Slavoj, Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190.
The limit of such a reference to the impenetrable background into which we are thrown and on account of which we cannot be taken as fully accountable and responsible for our acts is the negativity of freedom: even when the entire positive content of my psyche is ultimately impenetrable, the margin of my freedom is that I can say No! to any positive element that I encounter.
This negativity of freedom provides the zero-level from which every positive content can be questioned. Lacan’s position is thus that being exposed/overwhelmed, caught in a cobweb of preexisting conditions, is not incompatible with radical autonomy.
Of course, I cannot undo the substantial weight of the context into which I am thrown; of course, I cannot penetrate the opaque background of my being; but what I can do is, in an act of negativity, “cleanse the plate,” draw a line, exempt myself, step out of the symbolic in a “suicidal” gesture of a radical act —what Freud called “death drive” and what German Idealism called “radical negativity.”
What gets lost in this “critique of ethical violence” is precisely the most precious and revolutionary aspect of the Jewish legacy.
Let us not forget that, in the Jewish tradition, the divine Mosaic Law is experienced as something externally, violently imposed, contingent and traumatic—in short, as an impossible/real Thing that “makes the law.”
What is arguably the ultimate scene of religious-ideological interpellation — the pronouncement of the Decalogue on Mount Sinai — is the very opposite of something that emerges “organically” as the outcome of the path of self-knowing and self-realization: the pronouncement of the Decalogue is ethical violence at its purest.
The Judeo-Christian tradition is thus to be strictly opposed to the New Age Gnostic problematic of self-realization or self-fulfillment, and the cause of this need for a violent imposition of the Law is that the very terrain covered by the Law is that of an even more fundamental violence, that of encountering a neighbor: far from brutally disturbing a preceding harmonious social interaction, the imposition of the Law endeavors to introduce a minimum of regulation onto a stressful “impossible” relationship.
When the Old Testament enjoins you to love and respect your neighbor, this does not refer to your imaginary semblable/double, but to the neighbor qua traumatic Thing.
In contrast to the New Age attitude which ultimately reduces my Other/Neighbor to my mirror-image or to the means in the path of my self-realization (like the Jungian psychology in which other persons around me are ultimately reduced to the externalizations-projections of the different disavowed aspects of my personality), Judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my Neighbor — the Neighbor remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes me. The core of this presence, of course, is the Other’s desire, an enigma not only for us, but also for the Other itself.
For this reason, the Lacanian “Che vuoi?” is not simply an inquiry into “What do you want?” but more an inquiry into “What’s bugging you? What is it in you that makes you so unbearable, not only for us but also for yourself, that you yourself obviously do not master?”
— in Serb, there is a vulgar expression which perfectly renders this meaning: when somebody is getting on one’s nerves, one asks him, “What for a prick is fucking you? [Koji kurac te jebe?]”