Blog 4: Zizek- “On Radical Evil and Related Matters”.

Zizek, S. (1993). "On Radical Evil and Related Matters". Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 1996: 83-124.

I found this an interesting reading because I had spent time with it in my PGDip year. The writing is from Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, a book by Zizek who is a philosopher and writes often about the psychoanalyst Lacan.

In the excerpt titled On Radical Evil and Related Matters he discusses the idea of the Real (in Lacanian terms) or as Kant would call it, the noumenal Thing, the Thing-in-itself, that can only be explored through the symbolic.

We discussed in our group the idea of the Real, or the Thing-in-itself, as something that is a noumenom, something that cannot be explained or put into words, something that is beyond our comprehension, for example death. And discussed the idea that the Real can only be known to us through the symbolic, one can only know of the Real through representation of it. Zizek describes Magritte’s painting Le Lunette d’approache (1963) as a work that shows us that the Real can only be alluded to and talked about through representation.

"In Lacanese, the painting would translate as thus: the frame of the windowpane is the fantasy-frame which constitutes reality, whereas through the crack we get an insight into the “impossible” Real, the Thing-in-itself.”(Zizek, 1993: 103)

I question that came up for me was, how can an artist make a viewer aware of or allude to the Real in an artwork?

At this point I remembered a writing I had read by Hal Foster titled Death in America. He uses the examples of Andy Warhol’s series Death and Disasters (1963). He talks about trauma as being something we can’t understand and can’t explain in our symbolic world. He suggests that a function of repetition is to “repeat a traumatic event (in actions, in dreams, in images) in order to integrate it into a psychic economy, a symbolic order.” (Foster, 1996: 42). I guess in a way that is true, the more you see the event the less traumatic it becomes, it kind-of serves as something to focus on when the Real (death/ trauma) can’t be comprehended. The thing that Foster brings up here- that I have to agree with is that although the repetition can act as something to help the person deal with the real, it can also produce a new type of trauma, thus making the viewer aware of this unexplainable thing, the Real. He states

"repetition serves to screen the real understood as traumatic. But this very need points to the real, and it is at this point the real ruptures the screen of repetition. It is a rupture not in the world but in the subject; or rather it is a rupture between perception and consciousness of a subject touched by an image." (Foster, 1996:42)


The Real in this sense is the trauma one experiences when looking at these images.

References:

Foster, Hal. "Death In America". October. 75, Winter, 1996: 36 – 59. jstor. University of Auckland, Auckland. 3 Dec. 2007

Zizek, S. (1993). "On Radical Evil and Related Matters". Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 1996: 83-124.