Orientalism
ELI5
Orientalism is the habit of turning people from the "East" (or any racialized outside) into mysterious, exotic objects of fascination—treating them like a prize you can never quite possess, which makes you want them even more. This corpus argues that this habit isn't just racism or ignorance; it's built into the same logic that makes consumers keep buying things that never fully satisfy them.
Definition
Orientalism, as theorized across this corpus, is understood not primarily as a discrete cultural or literary phenomenon (à la Said's discourse-analytic approach) but as a structural effect of capitalism's commodity logic and of the Western subject's fantasmatic relation to the Other. The central move—developed most systematically by McGowan—is to reframe Orientalism as an extension of commodity fetishism: the Orient is cast as the paradigmatic sublime commodity, perpetually hard-to-reach and mystery-laden, whose sublimity is what drives colonial exploration as a form of desire rather than mere will-to-power. In this reading, the Orient occupies the structural position of the objet petit a—always already lost, never fully attainable, constituted as desirable precisely by its resistance to epistemic mastery. Orientalism is thus not incidental to capitalism but structurally necessary to it: "one cannot imagine capitalism without some form of orientalism."
Copjec and others extend this analysis by linking Orientalism to the symptomatics of the superego and to the utilitarian erasure of lack: the veiled, draped colonial Other functions as the fantasmatic externalization of the surplus jouissance that utilitarian Western culture structurally disavows but cannot eliminate. Within film and media studies (Neroni, McGowan), Orientalism names the ideological mechanism by which racialized Others (Arab, African, Asian) are denied desiring subjectivity—either reduced to instruments of destruction or vessels of mystical enjoyment—sustaining a biopolitical or colonial fantasy that forecloses genuine encounter with the Other's lack. Lacan himself uses "oriental" as a critical marker for traditions (e.g., Taoism) that he distinguishes structurally from the Western elaboration of the subject, though he explicitly detests the term and its reductive implications.
Evolution
In Lacan's own seminars (Seminar 12, object-a period), "oriental" appears only as a passing, explicitly distasteful label for traditions Lacan wishes to distinguish from the Western psychoanalytic elaboration of the subject. His concern is structural and clinical: "oriental" traditions (Taoism) begin from the male/female signifying opposition but do not, in his view, develop the function of the subject in relation to the missing signifier. This is an internal, technical differentiation rather than a cultural critique, and Lacan's discomfort with the term itself registers the risk of reproducing the very reductive gesture he wants to avoid.
In the secondary literature produced by Copjec, McGowan, and Neroni (unspecified/contemporary period), Orientalism becomes a fully developed theoretical object, analyzed through a Lacanian-Marxist lens. McGowan's decisive contribution is to ground Orientalism in the structure of the commodity sublime: Said's power/knowledge framework is acknowledged but found insufficient because it cannot explain why the Orient is constituted as a mystery (rather than merely domesticated) in the first place. The answer, McGowan argues, lies in capitalism's production of futural sublimity—the Orient functions like the commodity before purchase, radiating a transcendence that dissolves on contact. This is a significant theoretical displacement: from Foucauldian discourse to Lacanian-Marxist structural analysis.
Copjec's contribution (across both editions of Read My Desire) is to embed Orientalism in the psychoanalytic theory of the superego and surplus jouissance: the colonial fantasy of the veiled Other is read as utilitarianism's symptomatic return of the obscene law it disavows. Her analysis of Clérambault's Morocco photographs situates Orientalism at the intersection of fetishism, the gaze, and colonial drapery—showing how the colonial cloth functions simultaneously as ethnographic object and as a screen for projected surplus enjoyment. Neroni's work extends this to media analysis, reading the representation of Arab characters in 24 and the torture regime at Abu Ghraib as structured by a biopolitical Orientalism that denies Arab subjectivity altogether.
In Žižek, Ruti, and the Žižek-responds corpus (contemporary period), Orientalism is engaged critically and reflexively: Žižek complicates the Eurocentrism/postcolonialism binary, arguing that European influence and decolonization are not simply opposed; Ruti (citing Badiou) shows how multiculturalism's tolerance of the Other is secretly structured by an Orientalist logic that accepts only domesticated difference. McGowan's Emancipation After Hegel and Universality and Identity Politics frame colonial racism and Orientalism as instances of the ideological trap of particularity—substantializing the Other as whole and substantial rather than recognizing shared alienation.
