현대 사회의 문화적ㆍ정치적 무의식 읽기 : 정치적 범주로서의 환상, 물신주의, 이데올로기

Reading the Cultural / Political Unconscious in the Contemporary Society : Fantasy as Political Category, Fetishism and Ideology

According to Slavoj ？i？ek, one of the most influencial contemporary post-marxist social and psychoanalytic theorists, our postmodern epoch is characterized by post-ideology, anti-authority, anti-oedipus, pluralism, autonomy of the subject, and a preoccupation with enjoyment and pleasure. Especially from the psychoanalytic and marxist perspective ？i？ek, not satisfied with merely pinpointing the dark side of the contemporary cultural and political situations, attempts to analyse exactly the cause and mechanism of the drastic changes in the contemporary postmodern culture and politics, and to clarify the meaning of this cultural and political change of our epoch. According to him, the mutation of the cultural and political situations results from ‘becoming narcissistic of the postmodern men’, and this is again caused by the fall of the symbolic authority and the universalizing of the injunction of the internalized super-ego. This leads to a political conservatism or political defeatism. Meanwhile, ？i？ek has had discussings with other political, social theorists, such as J. Bultler and E. Laclau, and criticized their implicit or explicit historicism which could result in the politically false orientation. Through this investigation into the postmodern culture and politics and discussions with many thinkers and theorists ？i？ek has concluded marxism, psychoanalysis and German idealism as useful tools for the global analysis of culture and politics, and emphasized the possibility of the global social change, which is the possibility of the ‘grand narrative’ and the ‘meta-narrative’. Finally ？i？ek proposes and clarifies such Lacanian concepts as ‘the act", and ‘the traverse of the fantasy’, which are concerned with the end of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Based on these concepts ？i？ek inquires into the political meaning of the ‘act", and with this the subversiveness and political signification of psychoanalysis.