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 face is thus the ultimate fetish, the object which fills in (obfuscates) the big Other’s “castration” (inconsistency, lack), the abyss of its circularity. At a different level, this fetishization— or, rather, fetishist disavowal — is discernible also in our daily relating to another person’s face. This disavowal does not primarily concern the raw reality of flesh (“I know very well that beneath the face there is just the Real of the raw flesh, bones, and blood, but I nonetheless act as if the face is a window into the mysterious interiority on the soul”),
but rather, at a more radical level, the abyss/void of the Other: the human face “gentrifies” the terrifying Thing that is the ultimate reality of our neighbor.
And insofar as the void called “the subject of the signifier” ($) is strictly correlative to this inconsistency (lack) of the Other, subject and face are to be opposed: the Event of encountering the other’s face is not the experience of the abyss of the other’s subjectivity — the only way to arrive at this experience is through defacement in all its dimensions, from a simple tic or grimace that disfigures the face (in this sense, Lacan claims that the Real is “the grimace of reality”) up to the monstrosity of the total loss of face.
Perhaps the key moment in Jerry Lewis’s films occurs when the idiot he plays is compelled to become aware of the havoc his behavior has caused: at this moment, when he is stared at by all the people around him, unable to sustain their gaze, he engages in his unique mode of making faces, of ridiculously disfiguring his facial expression, combined with twisting his hands and rolling his eyes. This desperate attempt of the ashamed subject to efface his presence, to erase himself from others’ view, combined with the endeavor to assume a new face more acceptable to the environs, is subjectivization at its purest.
However, Lacan’s counterargument is here that shame by definition concerns fantasy. Shame is not simply passivity, but an actively assumed passivity:if I am raped, I have nothing to be ashamed of; but if I enjoy being raped, then I deserve to feel ashamed. Actively assuming passivity thus means, in Lacanian terms, finding jouissance in the passive situation in which one is caught. And since the coordinates of jouissance are ultimately those of the fundamental fantasy, which is the fantasy of (finding jouissance in) being put in the passive position (like the Freudian “My father is beating me”), what exposes the subject to shame is not the disclosure of how he is put in the passive position, treated only as the body. Shame emerges only when such a passive position in social reality touches upon the (disavowed intimate) fantasy.
Let us take two women, the first, liberated and assertive, active; the other, secretly daydreaming about being brutally handled by her partner, even raped. The crucial point is that, if both of them are raped, the rape will be much more traumatic for the second one, on account of the fact that it will realize in “external” social reality the “stuff of her dreams.” Why?
There is a gap which forever separates the fantasmatic kernel of the subject’s being from the more “superficial” modes of his or her symbolic and /or imaginary identifications — it is never possible for me to fully assume (in the sense of symbolic integration) the fantasmatic kernel of my being.
When I approach it too closely, what occurs is the aphanisis of the subject: the subject loses his or her symbolic consistency, it disintegrates. And the forced actualization in social reality itself of the fantasmatic kernel of my being is, perhaps, the worst, most humiliating kind of violence, a violence which undermines the very basis of my identity (of my “self-image”) by exposing me to an unbearable shame.