Imaginary alienation is posturing wholeness and symbolic alienation is posturing allness. These designate two forms of fetish that are different yet related to each other. Following the psychoanalytical story of Oedipal development let us describe first imaginary alienation and then symbolic alienation [1].

The one who postures wholeness wears the authority on his/her body, disguises himself/herself as an authority-body complex and presents himself/herself as a non-lacking fullness. The postured wholeness finds expression in the intensity of the emotions that leave words inadequate. Walter Benjamin’s definition of Fascism as “the aestheticization of politics” follows this path. The wholeness postured with images on social media is another example of the same aestheticization [2]. The feeling of fullness excited by populists like Trump with slogans like “Make America Great Again” is such an imaginary alienation. The concept of Nature taking the shape of a “Mother Earth” to be respected is another example of this. The Oedipal model of imaginary alienation is the indivisible union of the mother and the child who are imagined to complete one another. What breaks this union is not the father’s transcendent intervention from the outside, as is thought to be, but the immanent lack that originates from the mother’s desire. The father and thereby the symbolic order can find its place only in the space opened by the mother’s desire. If the desire does not turn outward, the door of the symbolic order can never open and the symbolic separation cannot take place [3]. In this sense, posturing wholeness is like a psychotic defense.

When the symbolic order comes into play with the law of the father, one passes from posturing wholeness to posturing allness. The one who postures allness has put his/her authority against others’ bodies. Contrary to the wholeness which takes the shape of an emotional fullness, the distinctive feature of allness is that it’s pure, taintless, clean, empty. When the Master-Signifier which comes to fill the lack opened by desire totalizes the person, the previous exciting fullness is replaced by a peaceful emptiness. From the symbolic order’s standpoint, emptiness is reassuring whereas fullness is suspect. The concept of God in religion plays such an emptying role and is posturing allness. The gender-race-class blindness attributed to bureaucratic institutions also indicates the same operation of emptying and is posturing allness. Even though it seems to be a little bit more consistent than imaginary alienation, symbolic alienation is also ‘posturing’ because its ground is empty, it’s groundless. One becomes aware of the groundlessness of the symbolic order with the real separation which discerns the object-cause of desire [4].

The main difference between posturing wholeness and posturing allness is between the ways they relate to knowledge. The one who postures wholeness claims to dwell in a very special emotional place unattainable by any knowledge; whereas the one who postures allness claims to dwell in a very special knowledge that distinguishes the ones who know from the ones who don’t know. We could call the passing from imaginary alienation to symbolic alienation, thereby from posturing wholeness to posturing allness, a symbolic ‘virtue’, because it enters a field of knowledge or produces it. But the real virtue (Görce) is to become aware that both of them are posturing: It assumes the ignorance in order to open the field of truth on the horizon of knowledge [5].

(Turkish)

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] Imaginary alienation and symbolic alienation respectively correspond to the 1st and 3rd steps of Oedipal development: “Beyond the Abstract Fetish of the Phallus”

[2] See “The Authority-Body Complex”

[3] Symbolic separation and real separation respectively correspond to the 2nd and 4th steps of Oedipal development (see [1]), see “Symbolic Separation and Real Separation”

[4] Symbolic separation passes from Whole to All, real separation passes from All to Hole. For the schema that brings the four steps together, see “The Traversal of the Phallus”

[5] See “Virtue, Erdem, Görce” and “Görce Writings”