical evidence of the other's knowledge, but rather depends on the place the other occupies in relation to me and to others.

This could help us distinguish between two kinds of love. One is predicated on desire that is on the lack in the other and consequently on the interrogation of the enigma of the other. What does the other want and what am I for the other? Love is an answer to this interrogation. An answer in which the subject responds to the lack in the other with its own lack by giving the other what one does not have. In love, we fill in the lack implied in the desire of the other with our own lack or desire rather than with any positive content.

More precisely, and to reiterate Lacan's point, it is the presupposition of knowledge that constitutes the positive concrete form that giving my lack to the other takes. This presupposition is of course not based on any empirical evidence of the other's knowledge, but rather depends on the place the other occupies in relation to me, and to others.

But this is not the only kind of love, and it is not the kind Freud refers to in his mass psychology essay where he also calls it "hypnotic". I am tempted to call this other form of love "perverse" because it is based on a perverse kind of seduction. The other here seduces or fascinates the subject not through desire or lack, but through plenitude. There is no exchange taking place such as the exchange of my lack for the lack in the other. And in this sense, the bond thus created is indeed hypnotic. It remains external and one-sided.

What distinguishes this relation from classical respect for social authority is that the latter is predicated on authority being emptied of enjoyment. Whereas the former operates in the name of enjoyment. This is also the reason why perverse authority, unlike classical authority, is not vulnerable to the exposure of enjoyment.

On the contrary, such exposure only reinforces it. The presupposition of knowledge here is not an empty token of trust. Love for the leader begins with some possibly lost experience of enjoyment that he evokes or stirs up in us and which then becomes associated with knowledge. Knowledge about enjoyment.

To take Trump again as an example, the presupposition of knowledge in his case is not about political insight or wisdom in governance. It is simply this. He is rich. He knows how to get rich. And rich here evokes enjoyment. He knows how to enjoy and he can take care of our enjoyment.

At the same time, the exposure of enjoyment, I can do and say whatever I want, functions as a source of fascination. Fascination in the strict sense where one is unable to look away, drawn in and repulsed at once. Enjoyment is the lure.

So to return to our question of how to understand the coexistence of complete distrust in all public authorities and unconditional trust in the leader, we have to understand that this unconditional trust is in fact not unconditional at all. It is conditioned by the surplus enjoyment which is also our enjoyment circulating in the other under the paranoid presumption that someone, everyone, is trying to steal it. In this precise sense, the love for the leader is nothing other than the positive form taken by distrust in all other authorities. They are one in the same mechanism. To love the leader is to distrust everything and everyone else.

This of course is not the kind of love that liberates or empowers, gives us strength. It only makes us strong in the endless exercise of purges, or as Lacan calls them in his discussion of perversion and power, "Crusades". He adds this prophetic warning, "Byzantium never rose from the ashes of the crusades".

We must pay attention to such games for they can be played again even now in the name of other crusades. Indeed.