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→Racism
==fantasy==
==Che vuoi?==
For Žižek, racism begins with the question of 'Che vuoi?'. As we saw in Chapter 5, 'Che vuoi?' is a shorthand way of asking 'What do you want from me?'. This question arises from the arbitrary character of our roles in the Symbolic Order. These roles are arbitrary in that they are not the direct consequence of our actual, real properties. For example, if I am a king there is nothing inherently 'kingly' about me; I do not have an intrinsic quality of 'kingliness' that I am born with. The qualities of 'kingliness' are conferred upon me by my position in the Symbolic Order when I am born into a royal family. We therefore maintain a distance towards our roles because we do not feel we can fully account for them. This distance is expressed by the 'Che vuoi?'-'ZWhy am I what you say I am?-the question we address to the big Other. It is a question asked these days less by kings and more by celebrities: do you (the fans) love me for my fame (my role in the Symbolic Order) or for who I really am?
What, however, has this to do with racism? According to Žižek the question of 'Che vuoi?' or what you really want from me 'erupts most violently in the purest, so to say distilled form of racism, in anti-Semitism: in the anti-Semitic perspective, the Jew is precisely a person about whom it is never clear "what he really wants"' (SOI: 114).
As is suggested here, the Jew is the paradigmatic figure of the victim of racism for Žižek. Elsewhere, he concedes that this figure may well be Afro-American or Japanese, but in Europe the Jew has always been the subject of racism. The Jew is suspicious because we do not know what he wants-his intentions and his desires are unclear to us. In order to dissipate our own sense of incomprehension thrown up by the Jewish 'Che vuoi?' we create our own scenario, explaining the Jew's actions in terms of a hidden agenda-'This is what he really wants (to get all our money, to take over the world, etc.)'. This scenario, this answer to the 'Che vuoi?', is a fantasy. Fantasy functions as an attempt to fill out the void of the question of 'What do you want from me?' by providing us with a tangible answer. It spares us from the perplexity of not knowing what the Other really wants from us.
In order to clarify this point, Žižek suggests that the reason the Jews have become the paradigmatic subjects of racism is because of the particular character of the Jewish God. The Jewish God is unknowable. The Judaic prohibition on making images of God means that, for Žižek, the Jewish God persists as the incarnation of 'Che vuoi?'-we never really know what He desires from us. Even when this God pronounces a comprehensible order, such as when he demands that Abraham sacrifice his son, it remains unclear what he actually wants from Abraham, what God's intention is behind this command. Abraham's position in this respect is emblematic of the position of the Jews as a whole. Why were they picked by God to be the 'chosen people'? In themselves they were not special, but they became 'the chosen ones' when they assumed their Symbolic mandate, the role that God had chosen for them. The starting point for a Jewish believer is thus the perplexity of the 'Che vuoi?'-'What does God want from us?'. In contrast to the anxiety of Judaism, Žižek asserts that Christianity is founded upon the pacification of the 'Che vuoi?': the Passion of Christ, the image of Christ upon the Cross, is a kind of fantasy scenario which fills in the void of the question of the desire of the Other. By sacrificing His son, God reassures Christian believers that He loves them and thus makes His desire clear.
What Žižek insists we be clear on here is that fantasy, as a psycho-analytic category, is not reducible to an imagined scenario in which our desires are satisfied. The first point to note here is that desire itself cannot be satisfied or fulfilled. In order to exemplify this, Žižek relates the plot of 'Store of the Worlds', the story by American author Robert
==HYSTERIA, OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS AND PERVERSION==
We saw in the previous chapter that the question of 'Che vuoi?' defines the position of hysteria. The hysteric is never clear what the Other wants and is therefore always plagued by a kind of self-doubt, manifest in a recurrent questioning. In straightforward hysteria the subject believes that what the Other wants from him or her is love. In obsessional neurosis, which is a sub-set of hysteria, the subject believes that what the Other wants is work, and so the obsessional devotes him or herself to frenetic activity. Žižek often contrasts these hysterical responses with perversion. Despite its everyday associations with so-called sexual deviancy, perversion is also a technical term that Lacanian psychoanalysis uses to designate a certainty that a subject knows what the Other wants, The pervert is therefore defined by a lack of questioning. He or she is convinced of the meaning of the desire of the Other.
