The Sublime Object of Ideology
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"One of the most interesting, if not the most interesting, point that Zizek makes in The Sublime Object of Ideology is that ‘love is a forced choice.’ He explains this by simply pointing out that one cannot choose who one loves nor can one be forced into loving someone, instead what happens is that the loving subject realizes that they have fallen in love, having already choosen, only after the fact." --Naught Thought[1] "This is also the basic paradox of love, not only of one’s country, but also of a woman or a man. If I’m directly ordered to love a woman, it is clear that it doesn’t work: in a way. love must be free. But, on the other hand, if I’m proceeding as if I really have a free choice, if I start to look around and say to myself, “Let’s choose which of these women I will fall in love with,” it’s clear that this also doesn’t work, that it isn’t “real love.” The paradox of love is that it is a free choice, but a choice which never happens in the present, i.e., which is always already done - at a certain moment, I can only state retroactively that I’ve already chosen."--The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) by Slavoj Žižek "In his Treatise on Human Freedom ( 1809), Schelling, the 'acme of German idealism' (Heidegger), radicalized the Kantian theory by introducing a crucial distinction between freedom (free choice) and consciousness: the atemporal choice by means of which the subject chooses himself as 'good' or 'evil' is an unconscious choice (how can we not recall, apropos of this Schellingian distinction, the Freudian thesis concerning the atemporal character of the unconscious?)."--The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) by Slavoj Žižek "Look at her, what a shame, under her clothes, she is totally naked." |
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The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) is a book by Slavoj Žižek. The book, which Žižek believes to be one of his best, essentially makes thematic the Kantian notion of the sublime in order to liken ideology to an experience of something that is absolutely vast and forceful beyond all perception and objective intelligibility.
The first chapter begins with an analysis of "How did Marx Invent the Symptom?" Žižek compares the notion of symptom that works in both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud in this section. He is against a simplistic reading of both the authors who are seen to have discovered the hidden "kernel" of meaning behind the apparently unconnected "forms" of commodities (by Marx) and dreams (by Freud). The kernel of the content of commodity being labour and the dream being its latent meaning. Žižek thinks the more important question is why did the latent content take this particular form? Thus, the dream-work and commodity-form itself requires analysis, according to both Freud and Marx, Žižek says.
See also
- Sinthome
- Jacques Lacan, L'Éthique de la psychanalyse, Paris: Seuil, 1986, p. 231.