Key formulations
Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (p.245)
Orientalism transforms the East into a site of mysterious wisdom, holding secrets that remain ever out of reach. It is both the location of exotic commodities and itself one.
This formulation is the pivot of McGowan's Lacanian reframing of Said: Orientalism is not merely ideology but a structural homologue of commodity fetishism, constituting the Orient as a sublime object perpetually deferred.
Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (alt. ed.) (p.233)
orientalism is a product of capitalism. Prior to the capitalist epoch, one might conquer or destroy the other, but one would not view the other through the prism of the commodity's sublimity.
This is the thesis statement of McGowan's materialist revision of Said: Orientalism is not a transhistorical or merely discursive formation but a specifically capitalist phenomenon, structurally generated by commodity fetishism.
Theory Keywords (p.60)
One cannot imagine capitalism without some form of orientalism, some mode of transforming the other into a figure of sublimity that must be explored. The exoticism of the other is the extension of the fetishism of the commodity.
This compressed formulation from McGowan (cited as a keyword) makes explicit the equivalence between colonial exoticism and commodity fetishism, serving as the theoretical bridge between political economy and psychoanalytic critique.
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (p.248)
traditions that we qualify, that we label - I detest the term - oriental, of something which is not from the tradition which has elaborated the function of the subject.
Lacan's own use of 'oriental' is explicitly critical and self-distancing: he deploys the term to mark a structural distinction between Taoist and psychoanalytic traditions while registering his discomfort with the reductive label itself.
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (page unknown)
Nowhere is this symptom more visible than in the well-documented fantasy of an erotic and despotic colonial cloth…there emerged a fantasmatic figure—veiled, draped in cloth—whose existence, posed as threat, impinged on our consciousnesses.
Copjec's formulation ties Orientalism to the superego symptomatics of utilitarianism: the colonial fantasy of the veiled Other is the externalised surplus jouissance that the utilitarian order produces and disavows, making Orientalism a structural necessity rather than a contingent prejudice.
Cited examples
Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003) (film)
Cited by Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (p.245). McGowan reads Coppola's film as performing an anti-Orientalist move: rather than presenting Japan as a site of mysterious, inaccessible wisdom (the standard Orientalist gesture), the film relocates sublimity in the act of sublimation itself—in the relationship between the two protagonists—thereby invalidating the Orient as commodity and opening a path beyond capitalist accumulation. Critics who condemned the film for Orientalism miss, on McGowan's reading, its structural critique of Orientalism's own logic.
Claire Denis's Chocolat (1988) (film)
Cited by The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (p.114). McGowan reads Chocolat as Denis's attempt to explode the predominant European fantasy of Africa as a place of natural, unrepressed enjoyment—an Africanist/Orientalist fantasy structurally parallel to commodity fetishism. The film establishes and then demolishes the image of the enjoying Other, revealing the lack that underlies colonial fantasy.
The television series 24 and its depiction of Arab characters (film)
Cited by The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film (p.109). Neroni shows that 24 oscillates between two Orientalist representations: purely destructive Arab villains (marked only by desire to destroy America) and purely servile Arab heroes (working to save American lives). Both types deny Arab characters desiring subjectivity, sustaining a biopolitical fantasy that enables the show's torture ideology.
Abu Ghraib torture photographs and Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind (1973) (history)
Cited by The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film (page unknown). Neroni analyzes how Patai's pseudo-anthropological text functioned as the ideological manual for the sexualized torture at Abu Ghraib: the belief that Arab men could be destabilized through confrontation with sexuality exemplifies an Orientalist knowledge regime that furnishes racist fantasy with pseudo-scientific authority, connecting ideology to jouissance via the gaze.
Clérambault's Morocco photographs and ethnographic project on drapery (history)
Cited by Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (p.83). Copjec uses Clérambault's obsessive photographing of draped Moroccan women and his ethnographic comparison of North African and classical Greek drapery to show how colonial looking involves a mutual reinvention: Moroccan drapery is reinterpreted through classical aesthetics and vice versa, illustrating the ideological work of Orientalism in the colonial gaze—and then argues that Clérambault's fetishistic photographs pervert rather than simply reproduce this colonial fantasy.