Scheckley (b. 1928), in which the central character visits an old recluse who, it is claimed, can satisfy people's desires by means of a drug. Before commencing with the drug, the old man advises the story's hero, a man called Wayne, to go away and think about what he is 'going to do. Back with his wife and child, Wayne gets caught up in day-to-day family life. Although he keeps promising himself that he will one day visit the old man and have his inner desires realized, it is a whole year later before he finally decides to go. At this point, however, Wayne suddenly wakes up in the presence of the old man who asks him if he is satisfied. Wayne agrees that he is and scurries off across a landscape devastated by nuclear war. The trick of the story, as Žižek avers, is that 'we mistake for postponement of the "thing itself" what is already the "thing itself", we mistake for the searching and indecision proper to desire what is, in fact, the realization of desire' (LA: 7). In other words, the desire realized in fantasy is only 'satisfied' by the postponement of satisfaction, by the perpetuation of desire. As soon as desire is satisfied, in the sense of being fulfilled, it disappears.
The second feature of fantasy that Žižek insists upon is that the object of our desire is not something given in advance. Rather, fantasy teaches us what to desire in the first place. Fantasy actually constitutes our desire, as Žižek explains:
Fantasy does not mean that when I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality, I fantasize about eating it; the problem is, rather: how do I know that I desire a strawberry cake in the first place? This is what fantasy tells me.(TPOF: 7)
The fantasy of desiring a strawberry cake is my own individual concern. Fantasy, at this level, is very specifically mine. At the same time, however, the desire that is realized in this fantasy is not strictly my desire-it is, rather, the desire of the Other, the desire which throws up the enigma of 'Che vuoi?'. The question of desire is therefore never directly a matter of what I want, but what the Other wants from me: what I am to other people.
In order to exemplify this, Žižek reports the incident noted by Freud of his daughter's fantasy of eating a strawberry cake. Freud's daughter's fantasy is not just a case of simple wish-fulfilment in which she wanted a strawberry cake and in order to satisfy this desire she dreamt up a scenario in which she ate one. For what is at stake here is not her desire but the desire of the Other, in this case her parents, which permeated her desire. Previously, when eating a strawberry cake with a degree of gusto, Freud's daughter had observed how much her parents seemed to enjoy the scene of her eating. It was thus clear to her what her parents wanted from her-they wanted her to devour strawberry cake. The girl's fantasy of eating strawberry cake was therefore a way of answering the question of 'Che vuoi?' or 'What do my parents want from me?'. Although the fantasy of the strawberry cake was her fantasy, the desire it realized was actually that of her parents' desire. More precisely, we can say that the desire of Freud's daughter was the desire for the desire of the Other (for the answer to the question of what her parents wanted from her).
Fantasy, then, is what Žižek terms intersubjective. What Žižek means by this is that fantasy is only produced by the interaction between subjects. However specific a fantasy is to an individual, that fantasy in itself is always a product of an intersubjective situation. In order to make this clearer we can schematize the relation between 'Che vuoi?', fantasy and desire in Figure 6.1.
==fantasy window==
Žižek often conceives of fantasy as a kind of frame through which we see reality. This frame offers a particular or subjective view of reality. It is permeated with desire and desire is always 'interested', that is, it always presupposes a certain point of view. What Žižek means by this can be understood by reference to the concept of an anamorphosis. An anamorphosis is an image distorted in such a way that it is only recognizable from a specific angle. It is, as Žižek states, 'the element that, when viewed straightforwardly, remains a meaningless stain, but which, as soon as we look at the picture from a precisely determined lateral perspective, all of a sudden acquires well-known contours' (LA: 91). The most often-cited example of anamorphosis is a picture entitled The Ambassadors by the German painter Hans Holbein (1497-1543). Ostensibly this is just a portrait of two foreign emissaries, then at the court of Henry VIII, showing them amid all the accoutrements of Renaissance learning. However, at the bottom of the picture is an elongated stain which, when viewed from the side, reveals itself to be a skull. This anamorphic reminder of death alters the meaning of the picture, staining all the worldly accomplishments it depicts with a sense of futility and vanity. It is not part of the field of the rest of the painting yet, at the same time, it utterly changes the meaning of the rest of the painting. In the same way, '"fantasy" designates an element which "sticks out", which cannot be integrated into the given symbolic structure, yet which, precisely as such, constitutes its identity' (EYS: 89).
