Narration of Fantasmatic Reality and Staging of Symptomatic Truth — Işık Barış Fidaner

A narration constructs a reality by synthesizing combinatorial elements into a timeline [1]. The opposite of a synthetic narrative construction is not deconstruction, but a staging of truth (struck-turalism). The narration of reality and staging of truth relate sexually as the masculine and feminine generative processes [2]. The masculine narration progresses in time on the basis of excluding a crucial truth; he censors and represses it by his passion of ignorance. The feminine staging undermines the masculine progression of reality by revealing the excluded truth and thereby leaves a hysterical/historical mark. This historical marking by staging truth also constitutes the function of (psycho)analysis.

The temporal synthesis of reality always relies on a certain conservation of energy. The narrated progression ultimately tells the story of an energetic essence, e.g. financial capital in economic growth, human capital in personal development. The word ‘life’ names this energetic essence. The truth excluded by the narrative progression of energy is then the loss of energy, ‘death’ and entropy. It is the fact that our lives as individuals are ultimately sacrificed for the sexual reproduction of the species [3].

When analysis stages the truth, it leaves a historical mark that interrupts the narrative progression of the temporal synthesis of reality. The staging of entropy interrupts the exciting story of the energetic essence. Analysis breaks the synthesized fantasy of conservation and starts a conversation instead, because the conversion of energy does not work properly. Analysis focuses on other kinds of conversion, in the sense of faith or symptom [4]. Both transcend the conscious will but in different ways.

First, the conversion of faith: God is one conventional way of denoting the field of facts that transcends one’s free will. It is a way of authorizing the masculine narrative reality. But essentially it refers to the formal status of a pure purposefulness that does not yet serve a utility. God refers to the mere purpose of having a purpose. Modernity holds on to this abstract formal reference of purpose and expulses the religious contents of God. Modernity thereby dares to construct the narrative reality of facts by relying on the immanence of free will. On the other hand, postmodernity points out the synthetic generation of modern reality and dares to deconstruct and reconstruct it. This is the story of philosophical systems.

Psychoanalysis divorces itself from both religion and philosophy by opening up another field of facts that transcends one’s conscious will: It opens the unconscious field of desires. This is the conversion of symptom. Psychoanalysis teaches us that human desire has a certain correlation to malfunctions: Parapraxes, slips of the tongue, jokes, dreams, symptoms. This revelation opens a new field that is more truthful than philosophy, reducing philosophical systems to obsessional fantasies. This is the field of desire-malfunction that disrupts the will-system [5]. Will-system marks the narration of fantasmatic reality whereas desire-malfunction marks the staging of symptomatic truth.

(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 “The Paradox of the Phallus”

[2] This is because the standard gender regime assigns the authorization of reality to men and the embodiment of truth to women. See “The Traversal of the Phallus”

[3] See “Always Afterwards: Entropy and Sacrifice”

[4] See Jamieson Webster’s Conversion Disorder (2018)

[5] See “Life, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis”