Psychoanalysis distinguishes the questioning hysteric from the conservative obsessional. The first is feminine, the second is masculine:

1) Hysteria is a curiosity that originates from the question “What is my sex and what does it mean?” [1]

2) Obsession is an avoidance or sealing or sterilization (neutralization/castration) that originates from the question “Of course I exist but what if I don’t?”

Those who say “There is such a thing as society, there is such a thing as civilization!” signal the obsessional axis, whenas every surprising innovation that supposedly “progresses” society comes from the hysteric axis. In sum: Hysteria is like a fountain where psychic curiosities flow, whereas obsession is how one taps that fountain. McKenzie Wark distinguished these two axes as follows [2]:

1) On one side there is the hacker class who creates every new information (hacking does not refer to piracy but genius, not individual geniuses but the collective pool of ingenuity where all our intelligence is collected).

2) On the other side there is the vectoralist ruling class who packages and sells that information and thereby exploits the hackers (think of the owners of current big platforms: Big Tech).

But it’s more accurate to think of these not as two separate classes but as two axes that each of us have. Hysteria is like the mamilla as the symbol of abundance and fertility, whereas obsession is like the phallus as the symbol of power. In social media each of us act a bit like mamilla and a bit like phallus, one can be envious or grateful to each of them, and it frequently occurs that one is grateful to the mamilla while remaining envious to the phallus or that one is grateful to the phallus while remaining envious to the mamilla [3].

So when we marry these two dimensions in our psyche, we take the following stance:

I ask the questions around here!      or:       I feel the emotions around here!

The one who says this has wrapped his/her own hysteria (“I ask questions”) with an obsessional shell (“around here”). Let’s call this figure the postmodern police. It manifests a double paradox:

1) If your hysteria is going to belong only to you, then it will be isolated from the desire of the other and will lose its hysteric quality; the ones who attempt to define their gender by declaring their identity make this mistake.

2) Insofar as your obsessional shell carefully/rigorously “neutralizes” the unapproved/foreign hysteria, it is actually betraying its own hysteria that it’s striving to conserve; in order to solve this problem one can develop alternative ways of reciprocal exchange that don’t fit the market standards.

Developing alternative ways of reciprocation concerns the topic of negation of negation (what negates you is reciprocated by you negating it) [4]. In any case, the most precise way to reciprocate a dangerous psychic leakage is (metaphorically) to see that your interlocutor has brought you this virus due to his/her disposition, and to produce the formula that will immunize both of you to this virus, so that you vaccinate each other’s unconscious minds. You can then transfer this formula to others. But if you are going to apply this vaccination, you will have to risk facing some recoil from your constitutions.

(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] See “Curiosity and the Passion of Ignorance”

[2] See “Hysterics are the true hackers”, “Cinyıs Olmadan Adam Çarpmak”

[3] See “Make Gratitude Cool Again”, “The Artemis of Ephesus: Being Seized by Mamilla Envy and Being Turned into a Data Breast of the Virtual Lord”, “Don’t Look Up to the Sky, Look Down at the Symptom”

[4] Bkz “Simgesel Dünyanın Zarı: Yadsımanın Yadsınması”, “Yadsımanın Yadsınmasında Karşıllık ve (A)simetri”