We may think of this element that 'sticks out' as a surplus knowledge, one that contaminates the gaze, subjectivizing the viewer and making it impossible to look at the picture in an objective or neutral fashion. In fact, it is possible to be more precise here and say that an anamorphosis is only the materialization of a surplus knowledge. The stain of the skull in The Ambassadors, for example, merely gives body to the knowledge that death is always the conclusion awaiting humankind however clever we may be. Anamorphosis is, therefore, a form of suspense-it suspends the ostensive meaning of a picture or situation. If, for example, we look at a piece of film which shows someone in a house idly making some dinner while listening to phone messages, this seems like an innocuous, mundane shot. If, however, previous to this shot, we see the same house from the outside with someone creeping about in the bushes, wearing a mask and wielding a knife, this completely changes the meaning of the second shot. The first shot stains the second one. We now have a surplus knowledge which contaminates our gaze. There is no stain on the screen in front of us, but everything the person in the house does in the second shot is denatured by the knowledge we have that that person is under threat from the stalker outside.
Ultimately, what anamorphosis represents is subjectivity itself. For subjectivity is precisely such a surplus knowledge. It is that which cannot remain neutral or objective but which looks at the world awry or from a particular point of view. Racism is exemplary in this regard. Shortly after the beginning of the allied bombing of Afghanistan in 2001, the American President George W. Bush (b. 1946) made an address to the American nation on television where he quoted from a letter written to him by the daughter of a military person engaged in the conflict. The letter stated that as much as the girl did not want her father to fight, she was willing to give him up for the war. For President Bush, this was a supreme example of American patriotism. Žižek suggests that we perform a simple mental experiment with regard to this event and imagine the same letter being written by an eight-year-old Afghan girl. Would we (in the West) not denounce this action as the work of a cynical, manipulating fundamentalist? Žižek supposes we would. The difference between interpreting the letter as the product of patriotism or as the product of manipulation is the surplus knowledge informing our perceptions. If we are American subjects, our gaze is stained by American history, customs and traditions. Our interpretation of the Afghan letter is anamorphically distorted by the 'knowledge' we have of Afghanistan as the centre of fundamentalism, as the enemy of our country, and so on. How we apprehend the ethnic 'other' is always subject to the ethnic stain of our own origins.
An anamorphosis, then, is a point of view-it frames reality. In this sense it is analogous to fantasy which is a kind of anamorphic frame around reality. Nowhere is this more clearly realized than in Hitchcock's film, and one of Žižek's favourite references, Rear Window. Stuck in a wheelchair because of a broken leg, L.B. 'Jeff' Jeffries, played by James Stewart, is forced to contemplate life through a window, observing people in the other apartments across the yard. Stewart's neutral gaze is subjectivized when he glimpses a murder and catches the eye of the murderer himself. Stewart becomes obsessed
with the murderer and is forced to confront the question of 'Che vuoi?'-what does he actually want from the murder? Why is the murderer the object of his desire? The answer to this question, according to Žižek, is that the murderer stages Stewart's desire. Stewart's desire is centred upon avoiding a sexual relationship with Lisa Carol Fremont, played by Grace Kelly, who constantly attends him in his apartment. The window through which Stewart observes the occupants of the other flats is thus a fantasy frame. Through it he sees what could happen to him and Kelly-they could become like the newlyweds, he could abandon her so she would end up like the lonely artist, and so on. Or, ultimately, he could do away with the problem of Kelly altogether and kill her like the murderer kills his wife. Stewart's attitude towards the murderer is thus predicated upon the surplus knowledge or anamorphic stain of his relationship with Kelly. His point of view is skewed or framed by the interest of his desire in a way that is embodied by the fantasy screen of the window.
