User:Aitantv/Slavoj Zizek (2001) Enjoy Your Symptom

The Matirx or the Two Sides of Pervsion (6.2, pp. 213)

"What if ideology resides in the bery belief that outside the closure of the finite universe, there is some 'true reality' to be entered." (pp. 214)

"arriving at the end of the universe" (pp. 214)

• a premodern notion we return to repeatedly in fantasy and science fiction
• are we retruning to a"renewed medieval pre-perspective universe?"

"the big other"

• the subject never fully dominates the effects of his acts.
• "beneath the chaos of market, the degradation of morals, and so on, there as the pruposeful strategy of the Jewish plot".

false claim of The Matrix

• "behind the incomplete/inconsistent reality we know, there is another reality with no deadlock of impossibility structuring it".
• Also, a sort of New Age wish, linking to Nirvana or one mind (Gaya) theory

Conspiracism

• "The problem is not that Ufologists and conspiracy theorists regress to a paranoiac attitude unable to accept (social) reality, the problem is that this reality itself is becoming paranoiac." (pp. 219)

the radical ambiguity of the Lacanian real

• "it is not the ultimtate referent to be covered/gentrified/domesticated by the screen of fantasy; the real is also and primarily the screen itself as the obstacle that always already distorts our perception of the referent, of the reality "out there"." (p220-1)

Levi-Strauss's Structural Anthropology

• of the spatial disposition of buildings in the Winnebago, one of the Great Lake's tribes
• two conflicting/distorting perspectives of the same village from two subgroups of the same tribe
• Links this distortion to Freud's three-elvel dispotif of the interpretation of dreams, whereby "the real kernel of the dream is not the dream's latent thought, which is displaced/translated into the explicit texture of the dream, but the unconscious desire that indscribes itself through the very distortion of the latent thought into the explicit texture"
• hence "the real kernel" of artworks is not the work's latent thought, but the underlying unconscious desire.
• Malevich's The Black Square on the White Surface + Duchamp's ready-mades - "being a work of art is not a question of why but where" - Duchamps statement necessarily followed Malevichs - the place/frame had to be isolated, emptied of all its content, to indulge in the ready-made procedure.
• "Before Malevich, a urinal would have remained just a urinal, even if it were to be displayed in the most distinguished gallery.

The Smith's final soliliquy

• "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops [of himans serving as batteries] were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that. as a species, human being define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kepy trying to wake up from. Which is why the matrix was resdesigned to this, the peak of your civilization."
• "his lesson is that the experience of an insurmountable obstacle is the positive condition for us, as humans, to percieve something as reality. Reality is ultimately that which resists." (p. 226)