As someone who has always found the link between literature and politics fascinating, I really enjoyed the variety in this week’s readings and after completing them I find myself thinking the most about the arguments Žižek puts forward in his discussion of “Fantasy as a Support of Reality”. This short section is not only very relevant to how we confront and approach texts as human beings that function in a larger world with many active political pressures, but also how we approach political discourse – which in my opinion, largely affects our world. I liked that Žižek opened the discussion with a clarification of the fact that when Lacan states that the last support of what we identify as “reality” is a fantasy, we should not understand this in the sense of life being “just a dream” or of the opinion that “what we call reality is just an illusion” (722) – he rather carefully identifies that it is only in the dream that we “come close to the real awakening – that is, to the Real of our desire” (722). Žižek then draws a parallel between this type of dream if it can be termed that, and how it is that only in the dream do we approach the fantasy framework which determines our activity, and the ideological dream.
I think the crux of his thesis is best expressed in his explanation of “the determination of ideology as a dreamlike construction hindering us from seeing the real state of things, reality as such”. What I find to be his biggest contribution to this discussion is, however, when he takes a rather different stance than the “free your mind” one that I think invades so many discourses in the present-day; it is easy enough to utter these saying convincingly, but concrete measures for that purpose seem to be much harder to articulate by their proponents. This is where I find Žižek’s explanation (and his use of manifestations of anti-Semitism in the late 1930s in Germany) most useful, productive, and a very significant contribution to this type of discussion. He explains that:
“In vain do we try to break out of the ideological dream by ‘opening our eyes and trying to see reality as it is,’ by throwing away the ideological spectacles as the subjects of such a post-ideological, objective, sober look, free of so-called ideological prejudices, as the subjects of a look which views the facts as they are, we remain throughout ‘the consciousness of our ideological dream”
(722)
I think it is precisely this point that often gets forgotten or neglected in this type of discourse, and that might have something to do with the fact that it is by no means an easy issue to tackle – just how can we go about truly “breaking out” then? I am hoping that maybe talking this over with some other members of the class later on today when we meet might make for some interesting discussion on this very complex and germane topic!