Jane Campion's Holy Smoke (1999) — P.J.'s hallucination of Ruth as an Eastern goddess (film)
Cited by Lacan and Contemporary Film (page unknown). P.J.'s hallucination of Ruth as a multi-armed Eastern goddess is read as an Orientalist fantasmatic projection—his attempt to locate and master feminine jouissance by exoticizing and fetishizing the Other. Campion depicts this as psychotic breakdown, showing that fetishizing jouissance in a racialized, Orientalist image obliterates the radical kernel of jouissance itself.
The British colonial administration's elevation of The Laws of Manu as the legal code for India (history)
Cited by Reading Marx (p.39). Žižek inverts the standard Orientalism critique: rather than imposing a foreign universality, British colonialism elevated a local text justifying the caste system in order to make domination more efficient. This shows that colonial power can work by reinforcing 'traditional' culture, complicating the simple Orientalism-as-cultural-erasure framework.
Tensions
Within the corpus
Is Orientalism best explained as a power/knowledge formation (Foucauldian) or as a structural product of capitalism's commodity sublime (Lacanian-Marxist)?
McGowan (Capitalism and Desire): Said's account of Orientalism as knowledge-for-power is accurate but insufficient; the decisive move is the constitution of the Orient as a mystery to be known—an operation that is structurally generated by capitalism's commodity fetishism and would be unthinkable prior to the capitalist epoch. — cite: todd-mcgowan-capitalism-and-desire-the-psychic-cost-of-free-markets-columbia-uni p.233
McGowan (Capitalism and Desire, footnotes): Orientalism 'represents a translation of Foucault's thought to the relation between West and East. Western writers have assembled knowledge about the East with the ultimate aim of obtaining power over this otherness'—a formulation that provisionally endorses the Foucauldian framing before subordinating it to the Hegelian/Lacanian account. — cite: todd-mcgowan-capitalism-and-desire-the-psychic-cost-of-free-markets-columbia-uni p.299
This internal tension within McGowan's own text reflects the ambivalence of post-Lacanian theory toward Said: Foucault provides descriptive accuracy but not structural explanation, making the relationship between discourse-analysis and psychoanalytic-Marxist critique unstable.
Does critiquing Orientalism and Eurocentrism require affirming postcolonial particularism, or does emancipation require passing through universality against both colonial imposition and postcolonial retreat into identity?
Ruti (Singularity of Being): The post-Lacanian (Badiou/Žižek) critique of multiculturalism and identity politics is itself an enactment of institutionalized marginalization—a Foucauldian power/knowledge operation that suppresses entire fields of inquiry (feminism, racial/ethnic studies) while claiming the high ground of universalism. Sophisticated multiculturalism may be the closest approximation to genuine universalism. — cite: psychoanalytic-interventions-lacan-jacques-lacan-jacques-ruti-mari-the-singulari p.219
McGowan (Universality and Identity Politics): The violence of European colonialism does not consist in imposing a foreign universality on the colonized but in imposing a European particular while broadcasting it as universal. Emancipation requires abandoning investment in particular identity and embracing universality as constitutive absence—against both colonial imposition and the postcolonial retreat into particularity. — cite: todd-mcgowan-universality-and-identity-politics-columbia-university-press p.19
This is the corpus's sharpest debate: Ruti defends a nuanced multiculturalism against post-Lacanian universalism, while McGowan argues that universality (properly understood as absence rather than possession) is the only path beyond colonial particularity.
Across frameworks
vs Frankfurt School
Lacanian: For the Lacanian-Marxist corpus (especially McGowan), Orientalism is not primarily a form of cultural industry or administered consciousness but a structural effect of the commodity sublime: the Orient occupies the position of the objet petit a, constituted as desirable by its very inaccessibility. The subject's investment in Orientalism is driven by the logic of desire (always missing its object) rather than by ideological manipulation from above. Capitalism does not merely 'use' Orientalism as false consciousness; it structurally generates it.
Frankfurt School: The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer) would analyze Orientalism primarily through the culture industry thesis: the exotic Other is standardized and packaged as a commodity for mass consumption, administered from above to produce pseudo-individualization and prevent genuine experience of otherness. The problem is one of administered sameness masquerading as difference, not of a constitutive structural lack driving desire.
Fault line: The Frankfurt School locates the problem in administered false consciousness and the degradation of genuine experience, while Lacanian theory locates it in the structural logic of desire and the commodity sublime—making Orientalism a symptom of capitalism's psychic architecture rather than of cultural manipulation.
vs Object Oriented Ontology
Lacanian: Lacanian theory insists that the Orient is not a real object with its own withdrawn depth but a fantasmatic construction of the Western subject: what appears as the Orient's mysterious interiority is the subject's own projected lack/desire. There is no hidden 'real' Orient behind the Orientalist representation—the very constitution of the Orient as having a secret is the ideological operation itself.
Object Oriented Ontology: Object-Oriented Ontology (Harman, Morton) would argue that Orientalism fails precisely because it treats the Orient as a correlate of Western consciousness rather than as a real object that exceeds and withdraws from all human access. OOO would insist on the genuine, non-relational reality of Oriental objects, cultures, and things—their irreducibility to any subject's fantasy or projection.
Fault line: OOO's flat ontology of real withdrawn objects stands against the Lacanian insistence that the 'depth' or 'mystery' of the Orient is a structural effect of the subject's constitutive lack, not an ontological feature of the Orient itself.
vs Humanistic Self Actualization
Lacanian: Lacanian theory denies any authentic self that could 'encounter' the genuine Other beyond ideology: both the Orientalist Western subject and the fantasized Oriental Other are products of the signifying chain and the logic of desire. There is no pre-ideological intercultural encounter possible; cross-cultural understanding must pass through acknowledgment of structural lack and the impossibility of full knowledge of the Other.
Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic psychology (Rogers, Maslow) would approach Orientalism as a failure of genuine empathic encounter: with sufficient psychological growth, cross-cultural contact can overcome projection and achieve authentic mutual recognition. The problem is one of arrested development or defensive ego-projection, correctable through self-actualization and genuine intersubjective openness.
Fault line: Humanistic theory posits a potential plenitude of authentic cross-cultural encounter, while Lacanian theory insists on the constitutive impossibility of knowing the Other—making the humanist's 'genuine encounter' itself a fantasy covering the structural gap.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (27)
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#01
Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.87
<span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **Three significant turns away from Marxism in film theory**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that three major currents—realism, auteurism, and cultural studies—constituted a turn away from Marxist (especially Adornian) film theory by privileging spectatorial agency, medium transparency, and particularism over form, mediation, and critique; and that the institutionalization of film studies itself, as part of the cultural superstructure, materially conditioned this retreat from Marxism.
docu-realism would merely reinforce the colonizer's gaze regarding South Americans as primitive
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#02
Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.93
<span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **The apparatus**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that apparatus theory, while more Marxist than auteurism in attending to technology and spectator-subject constitution, ultimately falls short of genuine Marxist film theory by centering on the imaginary and ideal spectators while neglecting economic factors; true Marxist film theory is defined by its attention to contradictions within film form and their relation to contradictions in the capitalist mode of production.
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have expanded this insight of apparatus theory to encompass how the imperial trappings of cinema perpetuate a sense of imperial subjectivity
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#03
Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.57
FAN TA SIZ IN G THE E ND
Theoretical move: Capitalism exploits the constitutive unknowability of the Other's desire by supplying fantasy as both its mystification and its apparent solution—the commodity form oscillates between presenting the Other's desire as enigmatic and as answerable, thereby binding the subject to the capitalist order while keeping belonging permanently deferred.
The fantasy of horrible death from terrorism is hardly a comforting one, but it does give American society a concrete image of the Islamic believer… Even the most traumatic fantasy offers assurance.
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#04
Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.245
A SATI SFIE D OR IE N TALI SM
Theoretical move: McGowan argues that orientalism is a structural product of capitalism's commodity-sublime logic — the exoticism of the Other is an extension of commodity fetishism — and that Coppola's *Lost in Translation* performs an antiorientalist move not by revealing an 'authentic' Japan but by relocating sublimity in the act of sublimation itself, thereby invalidating the Other as commodity and opening a Hegelian path beyond capitalist accumulation.
Orientalism transforms the East into a site of mysterious wisdom, holding secrets that remain ever out of reach. It is both the location of exotic commodities and itself one.
