As most readers of Zizek have propably noticed, the pelvis of Cultural Theory has a tendency to repeat himself, giving many passages a strange air of déjà vu. This, of course, is not a problem per se, but if, like me, you are hysterical when it comes to references, it does tend to disrupt your reading somewhat when you feel the irrepressable urge to go look for that other place where you saw that paragraph last.
One such fragment is the following:
One becomes a full member of a community not simply by identifying with its explicit symbolic tradition, but only when one also assumes the spectral dimension that sustains this tradition, the undead ghosts that haunt the living, the secret history of traumatic fantasies transmitted “between the lines,” through the lacks and distortions of the explicit symbolic tradition […]
This passage can be read twice in the 2008 edition of The Fragile Absolute (pp. vii-viii and 58) and once in The Puppet and the Dwarf (p. 128).
In all three instances, the text adequately describes “Judaism’s stubborn attachment to the unacknowledged violent founding gesture that haunts the public legal order…” (ibid.). Zizek’s goal is to rid society of this spectral haunting and its obscene superego legal supplement, which is why he hails Christianity as the revelation that “there is nothing – no secret – behind it to be revealed” (Puppet p. 127); that “with this “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?,” it is God-the-Father who, in effet, dies, revealing His utter impotence, and thereupon rises from the dead in the guise of the Holy Spirit [the community of believers = communism] (Puppet p. 126).
The problem, of course, is not that “One becomes a full member of a community […] only when one also assumes the spectral dimension” but that, from time to time (and the time is now), “One” is required to become a full member of society in order to avoid austricism. This scenario is inherently comical as the spectral dimension to be assumed remains disavowed. This is why the Danish People’s Party, apart from its more overtly violent gestures, tend to think of weird stand-ins for the special “it” that will make you authentically Danish.
The greatest of these fantastic ideas was the proposal that municipal institutions such as kindergardens and retirement homes should serve a diet containing a minimum of 20% pork, as pork is supposedly a cornerstone of the Danish culinary tradition. The idea was not to indicate that any decent Danish person naturally abides by this peculiar requirement, but that pork is an integral part of Danish culture and as such, anyone unable to assume this random stand-in for the disavowed spectral dimension would provably have disavowed Danishness itself.
It was a hysterical demand for a Shibboleth: “Say the word and say it right or we will know that you are not one of us!”
Requiring not that you abide by the Law but by its hidden spiritual content, its spectral supplement, is developed even further when the same party states that all criminal foreigners should be deported. Such an argument hinges on the crime not being an act of legal trespass but an act of desecrating the spectral essence of the community.
What is the reason for these hysterical attempts at elevating the obscene superego injunction of the spectral dimension to capriccious acts of Law? Could it be that the Law is losing its validity, its symbolic coherence, and thus relies on hysterical evocations of its disavowed foundation for survival? If so, does the pork proposal not constitute the obsessional neurotic’s ritualistic attemps at avoiding complete symbolic disintegration, the spinning top in Inception that guarantees the continued existence of reality?