Stewart's response to the murder is, therefore, particular to him-it is framed by his own specific fantasy. He does not witness the slaying of his neighbour from an impartial point of view. Indeed, Žižek makes it clear that without our own specific fantasies we would be left not with a sober, objective version of reality, but with no access to reality at all:
With regard to the basic opposition between reality and imagination, fantasy is not simply on the side of imagination; fantasy is, rather, the little piece of imagination by which we gain access to reality-the frame that guarantees our access to reality, our 'sense of reality' (when our fundamental fantasy is shattered, we experience the 'loss of reality').(TZR: 122)
Despite its everyday connotations, then, fantasy is not just a flight of fancy or an imaginative indulgence. On the contrary, it is the vista from which we see the world. It is the slant with which we are enabled to look at reality.
Furthermore, for Žižek, the slant or point of view of our most fundamental fantasy is what objectively makes us subjective. Our roles in the Symbolic Order can be filled by anyone. You may well be the best baker in town and think yourself indispensable as such. However, should you disappear, another baker will knead your dough, bake your bread and ice your cakes and thereby essentially fill your role. Nevertheless, what is indispensable about you, what remains objectively unique about you is your fantasy. So even when it becomes possible to duplicate your exact genetic make-up down to the last of the six billion elements of code which comprise your objective body, you will still not be cloned because the fantasmatic core which makes you an individual is not reproducible. There may well be other bakers, but there will never be another you.
In order to illustrate the particularity of fantasy, Žižek often has recourse to the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by English writer George Orwell (1903-1950), and specifically the reading of it given by the American philosopher Richard Rorty (b. 1931). As is well known, the culmination of the torture of Winston, the novel's leading character, is reached in Room 101, the place where a victim's worst fears are realized. Up to this point, Winston has betrayed everyone and everything he believes in except his love for Julia. However, here, with a cage containing rats attached to his face, Winston utterly breaks down, betraying Julia completely:
'Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don't care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!'
He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats. He was still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the stars.(Orwell 1949:300)
What Winston betrays here is not just Julia but himself, the specificity of his being as it is contained in his fundamental fantasy. The 'Do it to Julia!' is, according to Rorty, 'the sentence he could not utter sincerely and still be able to put himself back together' (Rorty 1989:179). Žižek concurs with this analysis but argues that where Rorty identifies this as a breakdown in the Symbolic (because it is a sentence or signifying formation), Žižek proposes that what Winston forgoes here is actually his fundamental fantasy, that which 'sticks out' from the Symbolic. This fantasy is the support of his being and without it he falls into the abyss, 'into the gulf between the stars'. Winston's universe collapses because he no longer has the specificity of his own view, his own fantasy frame. He thus spends the remainder of the novel as an unthinking being, an automaton who is merely part of the Big Brother machine.
As each individual's fantasy is the support of his or her being, it is little wonder that it is, Žižek avows, extremely precious and therefore sensitive to the encroachment of others. Fantasy is, as it were, the tender nerve or raw ganglia of the subject's psyche, and it is liable to cause grave distress if we probe it with insufficient care. As an example of this, Žižek discusses 'Black House', a short story by the American author, and perennial Žižekian favourite, Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995). The story follows a young man who has just moved into a small American town. In the saloon he listens to the local men recount tales from their youth of their adventures in and around the black house on the hill. This house is a desolate building which, they claim, is either haunted or inhabited by a homicidal maniac or, in some other way, malevolent. Determined to verify this, the young man goes to the house the next evening and finds nothing but an old ruin devoid of any threat, supernatural or otherwise. When he returns to the saloon to inform the men of his findings they are horrified. One of them then attacks the man, an act which ultimately results in the young man's death. The reason for this behaviour, according to Žižek, is that the black house functioned as a fantasy screen upon which the men could project their nostalgic desires. By empirically proving that the house was just an old ruin, the young man inadvertently intruded upon that fantasy space. Where the young man saw just a decaying building, the men in the saloon saw it from the particular perspective of their fantasy and therefore imbued it with a meaning he could not fathom. The violent reaction of the men is thus caused by the young man annulling 'the difference between reality and fantasy space, depriving the men of the place in which they were able to articulate their desires' (LA: 9).
