Žižek, Slavoj. “A Plea for a Return to Différance (with a Minor Pro Domo Sua)” Critical Inquiry. 32.2 (2006): 226-249.
What, then, would be this differénce that precedes the ethical commit-ment to the abyss of Otherness?
On the southern side of the demilitarized zone in Korea, there is a unique visitor’s site: a theater building with a large screenlike window in front, opening up onto theNorth. The spectaclepeo-ple observe when they take seats and look through the window is reality itself (or, rather, a kind of “desert of the real”): the barren demilitarized zone with walls, and so on, and, beyond, a glimpse of North Korea. (As if to comply with the fiction, North Korea has built in front of this theater a fake, a model village with beautiful houses; in the evening, the lights in all the houses are turned on at the same time, although nobody lives in them.)
Is this not a pure case of the symbolic efficiency of the frame as such? A barren zone is given a fantasmatic status, elevated into a spectacle, solely by being enframed. Nothing substantially changes here; it is merely that, viewed through the frame, reality turns into its own appearance.
A supreme case of such an ontological comedy occurred in December 2001 in Buenos Aires, when Argentinians took to the streets to protest against their government and, especially, against Cavallo, the economy minister. When the crowd gathered around Cavallo’s building, threatening to storm it, he escaped wearing a mask of himself (sold in disguise shops so that people could mock him by wearing his mask).
It thus seems that at least Cavallo did learn something from the widely spread Lacanian movement in Argentina — the fact that a thing is its own best mask. What one encounters in tautology is thus pure difference, not the difference between the element and other elements, but how the element is different from itself. 234
The fundamental lesson of Hegel is that the key ontological problem is not that of reality but that of appearance: not, Are we condemned to the interminable play of appearances, or can we penetrate through their veil to the underlying true reality?
but, How could — in the middle of flat, stupid reality, which is just there — something like appearance emerge?
The minimal ontology is therefore that of the Möbius strip, of the curved space that is bent onto itself; all that has to intervene into the Real is an empty frame so that the same things we saw “directly” before are now seen through the frame.
A certain surplus-effect is thus generated, which cannot simply be cancelled through demystification. It is not enough to display the mechanism behind the frame; the stage-effect within the frame becomes autonomous. How is this possible?
There is only one conclusion that can account for this gap: there is no “neutral” reality within which gaps occur, within which frames isolate domains of appearances.
Every field of “reality” (every “world”) is always already enframed, seen through an invisible frame. However, the parallax of the two frames is not symmetrical, composed of two incompatible perspectives on the same x: there is an irreducible asymmetry between the two perspectives, a minimal reflexive twist.
We do not have two perspectives; we have a perspective and what eludes it, and the other perspective fills in this void of what we could not see from the first perspective. 235