Having stated that the formation of the other(s) involves an imaginary element, so to speak a fiction which is ingrained in the process of identification itself, one also needs to include that this fiction is a systematic one that also has a function. The following sections will try to summarize this systematization in a step by step manner.

Jouissance as the cement in forming a group unity – ‘we’ are enjoying

Jouissance is what holds a community together, as its ‘cement’ (Salecl, 1994, p. 20). “A nation exists…only as long as its specific enjoyment continues to be materialized in a set of social practices and transmitted through national myths or fantasies that secure these practices” (Zizek, 1993, p. 202). Here, through a work of construction, a comprehensive story that gives an explanation about what ‘we’ are, how ‘we’ came to exist etc. is established. This would constitute the identification process for a group which can be traced back in its fantasy life. It is formulated in a process [of identification] where a constant formulation, a construction that provides the answer as to the way a group enjoys. This fantasy involves the “‘thick’ cultural practices through which subjects’ access to jouissance is organized” (Sharpe, 2006). This process is evident in many different types of group formations (in a range varying from smaller ones like supporters of local football teams, the employees of companies [the ‘pepsi-co spirit’], Volkswagen drivers, to wider nationalist movements). For instance in Eastern Europe, following the fall of the socialist order and the rise of nationalism; “[b]oth national movements – the right wing moral majority and the authoritarian populism of the Communist Party – have built their power by creating similar fantasies of a threat to the nation and so put themselves forward as the protector of ‘what is in us more than ourselves’ – our being a part of the nation” (Salecl, 1994, p. 20).

Here, we are in the range of the excess, the drive that is satisfied via becoming a member to a group. A group is constructed upon imaginary ideals, a sense of belongingness that aims at an explanation as to the very core of what ‘we’ are, that is, “in us more than ourselves” that makes us what we are, as different from any other group. ‘We’ are this, that the other cannot understand / acquire.

It is also evident in the formulation of a strong group identity in the minority groups. The fantasy, the myth as to what ‘we’ are provides an answer to how the group is going to survive, make something of themselves and thus resist the threat of losing their identity. Here, we are talking about the imaginary ideals, a story that explains why we belong to this particular group but not any other, we are talking about the identification with the group. The fiction that we are talking about has been a crucial one for groups, especially the ethnic minorities “because ethnicity was deeply connected with the emotional space of ‘home’: food, family, traditions, a sense of belonging to a community, and, in some cases, language. It was associated with ease and familiarity” (Ethnos, 2005).

This process of forming a group identity is strongly affiliated with the formation of the out-group as well. That excess (that arises out of a particular kind of jouissance), what is in ‘us more than ourselves’ is that what the other does not understand. ‘They’ simply do not have / cannot have an access to that what is special to ‘us’, the Thing.

National identification is by definition sustained by a relationship toward the Nation qua Thing. This Nation-Thing is determined by a series of contradictory properties. It appears to us as ‘our Thing’ (perhaps we could say cosa nostra), as something accessible only to us, as something ‘they’, the others cannot grasp; nonetheless it is something constantly menaced by ‘them’. It appears as what gives plenitude and vivacity to our life, and yet the only way we can determine it is by resorting to different versions of the same empty tautology. All we can ultimately say about it is that the Thing is ‘itself’, ‘the real Thing,’ ‘what it really is about’, etc. If we are asked how we can recognize the presence of this Thing, the only consistent answer is that the Thing is present in that elusive entity called ‘our way of life’. All we can do is enumerate disconnected fragments of the way our community organizes its feasts, its rituals of mating, its initiation ceremonies, in short, all the details by which is made visible the unique way a community organizes its enjoyment. (Zizek, 1993, p.201)

Renata Salecl gives an account from Serbia, where during the war the bones of the ancestors were kept with extreme care. One becomes aware that within the Serbian ideological discourse, these bones also represent that which ‘the enemy has always wanted to deprive us of, that which we must guard with special care.’ (Salecl, 1994, p. 24). This act in itself can be read as the Thing that has to be secured with extreme care. Even the slightest glance at the human history would reveal many of those occurrences which led to wars of many kinds.[1]

Other Jouissance – ‘they’ are enjoying, which bothers us

On the other hand, what ‘we’ see in the other, in ‘their’ unity, a certain kind of enjoyment that ‘we’ do not understand, that we feel alien to and to which ‘we’ do not have access to bothers us. By enjoying themselves, the others appear as they are not paying tribute to our symbolic sphere, they actively refuse to become united with ‘us’ in ours.

