Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

294The violence of the Symbolic is reflective of modern America’s desire to contain, master,and domesticate its excesses. In the shuttling between reality and the Real, between excess andlack, there is always already a monstrous or perverse residue around which being and meaningrevolve. Lacan, in his The Four Fundamental Concepts, defines perversion as:an inverted effect of the phantasy. It is the subject who determines himself as object, inhis encounter with the division of subjectivity. … It is in so far as the subject makeshimself the object of another will that the sado-masochistic drive not only closes up, butconstitutes itself. … The sadistic desire exists in a crowd of configurations, and also in theneuroses, but it is not yet sadism in the strict sense. … the sadist himself occupies theplace of the object, but without knowing it, to the benefit of another, for whose jouissancehe exercises his action as sadistic pervert. (185)This passage sheds light on policy-makers’ obscene jouissance and their claim that what they aredoing (wars, killings, security codes) is merely the implementation of the law’s injunctions, or thefulfillment of the will of the Big Other. Is not the war on terrorism but a war on the obsceneresidue of America’s missed encounter with its Others? For example, waging a war on“terrorism” in the name of the Law is perversion at its purest. The transgression of the Law in thename of the Law (to punish those who transgressed it originally) displays perversion as “asocially ‘constructive’ attitude: one can indulge in illicit drives, or torture and kill for theprotection of law and order, and so on. This perversion relies on the split of the field of Law intoLaw as ‘Ego-Ideal’that is, a Symbolic order which regulates social life and maintains socialpeaceand into its obscene, superegotistical reverse (Žižek, Everything You Always Wanted toKnow about Lacan 225).