Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism.
Why, in more general terms, should we worry about idealism? Or, to put it differently, what has cultural criticism to gain by invoking the Lacanian real? … Lacan … offers an independent material alterity: ‘the real is what does not depend on my idea of it’ (Fink 1995: 142). 56
‘What could it possibly mean’, Lacan asks early on, ‘to say that the subject is everything?’ (1988b: 98). What indeed? Perfect sovereignty for the subject, damaged or not, of course. Idealism delivers what the free West prizes most.
In a world without alterity, I increasingly constitute my own origin; moreover, I construct my own body, cause my own diseases by bad habits or irrational worry, and bring about my own death if I am foolish enough to let either of these get out of hand. Western culture treats life as a constant process of self-fashioning, unimpeded by external constraints.
In science fiction Hollywood heroes materialize their anxieties; in cultural theory I materialize my own sex. Death, however, remains frightening, as does the threat of physical impairment that would impugn our autonomy. Idealism turns the object of desire into an increasingly prosthetic immortality, secured by remorseless self-discipline: a regime of diet and exercise, supplemented by surgery.
Lacan saw the possibility of assuming our own being-for-death as heroic, the consequence of a struggle to be what we are in the face of everything that may oppose us. His Antigone asserts her autonomy against the cultural script, and against the ‘good sense’ of other people, who urge her not to break the law.
Idealism, by contrast, leaves such autonomy there for the taking, or rules it out on the basis of cultural determinism. In the absence of any substantial alterity, how or what should we oppose? The abolition of opposition in turn does away with the heroism. 57
Critique of Žižek
Žižek, aware of the seductions of imaginary sovereignty, repeatedly insists that we should ‘traverse the fantasy’ presented by the symbolic order, go through the cultural screen to encounter the emptiness beyond it (1997: 30– 31). This bleak proposition takes Lacan’s account of the death drive to its logical conclusion, but it is his subscription to idealism in the first place that makes it all the more imperative for Žižek to prescribe suicide as the supreme ethical act. Traversing the fantasy to the void both constitutes a counterweight to the self-indulgence of an idealist culture, and at the same time installs the true sovereignty of the subject itself (see, for example, 1991: 63– 4; 1992a: 77– 8). 57