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September 8, 2006
In this article in the London Review of Books Zizek says that in postmodernity:
Everything is turned back to front. Public order is no longer maintained by hierarchy, repression and strict regulation, and therefore is no longer subverted by liberating acts of transgression (as when we laugh at a teacher behind his back). Instead, we have social relations among free and equal individuals, supplemented by 'passionate attachment' to an extreme form of submission, which functions as the 'dirty secret', the transgressive source of libidinal satisfaction. In a permissive society, the rigidly codified, authoritarian master/slave relationship becomes transgressive. This paradox or reversal is the proper topic of psychoanalysis: psychoanalysis does not deal with the authoritarian father who prohibits enjoyment, but with the obscene father who enjoins it and thus renders you impotent or frigid. The unconscious is not secret resistance to the law, but the law itself.
That is a major rupture with puritan capitalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Zizek says that the psychoanalytic response to the 'risk-society' theory of the reflexivisation of our lives is not to insist on a pre-reflexive substance, the unconscious, but to suggest that the theory neglects another mode of reflexivity. For psychoanalysis, the perversion of the human libidinal economy is what follows from the prohibition of some pleasurable activity: not a life led in strict obedience to the law and deprived of all pleasure but a life in which exercising the law provides a pleasure of its own, a life in which performance of the ritual destined to keep illicit temptation at bay becomes the source of libidinal satisfaction.
That's quite a reversal.
Zizek adds:
Regulatory power mechanisms and procedures become 'reflexively' eroticised: although repression first emerges as an attempt to regulate any desire considered 'illicit' by the predominant socio-symbolic order, it can only survive in the psychic economy if the desire for regulation is there - if the very activity of regulation becomes libidinally invested and turns into a source of libidinal satisfaction.
Everything has been sexualized.
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