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#05
Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.299
. THE M AR K ET'S FETI SHI STIC SUBLIME
Theoretical move: This passage (a footnote/endnote section) develops the theoretical grounding for the chapter's argument that commodity fetishism produces a sublimity rooted in immanent transcendence—a structure Hegel makes possible and Marx theorizes—while also deploying Lacanian concepts (subject supposed to know, lack) to critique orientalism and capitalism's psychic appeal.
In this sense, orientalism represents a translation of Foucault's thought to the relation between West and East.
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#06
Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher
<span id="Chapter2.htm_page42"></span>Ghosts Of My Life: Goldie, Japan, Tricky
Theoretical move: Fisher deploys hauntology as the master concept to read English art pop (Japan, Sylvian) and Tricky's music as sites where class anxiety, spectral identity, and the alien/android figure converge, arguing that identification with the alien/void — rather than authentic selfhood — is the politically charged gesture that links postpunk, art pop, and 1990s British music across racial and class lines.
the Chinese and Japanese Empires of signs are reduced to images, exploited and coveted for their frission… a 'semiotic orientalism'
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#07
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.248
**Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the biological phenomenon of meiosis and the expulsion of polar globules as a speculative material analogue for the lost object in fantasy, then turns this into a critique of psychoanalysts' systematic avoidance of biological discoveries about sex—arguing that this avoidance is symptomatic of the analyst's own structural exclusion from knowledge of the sexual relation, which aligns the analytic position with the subject defined only by the missing signifier rather than by any positive knowledge.
these traditions that we qualify, that we label - I detest the term - oriental, of something which is not from the tradition which has elaborated the function of the subject.
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#08
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.248
**Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the biological figure of meiosis and polar body expulsion as a speculative metaphor for the lost object, then pivots to argue that the analyst's position is no less excluded from knowledge of sexual difference than any other subject — and that psychoanalytic knowledge must be sharply distinguished from 'oriental' (e.g. Taoist) traditions that begin from the male/female signifying opposition, since analysis belongs to the Western tradition of the subject in relation to the missing signifier.
traditions that we qualify, that we label - I detest the term - oriental, of something which is not from the tradition which has elaborated the function of the subject.
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#09
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.80
Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Cause and the Law
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's theory of cause—tied to failure, the materiality of language, and the equivocations of the signifier—surpasses both the covering-law model and Hart/Honoré's norm/deviation framework, while simultaneously critiquing "historicist" and "psychological" constructions of the subject (illustrated through the Clerambault case) as unable to account for how subjects are overdetermined by meanings they never consciously experience.
La passion des etoffes offers constant invocations of familiar Orientalist myths, but it neither clarifies Clerambault's relation to them nor deconstructs them
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#10
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.258
LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Sexual Diference and the Superego > Chapter l
Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section (bibliographic apparatus) for a chapter on lethal jouissance, the femme fatale, and sexual difference; it contains no independent theoretical argument, only citations and brief editorial glosses.
Peter Wollen, 'Fashion/Orientalism/The Body,' New Formations, no. 1 (1987)
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#11
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.83
Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Colonies and Colonnades
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Clérambault's obsessive passion for fabric was not idiosyncratic but was conditioned by a historically specific revolution in the concept of "type"—one that, beginning in the early nineteenth century, replaced sensuous/symbolic description of objects (buildings, costumes) with functional/structural classification, a logic that equally subtended both colonial aesthetics and architectural modernism.
Moroccan drapery was not merely being used to reinterpret classical sculpture, classical sculpture was also being used to reinterpret Moroccan drapery to reinvent it for the West.
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#12
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.115
Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Fantasy and Fetish
Theoretical move: Against Ferguson's reading of the sublime as escape from utilitarian claustrophobia, Copjec (following Freud/Lacan) argues that utilitarianism itself is constituted by the flight from the superego's obscene law and from repressed desire, such that the colonial fantasy of the veiled Other functions as utilitarianism's own symptom—the positive bodying-forth of the surplus jouissance it structurally denies.
the well-documented fantasy of an erotic and despotic colonial cloth...the special fascination colonial cloth held for Western eyes and...the singular and sustained effort of imperialism to remove the veils that covered its colonial neighbor
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#13
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.207
8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *The Critique of Multiculturalism*
Theoretical move: Post-Lacanian ethics, drawing on the Real dimension of the other, mounts a structural critique of multiculturalism: far from respecting genuine difference, multiculturalism tolerates only a domesticated version of the other, thereby serving the logic of global capitalism and repeating a colonial imperative to assimilate.
