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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   28340 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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she should be satisfied with her own personhood

Do you know how many humans (male or female) are "satisfied with their own personhood"?

Not many!

We are all, at all times, engaged in a vain and desperate struggle to alter ourselves in order to solve the riddle of the Other's desire. It's not a woman thing it's a human thing.

"However, the thing to add at once is that the desire staged in fantasy is not the subject’s own, but the other's desire, the desire of those around me with whom I interact: fantasy, the phantasmatic scene or scenario, is an answer to: ‘You’re saying this, but what is it that you actually want by saying it?' The original question of desire is not directly 'What do I want?', but 'What do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I for those others?' A small child is embedded in a complex network of relations, he serves as a kind of catalyst and battlefield for the desires of those around him. His father, mother, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, fight their battles in his name; the mother sends a message to the father through her care for the son. While being well aware of this role, the child cannot fathom just what kind of object he is for these others, just what kind of games they are playing with him. Fantasy provides an answer to this enigma: at its most fundamental, fantasy tells me what I am for my others. This intersubjective character of fantasy is discernible even in the most elementary cases, like the one, reported by Freud, of his little daughter fantasizing about eating a strawberry cake. What we have here is by no means the simple case of the direct hallucinatory satisfaction of a desire (she wanted a cake, didn't get it, so she fantasized about it). The crucial feature is that, while tucking into a strawberry cake, the little girl noticed how her parents were deeply satisfied by the sight of her enjoyment. What the fantasy of eating a strawberry cake was really about was her attempt to form an identity (of the one who fully enjoys eating a cake given by the parents) that would satisfy her parents and make her the object of their desire."

(From Zizek's "How to Read Lacan")

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