“In turn, we find enjoyment in fantasizing about their enjoyment, in positing an enjoyment beyond what we imagine for ourselves. WE do not like the excess of the others’ ways of life (their music, the way they smell, their relation to their bodies). Their way of life seems immediately intrusive, an assault, like they are flaunting it, daring us, blatantly refusing to sacrifice their enjoyment and come under a common symbolic order. Why do their lives seem so authentic, so real? Why are they so much more in tune with their sexuality, able to eat and drink and live while I am hard at work? The very excessiveness of their enjoyment makes them ‘them’, other, foreign” (Dean, Why Žižek for Political Theory?)

Coming back to the very process of identification, – the emergence of the ‘I’ as a moment when the separation from the other has occurred, which also aimed at trying to veil a certain fragility, the fragmentation and weakness of the real and the worst of all, the neediness of the self towards the other that lies at the basis of the ambivalent (love/hate) relationship with the other – the other that enjoys is unbearable. The way the Other enjoys – that it can enjoy without me! – while I am suffering, in my need, comes to be a constant reminder that I am lacking. It appears as a constant threat which targets at unveiling the illusion of wholeness, it becomes the nudging point where one step further is disintegration, fragmentation – the black hole.

The way the Other enjoys is the bearer and reminder of the unbearable fact that it is I who needs the Other, where as s/he is fine by her/himself. That the other enjoys, that they enjoy themselves reminds me of something I do not want to remember. That is; I am the one who is needy, I am the one who is dependent. While the Other enjoys, in the next room, doing who-knows-what, it is ‘I’ that feels alone.

However, in a reversing process as part of the othering, it becomes as if it is ‘they’ that do not want to join in what we have.

The notion of the other as the one who enjoys has been formulated since Freud, starting from his attempts to construct a primaeval myth for the human kind. It is illustrated with “[t]he strong male” figure who “was the lord and father of the entire horde and unrestricted in his power, which he exercised with violence. All the females were his property – wives and daughters of his own horde and some, perhaps, robbed from other hordes”. This father-god figure was getting all the enjoyment, in stead of all the others who were kept under his brutal force and power. Those sons who were deprived of enjoyment and power, unjustly, had to surrender, for the way out of this situation “was a hard one: if they roused their father’s jealousy they were killed or castrated or driven out”. This is the myth of the Other-enjoyment, which we, as the rest, have been deprived of, despite our will and power. Freud goes on telling his story: “The first decisive step towards a change in this sort of ‘social’ organization seems to have been that the expelled brothers, living in a community, united to over power their father and, as was the custom in those days, devoured him raw” (Freud, 1939, p. 325).

This mythical story is also the one where ‘I’ emerges as the active spirit, the sons who get united to claim their right to enjoyment.

Thieves of Jouissance – They have stolen ‘our’ enjoyment

 The other appears as the one who wants to steal our precious thing. They want stake at our enjoyment, into which they cannot enter, they want to possess that what makes us ‘we’, in an attempt to annihilate us. The significant thing here is that it comes as a further veil upon the separation. In a process of projection; denying the aspect of the neediness of self, it turns into: ‘It is the other that wants to steal (most of the time, s/he already has stolen) ‘my own’ enjoyment’.

What is at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of [a certain materialized enjoyment]: the “other” wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our “way of life”) and/or it has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what gets on our nerves, what really bothers us about the “other” is the peculiar way he organizes his enjoyment (the smell of his food, his “noisy” songs and dances, his strange manners, his attitudes to work – in the racist perspective, the “other” is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or an idler living on our labour) (Zizek, 1992, p. 165).

The fantasy story which Freud proposes (the story of the primal father above) has further implications. As he himself posits, “[t]he essential point [] is that we attribute the same emotional attitudes [such as extreme jealousy  of other’s enjoyment, wish towards cannibalism etc.] to these primitive men that we are able to establish by analytic investigation in the primitives of the present day – [for instance,] in our children” (Freud, 1939, p. 325). The very notion that it (the thing) was ‘stolen’ indicates that it was ‘ours’ in the first place. This comes as an imaginary explanation for the thief who has stolen ‘our’ enjoyment and enjoys it to his/her utmost limits, deprives ‘us’ of what was inherently ‘ours’. As Zizek formulates, the way the other enjoys – that ‘they’ have something which do not own, but have stolen from ‘us’- bothers us. That the other enjoys his peculiar enjoyment bothers us.

“[W]hat ‘bothers’ us in the ‘other’ (Jew, Japanese, African, Turk) is that he appears to entertain a privileged relationship to the object – the other either possess the object-treasure, having snatched it away from us (which is why we don’t have it), or he poses a threat to our own possession of the object” (Zizek, 2005, p. 300).