African customs are barbaric, Muslims are dreadful, the Chinese are totalitarian, and so on. As a matter of fact, the celebrated 'other' is acceptable only if he is a good other—which is to say what, exactly, if not the same as us?
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#14
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.219
8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Whose Multiculturalism?*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's and Žižek's universalist critiques of identity politics and multiculturalism are themselves enactments of institutionalized marginalization, enabled by a Foucauldian power/knowledge system that suppresses entire fields of inquiry, and that sophisticated multiculturalism—building coalitions across differences—may be the closest approximation to genuine universalism.
Who, exactly, can afford such indifference? And whom does it ultimately serve?
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#15
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.222
8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *In Defense of Empathy*
Theoretical move: The passage argues against the post-Lacanian and Badiouian reduction of all interpersonal empathy to colonialist bad faith or structural impossibility, contending instead that the irreducible opacity of the Other as Thing does not preclude partial, meaningful human connection—and that the wholesale vilification of empathy may itself conceal intellectual lethargy rather than ethical rigor.
the reduction of man to a victim is part and parcel of the Western colonialist project
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#16
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec
**The Sartorial Superego** > **Fantasy and Fetish**
Theoretical move: Copjec inverts Ferguson's reading by arguing that utilitarianism does not flee *toward* the sublime but rather *from* the superego's obscene law; the utilitarian erasure of interior lack and repressed desire produces claustrophobia, decays the symbolic/auratic relation, and necessarily generates a fantasmatic colonial Other (the veiled subject) as its symptom—the positive bodying-forth of the jouissance it structurally denies.
Nowhere is this symptom more visible than in the well-documented fantasy of an erotic and despotic colonial cloth … there emerged a fantasmatic figure—veiled, draped in cloth—whose existence, posed as threat, impinged on our consciousnesses.
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#17
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.73
**The Sartorial Superego** > **Colonies and Colonnades**
Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Clérambault's obsession with drapery was not idiosyncratic but historically conditioned by a structural revolution in the concept of "type" (from sensuous/symbolic characterization to functional/constructive definition) that linked colonial ethnography, Beaux-Arts architecture, and functionalist modernism through the shared framework of utility as the essential parameter of classification.
Moroccan drapery was not merely being used to reinterpret classical sculpture, classical sculpture was also being used to reinterpret Moroccan drapery—to reinvent it for the West.
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#18
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.69
**The Sartorial Superego**
Theoretical move: The passage uses the case of Clérambault to distinguish between three epistemological constructions of the subject—psychological, psychoanalytic, and historicist—arguing that psychoanalysis dissolves the fantasy of a subject with secret inner knowledge by replacing "lived experience" with the overdetermination of the subject by the signifier, thus also critiquing historicism's reduction of subjects to pathological experience.
La passion des étoffes offers constant invocations of familiar Orientalist myths, but it neither clarifies Clérambault's relation to them nor deconstructs them.
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#19
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.246
<span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 4**
Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 4, providing footnotes and citations for sources on Clérambault, utilitarianism, automatism, and related topics; it contains no independent theoretical argument but does cite Lacan's Ethics of Psychoanalysis and flag utilitarianism as a revolution in ethics unseating Aristotelian ethics.
Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem … Sarah Graham-Brown presents Clérambault's photographs as a simple reverse striptease in which the body is gradually covered up rather than revealed; this interpretation misses the essential difference between Clérambault's photographs and those displayed in The Colonial Harem.
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#20
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec
**The Sartorial Superego** > **Fantasy and Fetish**
Theoretical move: By distinguishing neurotic fantasy (barred subject in relation to objet a) from perversion (subject positioning himself *as* objet a, becoming agent of division in the Other), Copjec argues that Clérambault's fetishistic photographs do not simply reproduce the colonialist fantasy of cloth but pervert it—exposing the fantasy's structural dependence on the supposition of an obscene, useless enjoyment of the Other that the fantasy simultaneously requires and disavows.
Does this historical fantasy of colonial cloth underlie his photographs? Do we see in them not, as some of them seemed to suggest, a cloth defined by its utility but rather by the way it curtains off an inaccessible pleasure?
