At the level of an atomized individual (which is the level Zizek insists on when he goes Kantian and psychoanalytic, which is to say, most of the time), there is an abyss between necessity and recognition: Zizek's favorite quotation from Lacan -- "I am not where I think." Zizek elaborates it thus: "[T]here is no possible answer to the question 'How is the Thing-that-thinks structured?' The paradox of self-consciousness is that it is possible only against the background of its own impossibility. I am conscious of myself only in so far as I am out of reach to myself _qua_ the real kernel of my being ('I or he or it (the thing) that thinks'). I cannot acquire consciousness of myself in my capacity as the Thing-that-thinks" (p. 205). This may explain a kind of "machine envy" in modernist aesthetic: "Replicants know their life span is limited to four years: this certainty which saps the openness of their 'being-towards-death' bears witness to the fact that they have arrived at the impossible point of knowing how they are structured _qua_ 'thing-machine that thinks'. For that reason, replicants are ultimately the impossible fantasy-formation of us, human mortals: the fantasy of a being conscious of itself _qua_ Thing, of a being that does not have to pay for its access to self-consciousness with $ [= "everything that I positively am, every enunciated content I can point at and say 'that's me', is not 'I' -- I am only the void that remains, the empty distance towards every content"], with the loss of its substantial support" (pp. 212-3). Zizek regards this as an "unbearably tragic" insight that is worth repeating ad infinitum. I don't know why it has to be tragic, though.
The antinomy experienced at the level of an individual -- a staple of Western philosophy -- with which Zizek is fascinated can very well be given a right-wing interpretation:
***** Modernism/Modernity 4.2 (1997) 121-138 Anatomy of Folly: Wyndham Lewis, the Body Politic, and Comedy Vincent Sherry
...[Wyndham] Lewis reverses the value and strategy of the Bergsonian formula: "The root of the Comic is to be sought in the sensations resulting from the observations of a thing behaving like a person" (WB, 158); the mechanical thing defines the essence of Lewis's character, not simply a provisional, farcical identity. This comedy laughs at the pretence to humanity, the imitation of personhood by its inveterate inferiors; the very humanist vantage assumed by Bergson is here the butt of laughter. Lewis's comic characters are not some subnormal exception; they comprise a usual humankind, whose strenuous but vacuous attempt to supersede their animal-mechanical nature affords the constant opportunity for comedy. Lewis expresses the antihumanist philosophy that generates this perception as the passage about "the root of the comic" continues, elaborating its basic premise in typical mise-en-scènes:
But from that point of view all men are necessarily comic: for they are all things, or physical bodies, behaving as persons. . . .
If you saw (to give another example of intelligence or movement in the "dead") a sack of potatoes suddenly get up and trundle off down the street (unless you were so sceptical to think that it was some one who had got inside the sack), you would laugh. . . .
The other day in the underground, as the train was moving out of the station, I and those around me saw a fat but active man run along. . . . [H]is running, neat, deliberate, but clumsy embarkation, combined with the coolness of his eye, had a ludicrous effect, to which several of us responded. His eye I decided was the key to the absurdity of the effect. It was its detachment that was responsible for this. It seemed to say, as he propelled his sack of potatoes--that is himself--along the platform, and as he successfully landed the sack in the carriage: ". . . When you run a sack of potatoes like ME, you get the knack of them: but they take a bit of moving."
It was the detachment, in any case, that gave the episode a comic quality, that his otherwise very usual appearance would not have possessed. [WB, 158-60]...
Notes 1. Wyndham Lewis, "The Meaning of the Wild Body," in The Complete Wild Body, ed. Bernard Lafourcade (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1982), 157; hereafter abbreviated WB. This edition reprints the texts of Lewis's 1927 compilation, The Wild Body: A Soldier of Humour and Other Stories, and it supplements this with the earlier versions, as published in English journals in 1909 and 1910, and with various ancillary materials
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modernism-modernity/v004/4.2sherry.html> ***** -- Yoshie
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