Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.
The incessant pressure to choose involves not only ignorance about the object of choice, but, even more radically, the subjective impossibility of answering the question of desire. When Lacan defines the object of desire as originally lost, his point is not simply that we never know what we desire and are condemned to an eternal search for the “true” object, which is the void of desire as such, while all positive objects are merely its metonymic stand-ins. His point is a much more radical one: the lost object is ultimately the subject itself, the subject as an object; which means that the question of desire, its original enigma, is not p rimarily “What do I want?” but “What do others want from me? What object — objet a— do they see in me?” Which is why, apropos the hysterical question “Why am I that name? ” (ie., where does my symbolic identity originate, what justifies it? ) , Lacan points out that the subject as such is hysterical. He defines the subject tautologically as “that which is not an object:’ the point being that the impossibility of identifying oneself as an object (that is, of knowing what I am libidinally for others) is constitutive of the subject. In this way, Lacan generates the entire diversity of “pathological” subjective positions, reading it as the diversity of the answers to the hysterical question: the hysteric and the obsessive enact two modalities of the question — the psychotic knows itself as the object of the Other’s jouissance, while the pervert posits itself as the instrument of the Other’s jouissance (64).
Herein resides the terrorizing dimension of the pressure to choose — what resonates even in the most innocent inquiry when one reserves a hotel room (“Soft or hard pilows? Double or twin beds?”) is the much more radical probing: “Tell me who you are? What kind of an object do you want to be? What would fill in the gap of your desire?” This is why the “anti-essentialist” Foucauldian apprehension about “fixed identities” -the incessant urge to practise the “care of the Self,’ to continuously re- invent and re- create oneself-finds a strange echo in the dynamics of “postmodern” capitalism.
Of course, good old existentialism had already claimed that man is what he makes of himself, and had linked this radical freedom to existential anxiety. Here the anxiety of experiencing one’s freedom, the lack of one’s substantial determination, was the authentic moment at which the subject’s integration into the fixity of its ideological universe is shattered. But what existentialism was not able to envisage is … namely how,
by no longer simply repressing the lack of a fixed identity, the hegemonic ideology directly mobilizes that lack to sustain the endless process of consumerist “self-re-creation.” (65)