“We’ll always have Paris”
Casablanca (1942)

We’ll always have the phallic jouissance that we all share. Nonetheless, when someone asks:

— Who are you then?

one may often feel the urge to start talking about “them” which inevitably degenerates into either praise or criticism. The automatic human response to the questioning:

— Who are you to deal with this?

is either idealization (“I deal!”) or devaluation (“They value Asian” as in “Level: Asian”). This duality:

— Shall I make it into a fetish or a phobia?

in the objectivization of the world is due to a deep fear of equivocation:

— Did you mean the one or the other?

Since “to mean the one” establishes the measure of fidelity and interlocutorship in an ongoing communication (as well as the accepted content of its history and its ground of legitimacy), “to mean the other” is acceptable only in condition that it serves “to better mean the one”. We let ourselves enjoy the Other only insofar as it makes us enjoy the One better. Žižek’s name for this is “inherent transgression”.

To enjoy the Other actually amounts to enjoy Othering “them”. Whether one’s fascination with the Other is fetishistic or phobic or ambivalent, the guiding principle of Othering is always “one’s” deep fear of equivocation, because in equivocation:

— You mean both the one and the other.

I put this sentence with the generic “you” instead of the particular “I” because the ambiguity of what is meant also ambiguates who is talking: The interlocutor owes his/her identity (Ego) to the validation that the measure of fidelity in the ongoing communication affords.

There is a paradox here: The deeper your dread of this “other meaning” in the equivocation, the more you end up summoning the ghost of the Other, i.e. the more you enjoy Othering “their enjoyment” and immerse yourself in the fascination about this Other that you have created.

There is nonetheless some good news: The Other that you create by your deep fear of equivocation has a name: She is the Phallic Woman [1]. To get what this means, just recall that Christianity represents the Holy Spirit by the image of Virgin Mary holding his sacred child (her phallus).

There is no Other jouissance than phallic jouissance [2]. What exists instead are the following:
1) Phallic jouissance, which relies on equivocation.
2) One’s deep fear of equivocation, which motivates the Othering of jouissance.
The first one is a parrot who repeats saying “We’ll always have Paris” but the second one inevitably arrives to correct him: No, we’ll lose Paris eventually. We’ve already burned the Notre Dame.

Scene from Before Sunset (2004)

Notre Dame fire in 2019

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] See “The Religion of Phallic Woman: Penis or Child or Success or Identity”

[2] See “The strange angel-making bed of ‘another jouissance than phallic jouissance’”