5 - Writing the self: Alain de Lille's De planctu naturae

Summary

It is the power apparatus itself which, in order to reproduce itself, has to have recourse to obscene eroticisation and phantasmatic investment … power relies on its “inherent transgression” … overidentifying with the explicit power discourse – ignoring this inherent obscene underside and simply taking the power discourse at its (public) word, acting as if it really means what it explicitly says (and promises) – can be the most effective way of disturbing its smooth functioning.

What Hegel already hints at, and Lacan elaborates, is how this renunciation of the body, of bodily pleasures, produces a pleasure of its own … the exercise of the Law itself becomes libidinally cathected …

In an essay on Lacan, “From Reality to the Real,” Slavoj Žižek discusses a novel by Robert Heinlein, The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, in which a private detective is hired to learn what happens to the said Mr. Hoag each day as he disappears into the non-existent thirteenth floor of a New York high-rise. Mr. Hoag, as it turns out, is a “plant” from another realm who has located, during his stay in New York, some minor defects in earthly creation. While these defects are being repaired, Mr. Hoag warns the private detective, the functioning of the world will be temporarily interrupted. Though the detective may circulate in his car just as he normally would, he is instructed never to open his window.