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.
This is how today’s ideology functions: a successful businessman who, deep in himself, thinks that his economic activity is just a game in which he participates, while his “true Self” expresses itself in spiritual meditation that he regularly practices, is not aware that this “true Self” is a mere delusion enabling him to successfully participate in the economic activity. He is like a Jew who knows there is no God, but nonetheless obeys the kosher rules. 179
Furthermore, is Lacan’s point not also that I am only as seen through a blind spot in what I see, through the stain in the field of the visible which is strictly correlative to the subject’s existence? Is this not what Lacan’s formula $<> a (the “impossible” correlation between the void of subjectivity and the stain of the object) amounts to? 180
Is this not also the anti-panopticon lesson of the recent trend of “-cam” Web sites, which realize the logic of “The Truman Show”? (On these sites, we are able to follow continuously some event or place: the life of a person in his or her apartment, the view on a street, etc.) Do they not display an urgent need for the fantasmatic Other’s Gaze serving as the guarantee of the subject’s being: “I exist only insofar as I am looked at all the time”?
Similar to this is the phenomenon, noted by Claude Lefort, of the TV set that is all the time turned on, even when no one effectively watches it. It serves as the minimum guarantee of the existence of a social link.
Thus, the contemporary situation is the tragicomic reversal of the Benthamic-Orwellian notion of the panopticon society in which we are (potentially) observed all the time and have no place to hide from the omnipresent gaze of the Power.
Today, anxiety arises from the prospect of not being exposed to the Other’s gaze all the time, so that the subject needs the camera’s gaze as a kind of ontological guarantee of his or her being.
And, last but not least, is the only position outside illusion really the impossible position of a totally desubjectivized self-exposure?
Does Wajcman not confound here two quite distinct experiences: the psychotic exposure to the all-seeing gaze of the Other and the experience that nothing in truth looks back at me because “there is no big Other,” because the Other is in itself inconsistent, lacking?
In Lacan’s perspective, it is wrong to say that the subject exists only insofar as it is exempted from the Other’s gaze; rather, the subject’s ($) existence is correlative to the lack in the Other, to the fact that the big Other itself is barred.
There is a subject only insofar as the Other is itself traversed by the bar of an inherent impossibility.
Here, we should bear in mind that l’objet petit a signals and simultaneously fills in the lack in the Other, so that saying that the subject is correlative to l’objet petit a equals saying that it is correlative to the lack in the Other.
Far from assuming this lack, the psychotic persists in the illusion of a consistent (noncastrated) Other who is not just a fiction, in other words, who is not just “my own gaze in the field of the Other.” 180-81