==postmodern racism==
Žižek contends that today racism is just as reflexive as every other part of postmodern life. It is not the product of ignorance in the way it used to be. So, whereas racism used to involve a claim that another ethnic group is inherently inferior to our own, racism is now articulated in terms of a respect for another's culture. If racists once said, 'My culture is better than yours', postmodern or reflexive racism centres around the assertion that, 'My culture is different from yours'. As an example of this Žižek asks 'was not the official argument for apartheid in the old South Africa that black culture should be preserved in its uniqueness, not dissipated in the Western melting-pot?' (TFA: 6). What is at stake here, according to Žižek, is the fetishistic disavowal of cynicism: 'I know very well that all ethnic cultures are equal in value, yet, nevertheless, I will act as if mine is superior'. The split evident here between the subject of enunciated (the 'I know very well …') and the subject of the enunciation (the 'nevertheless I act as if I didn't') is even preserved when racists are asked to explain the reasons for their racist behaviour. Typically, a racist will blame his or her socio-economic environment, poor childhood, peer group pressure, and so on, in such a way as to suggest to Žižek that he or she cannot help being racist, but is merely a victim of circumstances. Thus postmodern racists are fully able to rationalize their behaviour in a way that belies the traditional image of racism as the vocation of the ignorant.
==ethnic fantasy==
With this discussion of fantasy, we may appear to have drifted away from the topic of racism, but Žižek's contention is that what is at stake in so-called 'ethnic tension' is a conflict of fantasies. The standard analysis of racism contends that racists are misguided, uneducated or in some way ignorant of those they victimize. If only, so the theory goes, the racist could see them objectively, get to know them, his or her prejudices would melt away. If, for example, the German racist could only see what a huge economic contribution the Turkish immigrants make to the German economy. If only the French racists could see what important cultural achievements the Algerian community has made in the name of France. If only the British racists could understand the vital contributions of second and third generation Indians to the health of the United Kingdom. And if only they could, according to Žižek, they would still be racists. Why?
The answer to this question is that the subject of racism is not an objective collection of individuals but a fantasy figure. In the 1930s, for example, the Nazis could not have been persuaded by rational argumentation that the Jews were not really at the centre of some international plot to undermine the Aryan race. You could not, argues Žižek, present them with empirical evidence proving that the Jews were really not like that because, like the men in the saloon talking about the black house, they were not dealing with an objective view of reality. Rather, they were looking at the Jews from the point of view of a fantasy frame. You could not, then, contrast that fantasy frame with a view of reality because the whole point of a fantasy frame is that it constitutes your reality in the first place. So even if, as Žižek conjectures, you were a Nazi who lived next door to a real, neighbourly 'good' Jew, you would not experience any contradiction between your anti-Semitism and this neighbour. You would, rather, conclude that your neighbour proves quite how dangerous Jews are because they seem such decent people on the surface. The very facts which would seem to contradict your anti-Semitism would actually prove to be arguments in its favour precisely because you saw those facts through your fantasy window.
All of which begs the question: what is the racist fantasy? For Žižek, there are two basic racist fantasies. The first type of racist fantasy centres around the apprehension that the ethnic 'other' desires our enjoyment. 'They' want to steal our enjoyment from 'us' and rob us of the specificity of our fantasy. The second type of racist fantasy proceeds from an uneasiness that the ethnic 'other' has access to some strange jouissance. 'They' do not do things like 'us'. The way 'they' enjoy themselves is alien and unfamiliar. What both these fantasies are predicated upon, then, is that the 'other' enjoys in a different way to 'us':
In short, what really gets on our nerves, what really bothers us about the 'other', is the peculiar way he organizes his enjoyment (the smell of his food, his 'noisy' songs and dances, his strange manners, his attitude to work-in the racist perspective, the 'other' is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or an idler living on our labour).(LA: 165)
In other words, ethnic tension is caused by a conflict of fantasies, if, in this regard, we understand fantasy as a way of organizing enjoyment. The specificity of their fantasy conflicts with the specificity of our fantasy. So, for example, a strand of American racism is 'bothered' by the way the Japanese seem to enjoy working and work at enjoyment. The Japanese, by American conventions, do not know how to separate work from play-their relationship to enjoyment is in some
way disturbed or 'not normal'. They are therefore a 'threat' to the American way of life.
