What Must We Desire More Of? (or, Enjoyment Out Of Order)

Enjoyment Out Of Order

I stopped my clinical supervisor yesterday when he said something too Lacanian in regards to the diagnosis of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, which was that the obsessive is depressed due to having their enjoyment out of order. Enjoyment out-of-order, obsession presenting as depressive symptoms, enjoyment which comes “out of order,” the object placement as the source of enjoyment, and the final Hegelian interpretation, Enjoyment from out-of-order, which is that first the patient creates the nothing which is disorder, in order to have order.

In Zizek in the Clinic, what is brought up is a question of enjoyment in relation to the subversion of master discourses, which in one part of the book, takes the form of the question to the master, “What must we desire more of?” Another question might be, “What are we asking to be asked to desire more of?” What is the nothing that we ourselves are presenting in order to fill that nothing with something?

Fake Truth: A Materialist Juke Move

Marxist and Zero Books publisher Douglas Lain pointed out in an interview with Sky News that, among other things, that the Trump wall was entirely symbolic, in that it did not itself function to stop immigration. The Hegelian point which was repressed was that if the wall did function, then it would still be a symbolic wall as well. The symbolic wall of right wing nationalism as a “fuck you” to everyone who is against Trump’s brand of liar-nationalism might even be worse if it did function as a wall, because the primary function of the wall would be the “fuck you” rather than the stopping of the border crossing. The greatest obscuring factor of a symbolic wall would be in fact, it functioning as an actual wall properly, in order to keep people out. The material of the wall creates the nothing for which the symbol of the wall is then invited to fill.

The Lines Have Been Drawn For War In A Place Where No Blood Exists

We are faced with symbolic war more than ever, death drive without blood. In the virtual plane, people recreate the symbolic order which was once by necessity actualized by flesh and blood people, meaning that the gap between the Actual (with its previously difficult to recognize gap between symbol and material under a false unity) and the symbolic order for us is now distinguished with the help of the smooth space of electronic media. It was once “known” that philosophy or reason existed in a smooth-space, that philosophy as such never connects with the Actual because the flesh and blood discussions, where the important things happened, had to come up against social customs and the traditional forms of discourse, and thus the material limits of ideological repetition were these traditional forms of discourse. Does not the Donald Trump ascendence herald a sign where isolated forms of reason can now build in the smooth space of virtual reality, and be strung through meatspace while the luddites jump with surprise?

In electronic media, what we are to desire more of is almost entirely subsumed into the procedural unconscious, which is to utilize electronic media more. There is no limit or political necessity intrinsically to how this is to be done, and I think that any sort of outcry by the milquetoast right wingers about Alex Jones being banned or Jordan Peterson getting his Youtube account cancelled for five seconds is missing this universal of electronic media for electronic media’s sake, possibly because no one wants to be done.

Luddites are not free from virtual media, because the majority of discourse is happening in smooth space, between the human and their machine. What is more, where this is reversed, there lies a doomed ideology, or at the very least, a man on his heels with no repeater; the man holding the knife at the gun fight.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s