Fantasy plague

Author: ?i?ek (Slovenia)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-04-01
Features: In this book, ?i?ek argues that the current era is suffering from an epidemic of fantasy. The increasing abstraction of our lives—from digitalization to market relations—and the proliferation of pseudo-specific images around us are creating an ever-increasing conflict. Traditional criticism tends to establish a connection between abstract concepts and concrete social reality, whereas ?i?ek's perspective is that today, the correct procedure is to derive abstract concepts from pseudo-specific images. He provides examples from all walks of life in the book, ranging from the different designs of restrooms in various countries to online sex, from the Bosnian War to the music of Robert Schumann, exploring the relationship between fantasy and ideology, the means by which ideology both produces pleasure and ensures that it does not become excessive, the connection between the concept of the commodity and the allure of fantasy, and the impact of digitalization and cyberspace on the status of subjectivity. In these discussions, ?i?ek fully demonstrates his mastery, erudition, humor, and incisive insights. From the perspective of Lacan, the book systematically analyzes the hypothesis of the "epidemic of fantasy."
Chapter 1 ("The Seven Masks of Fantasy") discusses the contours of the concept of fantasy in psychoanalysis and specifically considers the dependence of certain fantasies on ideology.
Chapter 2 ("Love Your Neighbor? No, Thanks!") discusses the ambiguous relationship between fantasy and pleasure: fantasy drives and constructs pleasure while simultaneously acting as a shield to prevent pleasure from becoming excessive.
Chapter 3 ("The Commodity and Its Decline") focuses on the impasse of the commodity concept as an example of the allure of fantasy (from its religious origins to its postmodern transformation).
The final chapter ("Cyberspace, or the Unbearable Imprisonment of Being") directly addresses the topic of cyberspace as a new version of the "epidemic of fantasy" and attempts to explore how continuous digitalization will affect the status of subjectivity.
After the four chapters, three appendices are added, analyzing three examples of the unrepresentability of the reality underlying the "epidemic of fantasy": the failure to depict sexual acts in films (From the Sublime to the Absurd: Sexual Scenes in Cinema); the gradual disappearance of melodic lines as a manifestation of subjectivity (Robert Schumann: The Romantic Antihumanist); and the rejection of moral laws in modern (Kantian) ethics (The Law of the Unconscious: On an Ethics Beyond Good and Evil).