For Žižek, this 'threat', or at least the perception of a threat, is a growing one. The past couple of decades have witnessed a marked rise in racial tension and ethnic nationalism. Žižek, following Lacan and Marx, ascribes this rise to the process of globalization. 'Globalization' refers to the way in which capitalism has spread across the world, displacing indigenous companies in favour of multinational businesses. The effects of this process are not necessarily just commercial, for what is at stake here are the national cultures and political bodies which underpin, and are supported by, resident industries. When a multi-national business like McDonald's opens up in Bombay, for example, it is not just another business, but represents a specifically American approach to food, culture and, ultimately, social organization. The more capitalism spreads, the more it works to dissolve the efficacy of national domains, dissipating local traditions and values in favour of universal ones.
The only way to offset this increased homogeneity and to assert the worth of the particular against the global is to cling with ever greater tenacity to your specific ethnic fantasy, the point of view which makes you Indian, British or German. And if you are busy trying to avoid being dissolved in the multicultural mix of globalization by sticking to the way you organize your enjoyment, you will inevitably court the risk of succumbing to a racist paranoia. Even if we attempt to institute a form of equality between the ways in which we organize our enjoyment, unfortunately, as Žižek points out, 'fantasies cannot coexist peacefully' (LA: 168). One of the most common examples of this problem is so-called arranged marriages. If a couple's enjoyment is organized around the formal process of selection, restricted meetings and so on which culminate in an arranged marriage, as it is in some cultures, are we, who consider such arrangements to be the very antithesis of free, spontaneous love, not then imposing our own fantasies on the couple if we step in and stop these marriages taking place? Is this part of their 'right to enjoyment', or are we supposed to liberate them in the name of Western values from this archaic way of organizing their enjoyment? The answer, for Žižek, is that there is no way to establish a compromise between the two fantasies at stake here.
==ethics of fantasy==
How, then, are we to proceed? What is the way of avoiding a clash of ethnic fantasies? Žižek's first answer to this is to propose a kind of ethics of fantasy. Simply stated, this proposes that we try as much as possible not to violate the fantasy space of the 'other', the specific way in which an individual looks at the world. This does not mean that we love our neighbour in so far as he or she resembles ourselves, nor that we love our neighbour because of his or her Symbolic mandate, even if we stretch that mandate to include his or her status as a human being. In other words, we do not respect 'others' for any universal feature that they might share with us, but rather for what they do not share with us, which is their fantasy. We therefore do our utmost not to prove that what they think is a house full of significant meaning is actually a ruined old shack as the young man does in Patricia Highsmith's 'Black House'.
Of course, as fantasies cannot ultimately coexist peacefully, particularly when they are ethnic fantasies, this ethic can only ever be an intermediate solution. For the present, Žižek has a more practical solution to the problem of racism, one which draws on his own experience in Slovenia. Surprisingly for a revolutionary, Žižek argues that we should support the state in opposition to civil society. By 'state' Žižek here means to refer to the institutions of government, whereas 'civil society' designates, in its widest sense, the people of a nation or non-governmental groups. While Žižek might aspire to a nation based purely on the consensual will of civil society, he contends that, in the light of the currently existing racist fantasies of much of civil society, this is just not possible. If he finds this in Slovenia, where he argues that civil society is basically right-wing, Žižek also sees it, for example, in the United States:
In America, after the Oklahoma bombing, they suddenly discovered that there are hundreds of thousands of jerks. Civil society is not this nice, social movement, but a network of moral majority conservatives and nationalist pressure groups, against abortion, for religious education in schools. A real pressure from below.(Lovink 1995)
Žižek's argument is that the state can act as a buffer between the fantasies of different groups, mitigating the worst effects of those
fantasies. If civil society were allowed to rule unrestrained, much of the world would succumb to racist violence. It is only the forces of the state which keep it in check.
