Perversion the Social Relation

néSlavoj Èizekthem, not in the standard way, actively sucking his penis, but so that shelies flat on the bed and leans her head over its edge downward into theair—when the man is penetrating her, her mouth is above her eyes, herface is turned upside down, and the effect is one of an uncanny change ofthe human face, the seat of subjectivity, into a kind of impersonal suckingmachine being pumped by the man's penis. The other man is meanwhileworking on her vagina, which is also elevated above her head andthus asserted as an autonomous center of jouissance not subordinatedto the head. The woman's body is thus transformed into a multitude of"organs without a body," machines of jouissance, while the men workingon it are also desubjectivized, instrumentalized, reduced to workersserving these different partial objects. Within such a scene, even whena vagina talks, it is just a "talking head" in the same way that any otherorgan simply exerts its function of jouissance. This perverse vision ofbody as a multitude of sites of partial drives, however, is condemned tofailure: it disavows castration. 3How to Dissolve a Masochist Symptom?What, then, does the self-beating in Fight Club stand for? In a first approach,it is clear that its fundamental stake is to reach out and reestablishthe connection with the real Other, that is, to suspend thefundamental abstraction and coldness of the capitalist subjectivity bestexemplified by the figure of the lone monadic individual who, alone infront of the PC screen, communicates with the entire world. In contrastto the humanitarian compassion that enables us to retain our distancetoward the other, the very violence of the fight signals the abolition ofthis distance. Although this strategy is risky and ambiguous (it can easilyregress into a proto-fascist macho logic of violent male bonding), thisrisk has to be assumed—there is no other direct way out of the closureof the capitalist subjectivity. The first lesson of Fight Club is thus thatone cannot pass directly from capitalist to revolutionary subjectivity: theabstraction, the foreclosure of the others, the blindness for the others'suffering and pain, has first to be broken in a risk-taking gesture of directlyreaching toward the suffering other—a gesture that, since it shattersthe very kernel of our identity, cannot but appear as extremely violent.However, there is another dimension at work in self-beating: the