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#21
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.85
**The Sartorial Superego** > **Guilty versus Useful Pleasures**
Theoretical move: Copjec argues that utilitarianism's conversion of a descriptive claim (use is pleasurable) into a prescriptive one (pleasure must be maximized as duty) is the hidden motor of both architectural functionalism's "extensibility" and colonialism's "civilizing mission," and that Lacan's seminar on ethics exposes this maneuver as a despotism rooted in the belief that pleasure is fully usable—rendering man infinitely manageable.
We understand to what Lacan and Miller refer when we recall that colonialism was the historical partner of functionalism's rise. We think of the 'extensive benevolence' of industrialized nations, the 'civilizing mission,' the desire to dispense 'charity and humanity' that carried imperialism forward.
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#22
Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.39
*Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter01.xhtml_pg_36" class="pagebreak" title="36"></span>**Antagonism and Universality**
Theoretical move: Universality is not a neutral container for particular cultural identities but is inscribed within them as their inner antagonism; postcolonial "fluid ontology" frameworks that privilege the multiplicity of particular communities systematically disavow this universality, and this disavowal is itself the flip side of their failure to recognize the internal antagonisms that traverse every community.
the British colonial administration of India elevated The Laws of Manu – a detailed justification and manual of the caste system – into the privileged text to be used as a reference for establishing the legal code that would render possible the most efficient domination of India.
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#23
The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.114
**Claire Denis and the Other's Failure to Enjoy**
Theoretical move: Claire Denis's films perform a systematic demolition of fantasy by staging and then deflating the image of the enjoying Other—revealing the lack and partiality that underlie any apparent complete enjoyment—thereby redirecting subjects away from the paranoid lure of fantasmatic jouissance and back toward the partial enjoyment proper to the path of desire.
Chocolat represents Denis's attempt to explode the predominant European fantasy of Africa as a place where enjoyment flows naturally and repression does not exist.
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#24
The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.242
29 > **13. The Banality of Orson Welles**
Theoretical move: This passage, comprising endnotes for chapters on Orson Welles and Claire Denis, theoretically elaborates the objet petit a as a constitutively lost and impossible object: Antonioni's nostalgic fantasy treats the object as once-accessible, Welles's films reveal the banality/emptiness at the origin (Rosebud, the sled), and Denis's cinematography stages the partiality of jouissance rather than its plenitude.
The scene implies French pillaging of Cameroon, which has its basis in the fantasy of an exotic Africa
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#25
Theory Keywords · Various · p.60
**Object Relations Psychoanalysis** > **The Other of the Other**
Theoretical move: The passage assembles a keyword-style theoretical compendium covering four major Lacanian concepts — the Other of the Other, Orientalism, Phenomenology, and the Phallus — arguing above all that the Phallus is a paradoxical signifier of exception whose apparent mastery/phallic authority is illusory, dependent on a veil and collective obedience, and structurally tied to castration, lack, and the death drive.
One cannot imagine capitalism without some form of orientalism, some mode of transforming the other into a figure of sublimity that must be explored.
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#26
Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)
Žižek Responds! > [Response to Zalloua](#contents.xhtml_ch8a)
Theoretical move: Using the historical case of Jesuit linguistic policy in Guarani Paraguay, Žižek argues against a simple binary opposition between Eurocentrism and postcolonial thought, proposing instead that European influence can be paradoxically constitutive of, rather than merely opposed to, decolonization.
to complicate the standard binary of Eurocentrism versus postcolonial thought. What if the two are inextricably linked? What if European influence is not only an obstacle to decolonization, what if it can help it?
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#27
Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.19
<a href="#contents.xhtml_toc2_2" id="introduction.xhtml_toc2-2"><span id="introduction.xhtml_pg_1" aria-label="1" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>INTRODUCTION</a> > **WORKERS OF THE WORLD**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that emancipation requires abandoning investment in particular identity and embracing universality, drawing on Marx, Beauvoir, and Fanon to demonstrate that particular identity functions as an ideological trap that sustains capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism—while universality, as a constitutive absence rather than a possessable content, is inherently on the side of freedom and produces singularity through alienation from particularity.
The violence of European colonialism does not consist in imposing a foreign universality on the colonized people. This is the fabrication that the colonialists themselves repeatedly broadcast with their claims of bringing culture to the unenlightened.