In the long term, Žižek argues that in order to avoid a clash of fantasies we have to learn to 'traverse the fantasy'. What Žižek means by this is that we have to acknowledge that fantasy merely functions to screen the abyss or inconsistency in the Other which we noted earlier. In 'traversing' or 'going through' the fantasy, then, 'all we have to do,' according to Žižek, 'is experience how there is nothing "behind" it, and how fantasy masks precisely this "nothing"'(SOI: 126). But how does this apply to racism?
The subject of racism, be it the Jew, the Turk, the Algerian, or whoever, is a fantasy figure, someone who embodies the void of the Other. The underlying argument of all racism is that 'if only they weren't here, life would be perfect, and society would be harmonious again'. However, as Žižek points out, what this argument misses is the fact that because the subject of racism is only a fantasy figure, it is only there to make us think that such a harmonious society is actually possible in the first place. In actuality, according to Žižek, society is always-already divided. The fantasy racist figure is just a way of covering up the impossibility of a whole society or an organic Symbolic Order complete unto itself:
What appears as the hindrance to society's full identity with itself is actually its positive condition: by transposing onto the Jew the role of the foreign body which introduces in the social organism disintegration and antagonism, the fantasy-image of society qua consistent, harmonious whole is rendered possible.
(EYS: 90)
Which is another way of saying that if the Jew qua (or 'in his or her status or role as a') fantasy figure, was not there, we would have to invent it in order to maintain the illusion that we could have a perfect society. For all the fantasy racist figure does is embody the existing impossibility of a harmonious or complete society.
If, as Žižek suggests, we learn to traverse the fantasy, we will come to recognize that the characteristics attributed to the fantasy figure of racism are 'nothing' more than the products of our own system. Instead of saying 'if only they weren't here, life would be perfect, and society
would be harmonious again', we will say 'whether they are here or not, society is always-already divided'. By traversing the fantasy in this way we will accept that the figures of racism embody the truth of the failure of our society to constitute itself as complete. Instead of vilifying other cultures, therefore, Žižek enjoins us to come together in the '"solidarity of a common struggle", when [we] discover that the deadlock which hampers [us] is also the deadlock which hampers the Other' (TTS: 220). What kind of a society this 'common struggle' might lead to, Žižek, like everyone else, is unsure, but he remains hopeful.
==summary==
For Žižek, racism is produced by a clash of fantasies rather than by a clash of symbols vying for supremacy. There are several distinguishing features of fantasy:
# Fantasies are produced as a defence against the desire of the Other manifest in the 'Che vuoi?', the question of what the Other, in its inconsistency, really wants from me.
# Fantasies provide a framework through which we see reality. They are anamorphic in that they presuppose a point of view, denying us an objective account of the world.
# Fantasies are the one unique thing about us. They are what make us individuals, allowing a subjective view of reality. As such, our fantasies are extremely sensitive to the intrusion of others.
# Fantasies are the way in which we organize and domesticate our enjoyment or jouissance.
There are two basic racist fantasies:
1 The ethnic 'other' has a strange or privileged access to jouissance.
2 The ethnic 'other' is trying to steal our jouissance.
In each case, what is at stake is an attempt to maintain the particularity of the racist's fantasy, his or her way of organizing enjoyment, in the face of a globalization which threatens to swamp that particularity within a
universal. As fantasy is immune to rational argument, Žižek suggests that we can only combat racism by proceeding on three fronts. First, we must try not to intrude on the fantasy space of other individuals wherever possible. Second, Žižek proposes that we continue to use the state as a buffer against the fantasies of civil society. Third, he advocates the practice of traversing or going through the fantasy, to show that, on the other side of fantasy, there is nothing there.
