Sharpe, Matthew. Slavoj Žižek: a little piece of the real. Burlington Vt: Ashgate, 2004.
Žižek’s position is that ideology primarily captures subjects at the level of their unconscious beliefs, and that it does this by structuring their access to jouissance (99).
Žižek proposes … that the answer to how one can still speak from ‘outside’ of the big Other of a hegemonic ideological system comes from a more detailed ontology of this Other itself. … the Other is itself divided and/or inconsistent, and so contains the resources of its own critique (100).
Modernity, Žižek repeats, is that ‘enlightened’ epoch wherein: “… the symbolic substance (the “big Other” qua texture of symbolic tradition) can no longer contain the subject, can no longer hold him to his symbolic mandate. [Žižek, 1992: 134 (Sharpe’s italics)]
Žižek’s argument is that sexuality only emerges in the first place at the points of the failure of what can be sanctioned by social discourse (113).