According to Freud, all group members install the leader in the position of an ego ideal, and this ego ideal held in common furthers the bond among members of society. But the identification with the leader has two sides to it: on the one hand subjects identify with the leader’s symbolic position as a noncastrated ideal existing beyond the world of lack; but on the other hand, subjects identify with the leader’s weaknesses, which exist in spite of the powerful image.
Both modes of identification work together in order to give subjects a sense of being a member of society, but they work in radically different ways. The identification with the leader’s power provides the subject with a sense of symbolic identity and recognition, whereas the identification with the leader’s weaknesses allows the subject to enjoy being a part of the community.
The identification with the leader’s strength provides pleasure that obscures the enjoyment deriving from the identification with the leader’s weaknesses. The weaknesses indicate that the leader is a subject of loss, that she/he enjoys rather than being entirely devoted to ruling as a neutral embodiment of the people. The weaknesses are evidence of the leader’s enjoyment, points at which a private enjoyment stains the public image. By identifying with these points, subjects in a community affirm the association of enjoyment with loss rather than with presence.
The [leader’s] strength allows subject who identify with the leader in her/his weakness to disavow this would-be traumatic identification and to associate themselves consciously with strength rather than weakness. 162
The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that bond. 163
The structure of society (which is the result of the structure of signification) is such that it blinds the subject to the possibility of shared sacrifice and the social bond that results from it. No matter how often children hear the ideology of sharing or how many times we repeat to them the gospel of fairness, they will inevitably believe that their sacrifice has enabled others to enjoy more than their proper share or unfairly.
As Slavoj Žižek points out in Tarrying with the Negative, “We always impute to the ‘other’ an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the ‘other’ is the peculiar way he organizes his enjoyment, precisely the surplus, the ‘excess’ that pertains to this way: the smell of ‘their’ food, ‘their’ noisy songs and dances, ‘their’ strange manners, ‘their’ attitude toward work.”
This belief – the paranoia about the other’s secret enjoyment – derives from the signifier’s inability to manifest its transparency. 163-164
[…] paranoia is written into the structure of the signifier itself … The belief that the other holds a secret enjoyment that the subject has sacrificed renders the smooth functioning of collective life impossible. The force that allows human beings to come together to form a society in common — language — is at once the force that prevents any society from working out. The structure of the signifier militates against utopia. It produces societies replete with subjects paranoid about, and full of envy for, the enjoying other. 164 – 165
Though one might imagine a society in which subjects enjoyed without bothering themselves about the other’s enjoyment, such a vision fails to comprehend the nature of our enjoyment.
We find our enjoyment through that of the other rather than intrinsically within ourselves. Our envy of the other’s enjoyment persists because this is the mode through which we ourselves enjoy. It is thus far easier to give up the idea of one’s own private enjoyment for the sake of the social order than it is to give up the idea of the enjoying other. 165
The other is perhaps enjoying, but this is not an enjoyment that occurs in spite of loss. Like the subject’s own, the other’s enjoyment is the enjoyment of loss because there is no other kind. Recognizing the link between enjoyment and loss – that is, accepting the logic of female sexuation – allows subjects to emphasize enjoyment at the expense of pleasure.
Those who achieve this experience the impossibility of having the object, recognizing that one can never have the object because it is nothing, existing only insofar as it is lost, and it is only in this form that it provides enjoyment for the subject. 165
As subjects of loss, there is no barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond, one where envy does not play a key role. The antagonism between the society and the individual develops out of the envy that subjects experience when they believe other members of the society have greater access to the privileged object than they do.
For the subject who grasps that this object only exists – and can only be enjoyed – through its loss, envy is no longer inevitable.
The composition of nothing is such that no one can have more of it than anyone else; there can be no hierarchy of loss, because everyone alike loses nothing. The authentic society of subjects connected through the embrace of trauma would be a society that could recognize that nothing is something after all. 165-166