Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.
Here is the famous CHICKEN JOKE on Nov 5, 2010
A man who believes he is a piece of grain is taken to the mental institution where the doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a piece of grain but a man; however, when he is cured and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling and insisting that there is a chicken outside the door and that he is afraid that it will eat him. “But wait a minute,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a piece of grain but a man”. “Of course I know that,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken know that?” (34)
The insight of the patient is correct: no matter how wise and knowledgeable we become, the chicken-commodity will still get us. … we cannot avoid fetishizing the commodity, regardless of how much knowledge we have acquired.
Knowledge itself is not enough. Consequently, ‘the real task is to convince not the subject, but the chicken-commodities: not to change the way we talk about commodities, but to change the way commodities talk among themseves. (Žižek “The Parallax View” 352).
The key ideological battle is fought not on what we consciously believe in (or do not believe in), but on the plane of disavowed beliefs. What has to change is the substance of our “belief by proxy”: the way in which we unconsciously displace belief onto the other qua commodity, thereby ignoring that this other has always-already colonized our unconscious, and thus it has become the cause of what we are.
The task ahead, then, is to invent a new relation to the disavowed substance of our belief, which, of course, must follow our subtraction from or disengagement with commodity fetishism. For the paradoxical statment that commodities “do the believing for us” means that they have hooked us at the level of surplus-jouissance,
hence my argument that there is a crucial gap between our conscious enjoyment of the commodity (which falls under the jurisdiction of the pleasure principle) and the way the commodity enjoys us (commodity fetishism proper).
Only the latter can be said to represent our lack towards enjoyment, namely surplus jouissance, and therefore the only point from which we can subtract and begin anew. It is the traumatic encounter with our passive objectification vis-à-vis the circulation of commodities that, alone, can provide for us an image of salvation.
We are fetishists in practice not in theory: our reliance on common sense masks the fact that we are constantly duped by the commodities. Marx was therefore fully entitled to speak of “commodity metaphysics“. Our condition is one where instead of idealizing through knowledge, we idealize through fetishism — literally, without knowing what we are doing. More than ever before, belief today is externalized, embodied in our blind practices of consumption.
surplus jouissance is always at least minimally traumatic, and only as such liberating. The question is how to locate this jouissance and, most importantly, bring it about. (37)