This fantasy relation with the other and the story of the stolen Thing in itself, in fact has further implications. Going back to the process of identification, this imaginary relation with the other who is the thief of jouissance secures more than one aspect of the I simultaneously. On one hand, it establishes the emergence of the group identity, as a particular, special one, which can become strong enough to claim what the in-group perceives as essentially belonging to itself, while at the very same time securing the other’s place as the other. One achieves manhood by killing the strong father. The aspect of devouring him (again reminding that it all happens in the fantasy sphere, that of the imaginary) can be read as an imaginary identification. “We suppose, that is, that they not only hated and feared their father but also honoured him as a model, and that each of them wished to take his place in reality. We can, if so, understand the cannibalistic act as an attempt to ensure identification with him by incorporating a piece of him.” (Freud, 1939, p. 326)

On the other hand, the aspect of finding the thief, in itself, is an indication of the repression of the fragile, disintegrated self, and acts as another layer of defence that is established via achieving a group identity. The very act of locating the thief itself indicates that you had had something and that you lost it. You have been whole once. The thing which has been ‘stolen’ from you – indicating that it was yours in the first place, and was unjustly taken away from you.

The Nature of Jouisssance – It is in fact ‘our’ enjoyment we cannot bear but have to project

While going through this systematic fantasy construction, one should keep in mind that this itself is from a particular point of view. As has been indicated above, the other that has been constructed is ‘our’ other. It is the within group that formulates who the other is, in what form the other enjoys. “The deficiency of the other is simply the objectification of the distortion of our own point of view” (Zizek, 1989). The other is either too strong or too weak, they are either excessively hard working or too lazy etc. The other is what ‘we’ are not, but also always in an excessive manner. The other is the bearer of what has been projected onto itself, the bearer of the excess which the in-group cannot contain.

No matter how much we love our national ways of enjoyment, our national real, this real is never enough, it is already castrated, it is the real staged as staged in fantasy, in national myths and feasts. This is never enough; there is a surplus which is always missing. Within the national fantasy, this loss can be attributed to the existence of an alien culture or people: the enjoyment lacking from our national community is being denied to us because ‘they’ stole it. They are to blame for this theft of enjoyment. They are fantasized as enacting in their own national rituals what they denied us… It is not difficult to discern in this type of fantasmatic scenario the roots of nationalist and racist discourse. What is not realised within such a schema is the fact…that we never had at our disposal the surplus enjoyment that we accuse the Other of stealing from us (Stavrakakis, 2007, p. 156).

The truth is ‘we’ never had the thing. However, what is more is that this is an inherent aspect of the very notion of the jouissance itself. What is unbearable is the fact that jouissance itself is unattainable. The other is there as the bearer of our own enjoyment, that we cannot enjoy. The fantasy keeps open the possibility of enjoyment by telling us why we are not really enjoying (Dean, 2006, p. 12).

Our relationship to this unfathomable traumatic element that ‘bothers us’ in the Other  is structured in fantasies (about the Other’s political and/or sexual omnipotence, about ‘their’ strange sexual practices, about their secret hypnotic powers)…. At its most radical level, violence is precisely an endeavour to strike a blow at this unbearable surplus-enjoyment (Žižek, 2005, pp. 290-291).

The fantasy of othering gives an explanation as to why we are not / cannot enjoy. In order to become and stay as a unity, the group – like the individual – has to give up its own excesses.  One buries the possibility of a full enjoyment, for it is unbearable, excessive and disintegrating even to think about and looses the key as well, never to go back. Not only the image of a full enjoyment but even the recollection of having lost it is buried in the pack and stays visible only through the projected image of the other: ‘Those others who still do enjoy, those primitive savages…’

The other stands at an arm’s distance, as the reminder of the lost jouissance. ‘They’ stand there to be despised and to be othered, so that ‘we’ can stand here in our own cosy home. The other is precious to ‘us’ – even more than we know.

Jouissance, the excessive proximity to the Thing would not only be impossible but also dangerous. It takes the form of the death drive alive, which would tear apart the society. However, if we can find a way to secure the existence of the Thing but at the same time securing our distance from it…

If a love-relation with a given object is broken off, hate not infrequently emerges in its place, so that we get the impression of a transformation of love into hate. This account of what happens leads to the view that the hate, which has its real motives, is here reinforced by a regression of the love of the sadistic preliminary stage; so that the hate acquires an erotic character and the continuity of a love-relation is ensured. (Freud, 1915, p. 138-9)

Imputing the excessive enjoyment to the other serves for the survival of the Thing itself. It is out there, negated but still living. The very act of negation in itself has the function of securing the Thing. The possibility of having it one day, ‘if only all those others haven’t stolen it’, is kept alive…

