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→Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Imperative to Enjoyment!
The 'Jew', or the Jewish race, is presented within fascinst propaganda as a figure who transgresses and undermiens the law and as such must be first punished and eventually eradicated so that a new harmonious Aryan society can emerge.
For authoritarian regime to exist, however totalitarian it may be, the active participation and support of a population is required, toerwise the regime will very quickly collapse.
And yet, why would any population support an overtly repressive regime?
This is where the ambiugity of the father and what LAcan calls the superegoic imperative to Enjoy comes in.
When a subject identifies with a leader/father figur,e he or she identifies witha position of Oedipal power and authority.
At the same time, however, the subject identifies with that curel and licentious father of the primal horde.
If we do not have access to pleasure and enjoyment, we assume that it is because someone else has usurped our position and taken it from us.
Hence the inflated iamges of power and potency ascribed to other 'minority' groups.
Accoridng to Zizek, this is the logic that is at work in anti-Semitism.
The efficacy of the figure of the 'Jew' relies on the assumption of a certain surplus - that Jews possess somthing that we do not and therefore they ahve access to pleasures that we are denied.
For racism and anti-Semtiism to function psychically an impossible, unfathomable nejoyment, allegedly stolen from us, msut be attributed to the other.
Paradoixcally, argues Zizek, what 'holds together' a given community is "not so much identification with the public or symbolic Law that regulates the communty's 'normal' everyday life, but rather ''identification with a specific form of transgression of the Law, of the Law's suspension'' (in psychoanalytic terms, with a specific form of ''enjoyment'').<ref>1994:55</ref>
More specifically, what holds communitites together is the attribution of ''excessive'' enjoyment to other or alien groups; for instance, the sterotypical fantasy of seuxal potency associated with blakc men.
This attribution of excessive enjoyment to the other then comes to operate as a specific form of theft for the subject - the theft of one's own enjoyment.
Psychoanalysis argues that the inehrent ambiguity of these psychic structrues - the superego, the father and fantasy - is a necessary and constituive part of all social roders and essential to their proper funcitoning.
If the threat is not actually, empirically, there then it will have to be invented, just as Nazi ideology had to construct the 'conceptual Jew' in order to justify its own repressive regime.
The poitn is that the Jews is not hte cause of that ideology, but rather something that is constitued in its effects, that it to say, the Jew is posited retrosepctively as the condition of possibility for the fascist regime.
The notion of the 'conceptual Jew' is what gives the irrationality of fascist ideology its coherence nad consistency.
Within racism and anti-Semitism, enjoyment, and aspecifically an 'excess' of enjoyment, is always imputed to the other: "the other may be lazy but they still have more fun than us; they live off our hard work, etc."
However that is not enoguh in itself for racism to take hold.
The enjoyment of the other must also be seen as depriving us of our own enjoyment: "we work hard to build a community we cna be proud of and be happy within, but this goal is denied us by lazy scrounging foreginers. We can therefor not enjoy our community because they have stolen away from ust aht which would most fully realize our enjoyment."
This is what Zizek sees as the logic of racism and anti-Semitism: the theft of enjoyment.
Furthermore, the Nazis claimed that, because there were so many Jewish people who occupied positions of wealth and power, then the state mus tbe strong and authoritative to counteract them.
