Sharpe, Matthew. Slavoj Žižek: a little piece of the real. Burlington Vt: Ashgate, 2004.
Žižek’s contention is that the social conditions of the contemporary would demand nothing less than a radical rethinking of the discursive constitution of subjectivity as such. … what risk theory fails to register, and what it falls to a psychoanalytically based analysis to register, is the changed situation of contemporary subjectivity vis-à-vis the ‘Real of jouissance’ (86).
I know very well that symbolic conventions are empty, yet I continue to follow the social expectations [as the only means to attain to money, power, sex (etc.) = because I believe through the duped other(s)].
So Žižek’s position is that we should defitely not be taken in by the contemporary subject’s conscious sense of himself as something of ‘an outlaw … staying clear of binding commitment’ (Žižek, 1991b: 103, 102) Perhaps more than ever, Žižek argues, today’s subjectivity is radically conformist. “… instead of the symbolic Law, we have a multitude of rules to follow” What Žižek is referring to are the multitude of ‘… imaginary ideals (of social success, of bodily fitness…)’ with which the multimedia, and in particular advertising discourse, solicit us.
From Žižek in 1991:
… [w]hat usually goes unnoticed [by social psychology] is that this disintegration of the ego-ideal entails the installation of a ‘maternal‘ superego taht does not prohibit enjoyment, but, on the contrary imposes it and punishes ‘social failure’ in a far more cruel and severe way, through an unbearable and self-destructive anxiety. All the babble about the decline nof ‘paternal authority’ merely conceals the resurgnece of this incpmparably more oppressive agency. 89