Conclusion

It has been mentioned above that the systematic fiction about the other has a function on its own. To summarize my point I will here give an account in the Lacanian theory that provides an explanation to this phenomenon. According to this, the fiction, that is the various stories told about the other are there to cover over the Real, in this case the real of the society itself which is the class antagonism (Zizek, 2005, p. 243). Various factors such as economic hardship, oppression of different kinds etc. add spice to the already existing basic antagonism of the society, and worsen the fiction regarding the other(s) of the society. This is why at bad times such as economic crisis, an attack to the existing regime, and/or worst of all full or partial war the practices within the society could escalate up to scales of harsh racist moves, even mass murders (Salecl, 1994). The real of class antagonism is there in the society as the unpalatable, indigestible fact which cannot be symbolised in any way within the existing condition of the society to survive without suffering from a major crisis. And the side effects that arise from the existing situation have to be explained both by the individuals and by the society as a total unit, most of the time simply by finding the thief, pointing at the scapegoat(s), who happen to be the weakest of the society.

The real I am talking about is the real of the three Lacanian registers, here, acting just like the real of death – especially of a loved one, which is too real and too clear, at a level which is impossible to digest. When it happens in a family situation, one could observe very different kinds of tensions building up between family members – little things get a lot bigger, little antagonisms between the members get sharper. However, while every single person reacts differently to what happened, there is still one simple fact that should be acknowledged; the horror of death itself – that he is dead, that it will happen to you as well!

All the fiction, all the explanations are to cover over one simpler yet unpalatable fact – of the Real. And the identification process – be it in the case of an individual or the group, becomes possible out of, what Heidegger would call, a thrownness of the subject to whatever is there in the immediate environment, a certain real that has to be covered up [fragility, disintegration, inescapable death] with a fiction of identity, of unity, of jouissance, a subject that seeks for enjoyment. And this systematic fiction – which itself decides who the other is, describes its characteristics, describes how the in- group behaviour both towards the other – is there with a particular function, – to make the group to become possible and prolong as a unit.

I am feeling inclined to state my point once more here. Stating that processes of group identification and othering arise as a function of a construction of a particular fantasy should not lead us to think that they are trivial and negligible phenomena, neither to deny the importance and significance of tradition (that of, say, nationalism, of group identification). On the contrary, it is indeed to acknowledge that beliefs and practices such as racism and discrimination are (perhaps) more deeply ingrained into the order of the society itself than what they are taken for – for instance like unhealthy and irrational exceptions that should be abandoned- and therefore have to be dealt with at a more substantial level. This is why any study regarding the effects and consequences of practices such as racism or discrimination should take into account the very function (and therefore nature) of these practices into account to achieve more solid solutions and design possible interventions against them.

YASEMIN DINC

 

[1] Stating that this is a particular and systematized fiction, in other words a fantasy construction is certainly not to say that this is a trivial, unreal etc, but on the contrary that it is indeed a very strong and still prevalent form of identification. The national identity indeed constitutes one of the very basic forms of identity in a person’s life, even in today’s world of late-capitalism, where one can change pretty much anything about what makes oneself, including one’s sex, all sorts of cosmetic features, skin colour, career, class status etc. In the case of group identification, and particularly of national identification there stands out a paradox;

“There is no doubt that modernity – late modernity in particular – has signalled a greater autonomy in the way people construct and reproduce aspects of their identities. Yet anyone who subscribes to the idea of identity as an invariably fluid, multiple construction must surely be challenged by the persistence of certain patterns of identification. For how one can explain, then, the existence, rejuvenation and sustained reproduction of certain religious, cultural and national identities, with all their ambivalent effects in international and national politics. Furthermore, how can one account for the difficulty – even the impossibility – in shifting or displacing particular cultural, religious and national identifications? To a certain extent, the recent ‘No’ if the French and Dutch referenda on the European Constitutional Treaty may be seen as indicative of this difficulty.

This apparent paradox is crucial to the study of national identity. On the one hand, then, there is a wide consensus that there is no nation outside the universe of modernity; that national identity is one of the forms, in fact the dominant one, that the social bond acquires within modernity (Demertzis, 1996). There is no doubt in other words, that the nation is a contingent product of history, in fact of our relatively recent history. Yet, at the same time and throughout modernity, the nation has functioned as a relatively unshakable unifying principle for human communities. It is usually taken for granted. People believe in it in an almost religious manner and love it as an eternal essence conferring meaning to their existence. They are still ready to die and kill for it.” (Stavrakakis, 2007, p. 191)

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