In my never-ending quest to feel and appear clever, I read the first philosophy book that I might’ve ever so slightly understood (sorry Nietzsche I’ll try again one day mate).
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian, communist philosopher and culture theorist, known broadly for his good humour and discussions surrounding ideology which he often links to popular media. He does this by looking into hidden meanings in the most famous films in his two documentaries, “A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema” and “A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology”, the latter of which is available on Amazon Prime. It’s funny and you’ll learn a thing or two.
Anyways, onto the book.
Written in the year of Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin wall, ‘The Sublime Object of Ideology’ is a great entry into Žižek’s work. In a nutshell, he writes about the science of ideas, from conception to life and uses differing opinions of his favourite psychoanalysts to subvert all expectations of his commentary. It is the first of many books Žižek has written and rewritten under different titles. Below I share notes that litter my copy of the book, typed out so they’re actually legible.
The function of dreams
What are dreams? Why do we dream and what do they mean? Zizek presents opposing views from a coked up eel circumcisor (Sigmund Freud) and some bloke that didn’t believe that women existed (Jaques Lacan).
“At bottom, dreams are nothing more than a particular form of thinking, made possible by conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dream-work which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming - the explanation of its peculiar nature.” - Sigmund Freud
Freud thought of dreams as meaningful phenomena that transmits repressed messages that are to be discovered by an interpretative procedure. He believed we need to remove the obsession of the ‘hidden meaning’ of the dream and rather focus on the dream itself.
In order to analyse differing theories relating to the function of dreams, Žižek cites a short story from Freud,
“A father had been watching his child’s sick-bed for days for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went to the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which his child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing around it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours’ sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully. ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’ He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child’s dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them.”
The Freudian interpretation of this story is that dreams function to prolong sleep, where an irritating external stimulus could be incorporated into a little scene within the dream, until the element is too great and the dreamer wakes up (this’ll make sense if you’ve ever heard an alarm in your dream). This plays into the basis of Freud’s theories, being that the keys to the functionality of the human brain lie in dreams, slips of the tongue and similar ‘abnormal phenomena’ such as dreamwork.
Lacan thought quite the opposite, precisely that sleep encounters the reality of desire in dreams, such that reality announces itself in the dream. In the case of this story, the announcement is the the child saying ‘don’t you see I’m burning’. So the father awakens to escape the reality of his desire into ‘actual reality’ in the waking world, seeing his child’s body in flames as was warned.
Reliving emotional duty via simulation
In his book, Žižek makes many interesting comparisons. My favourite is the parallel between the function of professional mourners at funerals and canned laughter in sitcoms.
To the uninitiated, professional mourners known as ‘weepers’ are groups of women that are paid to cry loudly in a horrifying grief-stricken manner. This is said to have started in Egypt, but has been found in Chinese and Orthodox cultures. Back in the day it was socially unacceptable for men to cry at a funeral but what’s continued through time is the idea that the more loud crying at your funeral, the more the crier cared about the person and the more important the person was. I experienced this first hand at my father’s funeral, where little old Cypriot ladies with iced out gangsta rapper-esque crosses around their necks (most of whom I’d never met) screamed their lungs out in the church. It was awful. Truly something that’ll strike a sharp, invisible pain in your chest. 0/10, I do not recommend.
Moving away from the trauma-dump, Žižek says that weepers exist for two reasons:
to remind us when we should cry
to relieve us of our duty to do so
So identically, canned laughter would also exist to remind us when we should laugh and to relieve us of our duty to expend the energy to laugh out loud when sitting alone in a dark living room after a tiring day’s work at your depressing slog of a job (or The Big Bang Theory just isn’t that funny).
Prejudice and anti-Semitism
There’s an extended passage on anti-Semitism in the book which can be applied to other biases we develop and that remain as subconscious parasites in the mind. It’s often said that we should liberate ourselves from anti-Semitic prejudices and not to judge Jewish people based off of stereotypes and to see everyone as individuals rather than part of a set group with accompanying stereotypes. Žižek argues that this way we will remain victims of these prejudices. We need to confront the ideological figure that is ‘The Jew’, a scapegoat constructed through paranoia to stitch up the inconsistency of one’s ideological system. This means that ‘The Jew’ itself has absolutely nothing to do with Jewish people.
This is analogised to a pathologically jealous husband, who will believe that his wife is sleeping with other men no matter what and even if she is (he’s correct), his jealousy remains a pathological construction. He is a broken clock. The prejudice itself is a paranoid construction regardless of whether it proves to be correct or not. This makes it incredibly hard to shake these ideological prejudices without confronting the pre-ideological, basement-level experience.
Let’s take an example straight from the book,
“Let us again take a typical individual in Germany in the late 1930s. He is bombarded by anti-Semetic propaganda depicting a Jew as a monstrous incarnation of Evil, the great wire-puller, and so on. But when he returns home he encounters Mr Stern, his neighbour, a good man to chat with in the evenings, whose children play with his.”
This begs the question ‘Does not this everyday experience offer an irreducible resistance to the ideological construction?’
Well, no.
Žižek argues that you are not properly grasped by and entrenched in an ideology if everyday experiences sway you. So how does the anti-Semite reconcile his prejudice with his everyday experience? In fact, It may increase the strength of the ideological hatred, “You see how dangerous they really are? It is difficult to recognize their real nature. They hide it behind a mask of everyday appearance”. And so here is the contradiction that acts to justify a deeply held ideological belief, the fact that the anti-Semite likes every Jewish person he meets confirms his conception of them being duplicitous.
I think that this phenomenon can be noticed in many of our daily lives today. For example, you may have a racist old relative that will say truly heinous thing about a group yet contradict this by treating every individual part of said group with love and respect when face to face with them.
Belief (religious or otherwise)
Despite being baptised an orthodox Christian, I wouldn’t say that I grew up in a very religious environment. Very few of my family members are genuinely religious bible-readers and church-goers but the majority ‘go through the motions’ of religious practice as a means to make our elders happy and to keep traditions alive. Even so, I’ve never felt that God existed and decided that I was atheist at a young age. I came to the same conclusion that any 15 year old redditor does, that God is dead and that I’m smarter than anyone who disagrees.
Since then my ego has somewhat deflated. I didn’t realise that belief is not a logical mechanism, Žižek says that the Christian isn’t necessarily convinced by theological arguments, they’re just susceptible to them due to already being illuminated by the ‘grace of belief’. This would also mean that one that is susceptible to ‘illumination’ could be of any religion depending on their upbringing. As an unenlightened heathen I often wonder why it’s the case for me that I haven’t found God, and under what circumstances that wouldn’t be the case. Anyways, more on the grace of belief.
This is likened to Communism in the book. A communist may exclaim that they’ve read all of these big boring books and therefore have come to the conclusion that support of their chosen economic modality is justified but Žižek parries this with some line in a film I’ve never heard of said by a gay Soviet spy (based on Guy Burgess),
“You are not Communist because you understand Marx, you understand Marx because you’re Communist.”
And here we see that even seemingly logical conclusions can be rooted in basic belief and illumination, which is a real kick in the bollocks for teenage me. Take that r/atheism.
If you’ve made it this far, leave a comment below convincing me to join your religion (unless it’s Christianity or Swiftism).
Socials:
Threads: mario.k.n
Instagram: mario.k.n
A song I’m listening to