Slavoj Zizek - Denial: the Liberal Utopia

from lacan dot com

http://www.lacan.com/lacan1.htm

Jacques-Alain Miller

Jacques Lacan Université populaire of Psychoanalysis

http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=2

I'm saying Université populaire because the term is a well-known one, it's common currency, and it indicates very well that we'll be taking to heart that 'Freudian education of the French people' I was earnestly calling for back at the start of the decade.

Slavoj Zizek

Denial: the Liberal Utopia

http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=397

[…]

The long fight between Nada and Armitage which starts with Nada saying to Armitage: "I'm giving you a choice. Either put on these glasses or start to eat that trash." The fight, which goes on for an unbearable 10 minutes, with moments of exchange of friendly smiles, is in itself totally "irrational" – why doesn't Armitage accept to put the glasses on, just to satisfy his friend? The only explanation is that he knows that his friend wants him to see something dangerous, to attain a prohibited knowledge which would totally spoil the relative peace of his daily life. The violence staged here is a positive violence, a condition of liberation – the lesson is that our liberation from ideology is not a spontaneous act, an act of discovering our true Self. We learn in the film that, when one looks for too long at reality through critico-ideological glasses, one gets a strong headache: it is very painful to be deprived of the ideological surplus-jouissance. Marxists accept this aspect of struggle for dictatorship, they render it visible and openly practice it. Why? Let us return to the film: one you put the glasses on and see it, it no longer determines you. Which means that, before you see it through the glasses, you also saw it, but were not aware of it. To refer to the fourth missing term of Rumsfeld's epistemology, the injunctions were your "unknown knowns". This is why really seeing it hurts.

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