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| THE SOUND OF MUSIC The basic insight of psychoanalysis is to distinguish between enjoyment and simple pleasures. They are not the same. Enjoyment is precisely enjoyment in disturbed pleasure. Even enjoyment in pain and this excessive factor disturbs the apparently simple relationship between duty and pleasures. This is also a space where ideology up to and especially religious ideology operates. This brings me to maybe my favourite example, the great classic Hollywood film: The Sound Of Music.
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| We all know it's the story of a nun who is too alive with too much energy, ultimately sexual energy to be constrained to the role of a nun. Reverend mother I'm so sorry I just couldn't help myself.
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| So, mother superior send her to the Von Trapp family where she takes care of the children...
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| And at the same time of course falls in love with the baron Von Trap. And Maria gets too disturbed by it cannot control it, returns to the convent.
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| No wonder that in old communist Yugoslavia where I saw this film for the first time exactly this scène or more precisely the song that follows this strange hedonist, if you want, advice from the mother superior.
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| Go back. Seduce the guy. Follow this path. Do not betray your desire.
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| Namely the song which begins with "Climb Every Mountain"; the song which is almost an embarrassing display and affirmation of desire
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| It's not to prohibit, in this case, sexual pleasures. It's a much more cynical contact as it were, between the church as an institution and the believer troubled with, in this case, sexual desires. It is this hidden, obscene permission that you get. You are covered by the divine being, you can do whatever you want, enjoy.
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| This obscene contract does not belong to Christianity as such. It belongs to Catholic Church as an institution.
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| Not only the explicit message: renounce, suffer and so on... but the true hidden message: pretend to renounce and you can get it all.
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| '''A commodity is an object full of ideological even metaphysical niceties. It's presence always reflects an invisible transcendence and the classical publicity for Coke quite openly refers to this absent, invisible quality.'''
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| '''In our post-modern, however we call them, societies we are obliged to enjoy. Enjoyment becomes a kind of a weird perverted duty.'''
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| The paradox of Coke is that you are thirsty you drink it but as everyone knows the more you drink it the more thirsty you get.
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| Perhaps the ultimate quarrel of a desire is to be fully filled in, met so that I desire no longer.
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| We cannot return to that. The excess is with us forever. So let's have a drink of Coke. It's getting warm... it's no longer the real Coke and that's the problem.
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| '''It's the elementary dialectics of commodities. We are not talking about objective, factual properties of a commodity. We are talking only here about that illusive surplus.'''
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| The whole delicate balance is between these two dimensions. What you bought, the chocolate egg and the surplus probably made in some Chinese gulag or whatever, the surplus that you get for free. I don't think that the chocolate frame is here just to send you on a deeper voyage towards the inner treasure, what '''Plato calls the Agalma, which makes you a wealthy person, which makes a commodity the desirable commodity.
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| it's the other way around. We should aim at the higher goal?'''
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| The goal in the middle of an object precisely to be able to enjoy the surface; this is what is the anti-metaphysical lesson, which is difficult to accept.
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| Karamazov: if there is no God then everything id permitted. Well, the first problem with this statement of course is that Dostoïevsky never made it. The first one who used this phrase that was allegedly made by Dostoïevsky was Jean-Paul Sartre in 43, but the main point is that this statement is simply wrong.
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| If you pose it or perceive or legitimise yourself as a direct instrument of the divine will, then of course all narrow petty moral considerations disappear.
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| How can you even think in such narrow terms when you are a so-called instrument of God? This is how religious fundamentalists work, but not only them. Every form of so called totalitarianism works like that even if it is presented or if it presents itself as atheist.
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| In a Stalinist universe there definitely is what in psychoanalytic theory we call the '''Big Other.'''
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| '''This Big Other in the Stalinist universe has many names. The best known of them are the necessity of historical progress towards communism or simply history.'''
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| '''History itself is the big other. History is the necessary succession of historical stages.'''
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| When you are accused of my God, how could you have been doing all of these horrible things?
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| You could have said and this is the standard Stalinist excuse, of course my heart bleeds for all the innocent victims, I am not responsible for it, I was only acting on behalf of the Big Other.
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| Lenin in Stalinism is always presented as someone who likes small children and cats. The implication being Lenin had to order many killings and so on but his heart was not there, this was his duty as instrument of historical progress and so on and so on.
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| It is to undermine this very reference, mythic reference which legitimises the Stalinist leader: the people.
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| I think that this is the way to undermine the entire structure of the Stalinist universe.
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| To demonstrate not that leaders are not leaders, they are always ready to say oh but we are just ordinary people like you. No!
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| '''what is the Big Other?
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| there is no mythic people which serves as the ultimate legitimisation.'''
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| This basic element of every ideological edifice? It has two quite contradictory aspects. On the one hand, of course, the Big Other is the secret order of things like divine reason, fate or whatever, which is controlling our destiny.
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| Much more interesting is the Big Other as the order of appearances.
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| A supreme example of this agency of the Big Other as the agency of appearance is the prattling busybody in David Lean's masterpiece, the Brief Encounter.
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| At the very beginning of the film, the two lovers, Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard arrange for their last meeting in a cafeteria of a small train station.
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| Why is this situation so interesting? Because on the one hand we cannot but experience this annoying lady as a brutal intruder.
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| Instead of the two lovers being allowed at least their final moments alone they have to maintain the appearances that nothing is happening between them, that they are just acquaintances and so on and so on.
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| This precisely is the function of the Big Other. We need for our stability, figure of Big Other for whom we maintain appearances.
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| They survived a terrible predicament and what kept them alive was the idea I must survive to tell the truth. If when if they survived they made a terrible discovery, there is no one to really
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| But are things really as simple as that? The next scene Celia Johnson totally desperate... she knows she will never again see her lover.
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| Then we hear the line of Celia Johnson's thought.
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| What is the nature of this deadlock of Celia Johnson? She is split between the two figures in the film of the Big Other. On the one hand it's her husband, the ideal listener, but it's out of question to confess to him.
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| Yes, one has one's roots. On the other hand you hear this stupid person who is available as a confessor but there is not even an elementary trust.
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| So that's the tragedy of our predicament. In order to fully exist as individuals we need the fiction of a Big Other. There must be an agency which, as it were, registers our predicament.
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| But what if there is no such agency? This was the utmost despair of many women raped in the post Yugoslav war in Bosnia in the early nineties.
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| listen to them. Either some ignorant bored social worker or some relative who usually made obscene insinuations like are you sure you were not enjoying a little bit the rape and so on and so on.
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| They discovered the truth of what Jacques Lacan claims: there is no Big Other. There may be a virtual Big Other to whom you cannot confess. There may be a real other but it's never the virtual one. We are alone.
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